McKay first came to America in 1912, arriving in South Carolina and then traveling to Alabama, where he briefly studied at the Tuskegee Institute before moving to attend Kansas State College. Although he had encountered racism in Jamaica, he soon realized with shock that racism was far more deeply ingrained in the fabric of American life. Throughout the South, he encountered segregated public facilities, including restaurants and water fountains, and he realized American society’s entrenched white supremacy. Public facilities for Black people, if provided, were inferior. This systemic racial prejudice made a deep impression on him. In a 1918 essay, “A Negro Poet Writes,” published in Pearson’s Magazine, McKay wrote,

I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter. […] At first I was horrified, my spirit revolted against the ignoble cruelty and blindness of it all. Then I soon found myself hating in return but this feeling couldn’t last for to hate is to be miserable (Wayne F. Cooper. Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Louisiana State University Press, 1987, p. 65).

This sentiment resembles that of “America,” written just a few years later.

As a poet, McKay favored traditional verse forms, and he published 18 sonnets over an eight-year period beginning in 1917.