In 1919, the New York Times printed a number of reports on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice related to the scourge of “Bolshevism” supposedly taking root among the country’s Black population. In one, titled “Exhibit No. 10: Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes as Reflected in their Publications,” the DOJ claimed: “there can no longer be any question of a well-concerted movement among a certain class of Negro leaders of thought and action to constitute themselves a determined and persistent source of radical opposition to the Government, and to the established rule of law and order.” Proof that “Soviet doctrines” had taken hold among the Black intelligentsia, the office said, could be found in periodicals like the Liberator, a socialist magazine that had recently published a poem titled “If We Must Die” by the Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay. The report, writes historian Winston James in his new book, Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik, “explicitly mentioned McKay and his poem more than any other person or piece of writing” in its roundup of seditious Black literature.
McKay wrote “If We Must Die” in 1919, against the backdrop of the “Red Summer,” a campaign of racial terror (aided by local law enforcement) that devastated Black communities from Maine to San Francisco. The mass migration of African Americans to cities in the industrial North in the middle of a postwar economic downturn increased competition for wages, stoking the flames of white resentment. The violence, meant to subdue its targets, had the unintended consequence of sparking fierce and organized resistance. New political organizations, some quite radical, were formed, including Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a socialist group that was later absorbed into the Communist Party of the United States of America. The FBI tried to attribute this new Black revolutionary consciousness to Russian interference rather than homegrown unrest.
McKay, James reminds us, composed “If We Must Die” during a bathroom break while employed as a waiter for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He first recited the lines “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” to his fellow Black laborers on the train. The poem, which became the anthem of the Red Summer, had initially been received as an explosive Black leftist proclamation, a radical battle cry born out of the imbricated struggles of race and class. Briggs swiftly republished “If We Must Die” in the ABB’s newspaper, the Crusader. As did Black trade unionists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen in their socialist literary journal the Messenger.