Timelines: Text and meaning in Claude McKay’s ‘If We Must Day’ (part 4 of 4)

To read this special Text and Meaning Series from the beginning, please see the links at the end of the article. Part 4 begins now:
 
For those able to accept the image of history as a clock ticking its way along a circular timeline, it is more natural to imagine the hands of that clock moving forward rather than backward. Yet the June 2015 protests in McKinney, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, and the uprising in Baltimore, Maryland, combined with protest demonstrations the previous year in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, Cleveland, and elsewhere prompted many Americans to question why history appears to be ticking so relentlessly––much like a two-ton bomb built for maximum destruction––in reverse.

Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay could easily have surveyed the current state of African America––when many, ironically it seems, are observing the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth [adopted in 2021 as a federal holiday]–– and been as compelled now as he was in 1919 to pen the powerful lines of “If We Must Die.” The miracle at this hour, however, may be the remarkable restraint that African Americans continue to exhibit in the face of unceasing aggressive brutality.
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Whether due in 2015 to the presence of a Black man in the White House or out of respect for the examples provided by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, multiple generations of African Americans have avoided allowing their frustrations erupt into the kind of violence that ended with so many dead during the Red Summer of 1919.

​Equal Demographic Opportunity

The cities named above represent only a handful where African Americans, White Americans, and members of diverse demographic groups in the U.S. turned out to protest the use of deadly violence employed by armed policemen against unarmed Blacks. To be clear, the emphasis often placed on African-American males in no way diminishes the fact that a number of African-American women and girls have also met with such violence. Some––like 47-year-old mother Yvette Smith and Tarika Wilson , lost their lives to it. For that matter, in truth, so have a number of white women and white men.
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However, a clear enough picture begins to emerge when noting the body count of Black males who have fallen to policemen’s bullets, the number of those who have lost their freedom to the industrial prison complex, and the number of those who have been sidelined by decades of chronic unemployment. Nor has any single population group been so frequently labeled as an object of justifiable fear and subsequently, disproportionately, been tagged as justifiably killed.

​Reinterpreting “If We Must Die”

​Although Claude McKay was working as a “railroad man” when he wrote “If We Must Die,” it was his authority as a recognized poet that empowered him to galvanize a generation and, by doing so, help introduce the Harlem Renaissance. His passionate exultation assisted American history with a major push forward. 

Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay (left) with magazine editor and publisher Max Eastman in 1922. (Period image by Wide World Photography)

​Because McKay himself was among those to first make it clear that “If We Must Die” was a poetized response to the volatile racial and labor climate of 1919, there seems to be little room for misinterpreting or reinterpreting his conscious literary intentions. Scores of Black men were targeted for lynching in one form or another and those officials entrusted to preserve life and liberty in America did not seem particularly disturbed by this fact. However, when reflecting on the poem during the 1940s, to introduce a recording of it later released in 1954 on Smithsonian Folkways’ Anthology of Negro Poetry, he offered the following:

“…I felt assurance that 'If We Must Die' was just what I intended it to be: a universal poem. And wherever men are pressed with their backs against the wall, abused, outraged, and murdered, whether they are a minorities or nations, black or brown or yellow or white, Catholics or Protestants or pagans, fighting against the terror, 'If We Must Die' could be appropriately read." (McKay, Introduction to “If We Must Die").

​These words would indicate that McKay was at least as concerned about human rights in general as he was about racial equality in particular. 
 
A country in racial crisis, as America surely was when marking the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth Jubilee in 2015, and continues to be 2021, is one with its collective back “against the wall.” That makes McKay’s poem, during this now 102nd anniversary of its publication, a good one to revisit and reflect upon its classic lines for the various levels of insight and applicable meaning they may provide at this specific moment. 

Read the Claude McKay Text and Meaning Series from the beginning:
Red Summer: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” part 1
Poems Matter: Text and meaning in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” part 2
Fighting Back: Text and Meaning in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” part 3

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind 
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance