A race outcast from an outcast class

Abstract

These stanzas from McKay’s poem – ‘Old England’ – express the conventional, British Caribbean and colonial view of the mother country. It was published in 1912. His opinions, however, were to change radically, especially after he visited the metropolis seven years later. He ended his days hating England and the civilisation it represented. Unlike the other Caribbean intellectuals represented in this volume (barring only Padmore) McKay’s journey to England was indirect: he journeyed not from the Caribbean, but from New York after an absence of more than seven years from his native Jamaica. For most of the time in the US he was part of America’s black proletariat, earning his living, as his friend Max Eastman put it, ‘in every one of the ways that northern Negroes do, from “pot-wrestling” in a boarding-house kitchen to dining-car service on the New York and Philadelphia Express’. McKay regarded himself as ‘not only a Negro but also a worker’, and we might add for greater precision, a manual worker, one of Afro-America’s menials.2