Claude McKay: Poet, Author, Activist

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

A leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, poet and author Claude McKay had an idyllic childhood in Jamaica until his first experience of racism when he was 21. After emigrating to the United States in 1912 he became convinced that socialism held the answer to what ailed society, especially what kept black people down. His poetry and novels explored the themes of racial tension, the plight of poor black people in Harlem, and social struggle. He traveled extensively in Europe and Russia to find support for his efforts, but only became disillusioned with socialism. Eventually back in the U.S. his health failed and he was forced to seek help at a Friendship House, a Catholic endeavor. He became enamored of the Catholic approach to social justice and became active in both the Friendship House and the Catholic Worker movements. He came to believe in the Catholic faith, seeing in it the answers to the questions of justice and charity that he’d been seeking his entire life. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1944, four years before he died of heart failure.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.
0:11.0	If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit American Catholic
0:16.0	History.org slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crowe. And I'm Tom Crow. Today we're talking about
0:23.3	Claude McKay, a poet and author, and one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance.
0:29.2	McKay lived to be 58, and he was only Catholic for the final four years of his life, but his life
0:35.2	story has such a dramatic, there and back again arc.
0:38.9	Yeah, with gratitude to Tolkien for the phrase, it really does.
0:42.4	He begins with a practically idyllic childhood on a tropical island, then he has a
0:46.9	scandalizing experience, and the next many decades are filled with seeking a way to return
0:51.7	to the idyllic happiness and innocence of his youth. Through his life
0:55.1	as a writer, he would use the physical place of his youth as a stand-in for that peace and joy his
1:00.1	heart and mind sought. Right. He titled one of his earlier collections of short stories,
1:05.5	My Green Hills of Jamaica, after he'd been living in New York City for eight years.
1:10.3	And then, finally, as his own chapters are ending, he does find the answers he sought in the
1:15.0	most unlikely of places.
1:17.1	Since he was a poet and a writer of novels, it's rather fitting that his own story has such
1:21.9	epic qualities.
1:23.1	Well, the times he lived in help with that.
1:25.3	He was born in 1890.
1:26.9	He died in 1948. So he was 24 when
1:30.2	World War I broke out, 27 when the Bolsheviks took over Russia and launched the Soviet Union,
1:36.0	39 when the Great Depression began, and 49 when Germany invaded Poland to spark World War II.
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