Claude McKay was born in Jamaica, West Indies, in 1889 (there has been much confusion over whether McKay was born in 1889 or 1890, but his birth certificate has been discovered showing that he was born in 1889 [See Winston, Footnote 8] ). Educated by his older brother, McKay published his first work entitled Songs of Jamaica in 1912, the same year he left his homeland for the United States. There he attended Tuskegee Institute, although his enrollment was short-lived. He left after just a few months to study agriculture at the Kansas State University. In 1922 he published the poems "If We Must Die" and "America". (AAP, 2006)
"If We Must Die," written in 1919, was a bold statement of racial strategy. It raised McKay to international acclaim when Winston Churchill used it to rally British troops against the Nazis. In an essay titled "A Negro Poet Writes," McKay asks about American racism: "why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitten and probably transformed into a mad......
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