The Lynching

“The Lynching” is a sonnet written by Jamaican-American poet, writer, and activist Claude McKay. The poem was initially published in Cambridge Magazine in 1920, in response to the violent race riots of the Red Summer of 1919 and the escalation of Black men being lynched that same year. McKay also included the poem in his poetry collection Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems published later that year. Alternating between visceral feelings of despair, horror, and indignation, “The Lynching” depicts the cruel and unjustifiable hanging of an innocent Black man as well as the casual acceptance and approval of such violence by white onlookers.

Although McKay was born and raised in Jamaica and would later live much of his life abroad in Europe, he has always been linked to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Like his peers in the movement, McKay “felt a desperate need for a clearly defined image” and group identity for newly emancipated Black Americans (Keller, Frances Richardson. “The Harlem Literary Renaissance.” The North American Review, vol. 253, no. 3, 1968, p. 31). His many sonnets of social protest served to accomplish that goal. Poems like “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching” insist on the dignity and humanity of the persecuted Black race, advocate for social change, and have become a kind of mantra for modern movements of racial protest, particularly in the instance of “If We Must Die.