The White House

“If We Must Die” by Claude McKay (1919)

It may be difficult to square the cautious, elegant voice heard in “The White House” with the voice heard here. This sonnet, written at the same time as “The White House” and also appearing in The Liberator, reveals a far more strident and angrier McKay and thus could be read as a response to the questions that he raises in “The White House” but refuses to answer. The poem is an inspirational, defiant call to arms. The poem understands and makes heroic the need for Black rebellion—“If we must die, let it not be like hogs” (Line 1)—and insists that if the Black race asserts its right to exist in white America it does so with pride and with integrity, together. White people are called “the common foe,” a “murderous and cowardly pack” (Lines 9, 13).

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes (1926)

Written by one of the most iconic figures in the Harlem Renaissance, “I, Too” expresses the sense of Black community, that Black people, if they are ever to secure their civil rights must do so together. In addition, like McKay’s speaker, Hughes argues that Black people are part of America despite segregation. Like McKay’s sonnet, Hughes speaks for the Black community and the poem is addressed to white America. We cannot be patient forever, Hughes argues, but he believes that white people will come to see the richness and beauty of Black culture and welcome Black people into America.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson (1900)

This poem offers an answer to the rhetorical question that McKay raises for Black America: How are we to live denied without giving in to anger? Drawing on the rich tradition within Black culture of finding hope and inspiration in the language, vocabulary, and symbolism of their adopted Christianity, this well-known Johnson lyric finds a strategy for endurance that offers hope in the promise that God, not white America, will right the abiding wrongs of racism and hatred. God, give us the strength to endure. Lead us, Johnson prays, to the light. This mindset was very much an element of the Harlem Renaissance, its more strident figures specifically rejecting how Black people can no longer find in the argument of white religion the justification for allowing racism to continue.