Claude McKay Publishes 'If We Must Die'

Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay published 'If We Must Die' in The Liberator in 1919 in direct response to the Red Summer racial violence. The sonnet calling for armed resistance and defiant self-defense became one of the most celebrated poems in Black American literature and an anthem of Black assertiveness. Winston Churchill later recited the poem in a different context during World War II.