Claude McKay and Langston Hughes: Harlem Renaissance Poets

Introduction: Two Voices of the Harlem Renaissance

Claude McKay and Langston Hughes became like two poster figures for the Harlem Renaissance. They burst from the shadows of underground jazz culture into the mainstream, crossing the racial divide to find support and fame not only in America but around the world. Their poems, however, like African American music, were co-opted by white culture and exploited for aims entirely divorced from the Black experience that gave the poems their reason for being. As McKay's own life shows, when the poetry took a deeper, less visceral, more theological turn, the poet was rejected by that same white Protestant establishment, which seemed to want only a "jungle fever" type of poetry. This demand from the surrounding white culture is what led the Harlem poets to develop a "double consciousness" regarding their work. To reach the top, they still needed the support of the very culture they wanted to criticize.

Double Consciousness, Religion, and White Patronage

Just as Countee Cullen longed for a "black Jesus" with whom he could identify, so too did McKay long for a religion that was not "white." McKay had been raised Protestant, and those same Protestants now served as his patrons — yet he rejected their religion, as did many other Harlem poets who sought a new identity. This tension accounted for the "doubleness" that Cullen experienced in his poetry: on the one hand, the poets saw something true and good in God; on the other, they could not identify with the white Protestant God of mainstream America. McKay would later convert to Roman Catholicism, a faith in which race played a less prominent role than in the WASP religion of the United States. By that point, however, McKay was out of fashion, and his religious experience was of no interest to those patrons who were primarily concerned with cultural trends — as Langston Hughes put it, "Negro was in vogue" (Sayre, 2012, p. 1176).

Jazz and Black Pride: The Two Central Themes

The two primary themes represented in Harlem Renaissance poetry were the jazz mentality — that outpouring and expression of free, joyful Black music that everyone wanted to experience — and the fierce assertion of Black pride. Jazz represented freedom of everything: freedom from the past, from the old rules, from constraint. Hughes captures this in his poem "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret," in which the band plays for everyone regardless of rank, creed, or color. The poem moves through English, French, and German, suggesting the universality of jazz's acceptance at the cultural epicenter of the world — Paris. This was the novel, "vogue" sensation that the Black cultural experience was enjoying, which Hughes described when he said "Negro was in vogue." It was a fad, something new, hip, alive, different — swinging and wild, capable of luring people out of themselves for a moment.

As E. Michael Jones (2000) has argued, the jazz movement also attracted support precisely because it conveyed a revolution against moral order, elevating the sensual and diminishing the spiritual. The other major theme is represented in McKay's "If We Must Die" — Negro pride, defiant, strong, independent, and fierce. McKay's poem is a call to arms for Black culture to stand up against white domination: "If we must die — oh, let us nobly die… Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack." There is a sense that Black Americans are cornered and that there is no way forward but to fight. Ironically, the poem was co-opted by the white establishment: Winston Churchill reportedly drew on it to inspire British troops during the Second World War, using a cry of Black resistance to rally men fighting for Western imperial interests. The themes of jazz liberation and fierce independence thus defined Harlem poetry — and both themes were ultimately claimed by forces beyond Harlem's control.

Conclusion: Rage, Popularity, and the Limits of the Renaissance

McKay's role in the movement was to express the righteous anger he felt toward a white culture that had raised him in what he considered an unreal religion — a faith from which he would eventually escape through a long journey out of Harlem. Hughes's role was to popularize Harlem and its new beat, to make it appealing to one and all. And he succeeded. But not without the help of the white establishment, and the accompanying rage grew within him over time, increasingly finding its way into his work. The following original poem attempts to capture this tension at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance:

Harlem, Harlem, where are you going?
Don't you know you can't get there alone?
You got Uncle Sam and Big Brother Graham
To help you out of the gutter.
But don't run too fast, or make a big splash,
'Cause that would only make the white ones shudder.

Don't find a true way to the God they try to display
On their radio shows and church walls inside.
Don't articulate what they inside hate
'Cause that's not what they want from you.
They want jazz 'cause it's new
And it's something to do
With the "jungle fever" sweeping the world.

Give them jazz, give them jazz,
But don't show them a side
Of your life and your mind
That represents Strife,
The struggle for Truth,
A thing from which Harlem
And you and they
— And the world
Has been hurled.

References

Hricko, M. (2013). The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance. NY: Routledge.

Jones, E. M. (2000). Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control. IN: St. Augustine's Press.

Sayre, H. M. (2012). The Humanities: Culture, Continuity and Change. NY: Prentice Hall.