Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James (review)

abstract:In 1919, the New York Times printed a number of reports on behalf of the US 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.