Claude McKay’s Road to Catholicism

Abstract

I found it not in years of Unbelief In science stirring life like budding trees, In Revolution like a dazzling thief, Oh, shall I find it on my bended knees? —Claude McKay, Truth Claude McKay's seemingly sudden conversion to Catholicism, his self-proclaimed right turn in the mid-1940s, has puzzled literary and political admirers for over half a century. How could a leading light of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, one of the most militant black voices of twentieth-century African American literature, suddenly join one of the most hierarchical and powerful organizations in the world, not just a church but the Church, and not a black church but the Catholic Church? This conversion is all the more surprising because McKay had, throughout his life, so stubbornly maintained his radical individuality as he engaged with concentrated intensity in the social movements around him. Because he had refused to be rooted to any one place or worldview, he had experienced firsthand the most important and diverse movements of his own time, and anticipated many of the most important ideas to come out of twentieth-century black life. He was a student, albeit briefly, of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute; already a West Indian migrant, he followed the Great Migration of black folk to the North and expressed in writing the tragicomedy of the new black metropolis, Harlem; he recognized, earlier than almost any Harlem intellectual of note, the significance and inner hopes of the Gar- vey Movement and attempted, alongside the distinctive African Blood Brotherhood, to create dialogue between the diasporic nationalism of the Garveyites and the socialism of the white-dominated American Left; a poet of the people, he found friends across the color-line in the increasingly radical movements of his time, briefly signing on to the 100,000-strong International Workers of the World in New York, working for women's suffrage and labor rights with Sylvia Pankhurst in London, and later becoming co-editor of the radical-bohemian newspaper, The Liberator; he traveled to Russia to participate in the historic debates following the 1917 Russian Revolution; and, in the meanwhile, wrote the poetry, novels, and memoirs that have made him one of the most well-known and influential black writers of all time. Given this illustrious life of intellectual and literary engagement, critics have been wary, to say the least, of McKay's final conversion to Catholicism, suspecting him of an intellectual abdication or exhausted rejection of his nomadic and radical youth. This is perhaps why scholars have either ignored or dismissed his unusual and fascinating years as a Catholic,