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Claude McKayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Although the psychology of bitterness and anger reflected in McKay’s poem can be (and has been) applied to many groups who within the culturally diverse American community have experienced this same hunger to be a part of America, and who have struggled with that sense of alienation and displacement (women, the underprivileged, the undereducated, first-generation immigrants, members of the LGBTQ community), the poem here specifically addresses how white America systematically and legally denied basic civil rights to its Black citizens. In this, the poem examines the reality of segregation, how Black people were considered part of America—and a valuable and viable part given the forced and unforced labor they contributed—but somehow (and the logic clearly escapes the poet here) at the same time not a part of America.
The poem resists cataloguing specific examples of the era’s segregation—and McKay, who lived in both New York City and the Deep South after leaving Jamaica, could easily have given powerful testimony to how segregation manifested itself—the poem resists that kind of documentary realism. There are no examples pulled from McKay’s experiences or from the newspapers. That would make the poem timely, perhaps, but in this argument the poem aspires to a broader thematic focus.
By Claude McKay
America
America
Claude McKay
Home To Harlem
Home To Harlem
Claude McKay
If We Must Die
If We Must Die
Claude McKay
Joy in the Woods
Joy in the Woods
Claude McKay
The Harlem Dancer
The Harlem Dancer
Claude McKay
The Lynching
The Lynching
Claude McKay
The Tropics in New York
The Tropics in New York
Claude McKay
To One Coming North
To One Coming North
Claude McKay
When Dawn Comes to the City
When Dawn Comes to the City
Claude McKay
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