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If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
-Claude McKay, "If We Must Die"
McKay's poem "If We Must Die" (1919) arguably marks the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance because it gives expres- sion to a new racial spirit and self-awareness. Its strong assertion of blackness against the race riots in northern cities following the Great War, particularly the Red Summer of 1919, is a clear indication of the interrelationship between racial violence and counter-violence. The poem expresses the essence of the Harlem Renaissance1 in terms of the assertiveness of the New Negro, his racial pride, and his militancy against white prejudice regard- less of the consequences. According to James Weldon Johnson, McKay "pours out the bitterness and rebellion in his heart" in this tragic sonnet "in a manner that strikes horror." But Johnson also writes that McKay's poetry "gives evidence that he has passed beyond the danger which threatens many of the new Negro po- ets-the danger of allowing the purely polemical phases of the race problem to choke their sense of artistry" (Book of American Negro Poetr y). Johnson, hence, articulates what McKay achieves in this poem: a protest message delivered aesthetically via the conventional sonnet form.
As early as 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk was paving the way for the radical spirit of the movement when he rejected the old school of Negro thought, represented by Booker T. Washington, for its accommodation, submission, and acceptance of intellectual inferiority.2 The New Negro Du Bois favored is proud, progressive, and above all militant in self- defense. Those Negroes who...