Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Despite being a minor literary success in Jamaica, with the publication of his first two collections of poetry, Constab Ballads and Songs of Jamaica, McKay decided to move to Alabama after learning of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in 1912.

While at the Tuskegee Institute, and later Kansas State College, McKay encountered what he described as the “implacable hate of my race” and decided to leave the South for the cooler climes of the Northeast, where still he would flee to the embrace of the early Soviet Union, feeling as a stranger in his own country, yet being accepted in the USSR by the likes of Trotsky and others.

When he returned to America, he spent the remainder of his life teaching.