The Red, Black and Green of Claude McKay’s London
Jamaican poet Claude McKay's early years in London shaped his socialism – and convinced him that only the struggle against capitalism could pave the way to liberation for the world's subject peoples.
Credit: Creative Commons
As Trafalgar Square filled with people, its grey stone became patterned with the bold green of Irish nationalists. Stood strategically on the steps of the National Gallery was an unusual figure clutching the latest Worker’s Dreadnought and displaying Herman Gorter’s pamphlet Ireland: The Achilles Heel of England. Sales of the material were swift, and the greetings were friendly, as members of the milling crowd noted the seller’s green necktie. ‘Black Murphy’, they called him, or ‘Black Irish’.
The honorary Irishman of Trafalgar Square was a Jamaican man named Claude McKay. He had arrived in Britain in late 1919, having worked for several years in the US and recently won long-sought acclaim in the world of literary radicalism with his militant sonnet ‘If We Must Die’. The poem was composed in response to the rampant white racial violence of the Red Summer in 1919, but has become a universal song of resistance recited by striking Nigerian workers, Indians struggling for independence under the leadership of Gandhi, and even Winston Churchill in the face of German fascism.
McKay’s presence at a 1921 Sinn Féin demonstration in London was only one in a long life full of unexpected travels through turbulent political and cultural contexts: he would later live for a year in Soviet Russia amid a convocation of the Communist International, and he moved through the circles of Lost Generation modernists in Paris.
McKay’s time in London—though not the most creatively fulfilling in his career as a poet, novelist, and essayist—was a politically significant moment in the development of radical Black politics in Britain. Like many of those who followed his path from the British Caribbean to the metropole, he was profoundly disappointed with the drab weather and unfriendly people he found in Britain. And, like many of his successors too, he found community and new political possibility in socialist and anti-colonial revolutionary circles.
Toward and Against the Metropole
In his first forays into poetry, early in the 1910s, McKay had broken new ground by writing in Jamaican dialect. However, he also operated with the misconceptions about Britain into which all the empire’s educated subjects were inculcated. As such, he wrote longingly in one poem of ‘Old England’, ‘de homeland’ where ‘men of science meet togeder in deir hall, To give light unto de real truths, to obey king Reason’s call.’ He imagined his first journey to the colonial centre as a return ‘back to my own native shore.’ Even as a rationalist and Fabian critic of the capitalist order, the young McKay maintained faith in liberal narratives of social progress.
His migration to the US—first to study, later to attempt working life in a doomed marriage, and later again as an unattached itinerant labourer—was McKay’s first awakening to harsh racial realities. Like many Caribbean migrants to the US, he was politically radicalised by the shocking experience of America’s racist regime. Jim Crow combined with the collective trauma of world war and the new dawn represented by the Russian Revolution to complete his disenchantment with capitalism and Western civilisation more generally.
McKay gravitated to the American Left: to the revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW, the pioneering Black socialism of Hubert Harrison, and to the Masses journal, a leading publication of bohemian radicalism edited by Max Eastman, who became McKay’s lifelong friend. Even so, when McKay was finally given the opportunity to visit England, he did so eagerly. He arrived in December 1919.
From Misery to Militancy
If McKay still felt that England was his home on arrival, the illusion did not last long. Permanent lodgings were impossible for a Black man to find without help from white friends, and McKay was depressed by the foggy climate. The experience was not helped by the local people, whose coldness he found deeply alienating. His miserable impression of the nation he had once held in such high esteem only deepened in the remainder of his life, not least because of the British state’s persistent surveillance of his activities.
Though surveillance officers tended to exaggerate McKay’s political ambitions and role, they were well justified in their suspicions that he was significantly more than an aspiring, idealistic poet. Immediately on arrival in London, McKay threw himself into party work for the Worker’s Socialist Federation, an organisation headed by Sylvia Pankhurst and affiliated at the time with the left-wing of the Communist movement that was famously derided by Lenin as ‘an infantile disorder’.
McKay was not heavily involved in the debates about revolutionary strategy, but his full political commitment was evident in his taking on of full-time journalistic work at the Worker’s Dreadnought. There, according to scholar Winston James, McKay was effectively the labour relations correspondent, reporting on the Trade Union Conference and strikes in the East End.
McKay’s most original contributions, however, were on the topic of racism. In January 1920, he penned a front-page article on ‘Socialism and the Negro’ where he offered critical assessments of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. The essay concluded with a sharp wake-up call to its British readership on the topic of imperialism.
McKay explained that his support for anti-colonial revolution in Ireland, India, and across Africa was founded on his support for international socialism. ‘For subject peoples’, he explained, ‘Nationalism is the open door to Communism.’ McKay committed to bringing people from the camp of nationalism to the camp of Communism.
In a later essay, written shortly after he returned to the US from Britain, McKay elaborated that the Irish liberation struggle was ‘an entering wedge directed straight to the heart of British capitalism.’ In these comments, McKay anticipated the perspective of permanent or uninterrupted revolution shared among Lenin and Trotsky, who came to agree with McKay’s attitude that ‘no people who are strong enough to throw off an imperial yoke will tamely submit to a system of local capitalism.’
McKay’s commitment to bridge anti-colonialism with socialism was not a rhetorical flourish but formed part of a programme of practical activity. McKay’s social world in London centred on two clubs: the International Socialist Club (ISC) and the Drury Lane club. The first was a centre of radical culture where McKay heard speakers including A. J. Cook of the Miners’ Federation, William Gallacher of Red Clydeside, and Shapurji Saklatvala, the first Communist member of parliament. Though mostly white, the clientele included exiles from across Europe. It was his encounters here that motivated McKay to begin his first proper study of Marx’s writing: despite his long-standing radicalism, McKay had previously been naïve about Marxist theory.
The Drury Lane club, meanwhile, was a hub for Black people and other colonial subjects in London. Here, McKay enjoyed fostering friendships with fellow migrants from the Caribbean and Africa, listening to their stories about the First World War and attending boxing matches. McKay made a systematic effort to introduce socialist ideas to his friends at the club, delivering to them to whatever radical literature he could get his hands on and bringing the most politically engaged of them to meet the cosmopolitan crowd at the ISC.
Labourism and Racism
Even at the ISC, McKay was not able to altogether escape racism, and perhaps his most explosive interventions into the British Left were focused on the racism dominant among the reformist intelligentsia.
In ‘Socialism and the Negro’, McKay already criticised the Fabian intellectuals, ‘enamoured of the idea of a Socialist (?) British Empire.’ The comment became a polemic when George Lansbury’s Daily Herald printed an article that inflamed fears on the Left about a French invasion of Germany by using racist scaremongering claiming that French colonial troops from Africa threatened European women with violent hypersexuality.
The author of the article, E. D. Morel, and Lansbury insisted that they supported the rights of African peoples, but when McKay submitted a reply to the racist article, Lansbury refused to print it. Instead, McKay found an outlet in the Worker’s Dreadnought, where he clarified that Black men were not especially disposed to rape and observed that it was Europeans who introduced syphilis in many colonised nations.
McKay registered his objection, not ‘because I happen to be a negro’ but ‘because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling’ among the London working-class. His defence was, therefore, not strictly nationalistic but class-based and formed part of an internationalist concern that also encompassed the Chinese and Indian labourers excluded by white dockers in the East End.
Pan-Africanism and Communism
McKay sustained this line of criticism when he returned to the US early in 1921. Against those on the Left who were inclined to minimise or neglect the entwined problems of racism and imperialism, McKay issued sharp and repeated rejoinders. He found his most sympathetic audience when he attended the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, at which he co-operated closely with the Japanese Communist Sen Katayama, and after which he had a brief correspondence with Trotsky about the tasks facing Black Communists.
McKay’s contributions at the Congress helped to pave the way for future discussions. These culminated in the authorship in 1928 of a policy arguing that African-Americans represented a national minority with full rights to self-determination, including the establishment of a separate state in the ‘Black Belt’ of Southern counties where they were a majority. Though this thesis was unwelcome to most Americans (Black and white) and is typically regarded as a misguided and dogmatic transposition of the Russian experience to the US, it catalysed a momentous period of Communist organising that helped to permanently remake the exclusionary American labour movement.
Following his trip to the USSR, McKay drifted away from political work as he travelled Europe and North Africa, focusing instead on literary endeavours that produced seminal novels of the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude. He became a sympathiser of the Left Opposition and sustained a lifelong admiration for Trotsky.
By the mid-1930s, however, he had evolved into a fierce opponent of the Communist International and a critic of Marxism. Unlike similar apostates, such as his friend Max Eastman, McKay did not abandon the Left altogether: even after converting to Catholicism, he opposed the McCarthyite witch-hunts and retained a faith in socialism.
During the years of McKay’s political drift and meandering migration, the mantle of his London activism was picked up by a new generation. At the centre were George Padmore, a Communist editor turned pan-Africanist, and C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist and pan-Africanist most famous for his iconic history of the Haitian Revolution. It was from these networks of radical organising and Marxian theory that many of the iconic figures of twentieth-century anti-colonialism emerged.
Their work remains unfinished, as demands for decolonisation have in recent years animated protest movements centred on university campuses from Cape Town to Oxford. McKay and his successors developed pioneering analyses of the contradictory cultural significance of colonialism, which introduced them to ideas and literatures (from Marx to Thackeray) that they treasured, even as it disrupted and destroyed non-Western histories.
But for McKay, as for James and many others, the resolution of this cultural problem was inseparable from the solution of the property question. It was by taking the lead in the fight for international socialism, they argued, that subject peoples would return to the centre of human history. The job of comrades in the imperial metropoles, meanwhile, was to facilitate that process by striking blows in the belly of the capitalist beast. Such insights remain vital.