Festus Claudius McKay was born in 1889 in Sunny Ville, a rural village in Jamaica's Clarendon Parish. Growing up amid the sounds of the Jamaican countryside, he received much of his early education from his older brother Uriah Theodore McKay, a schoolteacher who introduced him to literature and independent thinking. This intellectual foundation would influence everything that followed.
By the age of twenty-five, McKay had already published two collections of Jamaican dialect poetry — *Songs of Jamaica* and *Constab Ballads* — a noteworthy achievement that earned him recognition from the Jamaica Institute of Arts and Sciences. However, he felt limited by Jamaica's borders, and in 1912, he moved to the United States to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and later at Kansas State University. He never completed his degree. New York was calling.
“When he reached Harlem, McKay was ready to make his mark as a serious writer seeking a larger audience.”
He found it with his 1919 poem "If We Must Die," which responded to the surge of anti-Black violence during the Red Summer. The poem gained widespread circulation and established him as a powerful voice of Black resistance. Winston Churchill even quoted it in a World War II speech, seemingly unaware of its origins.
McKay emerged as a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, an incredible surge of Black art, literature, and music that blossomed in New York during the 1920s. His 1928 novel *Home to Harlem* became the first bestselling novel by a Black author in the United States, although it faced criticism from W.E.B. Du Bois, who deemed its candid portrayals of working-class Black life too raw. McKay stood his ground.
