Harlem Renaissance: The Lynching By Claude Mckay

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Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet and one of the most important poets during the Harlem Renaissance. He was best known for the literary works he wrote during that time, especially after his return to the United States. In 1922, he published Harlem Shadows, which is a collection of poems, where he wrote some of his most influential poems that highlighted the sufferings and struggles of the African Americans (“Claude McKay”). “The Lynching” is one of the poems included in the collection and it is about the act of lynching of the African Americans in the south during that time. The purpose of this paper is to link the act of lynching to the history of the African Americans, highlight the reasons behind it, and show the gruesomeness of the act as well as its repercussions. …show more content…

Also, it was very common in the south because when they gained their freedom after the end of the civil war, many white people thought that they enjoyed too much freedom, thus, lynching was a way to put them under their control (“History of Lynchings”). Moreover, another reason behind the lynching of African Americans was that they were severely oppressed and marginalized due to long held prejudices and stereotyping, such as regarding them as barbaric inferior beings. Thus, most of the poets at that time, including McKay, used to express the suffering of the African Americans through poetry in order to address these issues, like lynching, and show the kind of brutality and tortures the blacks had to endure because of common racist