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introduction • xxxvii
accent mark (“accursèd”), in lines 5 and 9 the word “Oh” was originally “O,” and in
line 13 “murderous cowardly pack” is missing a comma between “murderous” and
“cowardly.” For information about the poem, see William J. Maxwell, ed., Complete
Poems: Claude McKay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 332–33.
14. See Maxwell, Complete Poems: Claude McKay, 333, for the origin of the line “if we
must die” in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604).
15. Moreover, Foley showed that Harlem Renaissance “culturalism” and New Negro
radicalism were contradictory ideological poles that should be viewed “as neither
identical nor antipodal but as constituting a simultaneous unity and struggle of
opposites.” Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the
New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 7.
16. See Lee M. Jenkins, “‘If We Must Die’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay,”
Notes and Queries 50 (September 2003): 334–35.
17. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 77–91.
18. So anxious was McKay over his exact political role that in a political forum he
quibbled over the exact translation of his words from English to Russian. For this
episode, see chapter 16 of A Long Way from Home.
19. In 1977, Harper and Row released the second half of Black Boy as American
Hunger.
20. For more information, see chapters 16 and 29 of A Long Way from Home.
21. See chapter 21 of A Long Way from Home in which McKay states that he relishes
lived experience as a means of authentication literary expression.
22. Note that Locke retitles the original poem “The White House” again in Four Negro
Poets (1927) as “White Houses” (Maxwell, Complete Poems, 309).
23. Cooper, Claude McKay, 314.
24. Alain Locke,“Spiritual Truancy,” New Challenge 2(2) (Fall 1937): 63–64. For more
information about Locke’s article, see chapter 5 of Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans
and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
25. Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” The Survey Graphic Number (March 1,
1925): 633.
26. Locke,“Spiritual Truancy,” 63–66.
27. For more information about the tense relationship between Locke and McKay, see
Cooper, Claude McKay, 225, 261, 320, and George Hutchinson, The Harlem
Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995), 131.
28. McKay quoted in Cooper, Claude McKay, 307.