USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities.

Detailed explanation-2: -McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen; in 1942 he was converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization until his death.

Detailed explanation-3: -It expresses the Jamaican-born McKay’s ambivalent feelings about the United States (his adopted country), acknowledging the nation’s vitality while criticizing its racism and violence. At the end of the poem, the speaker prophetically looks ahead to a time when this seemingly invincible country will fall to ruin.

Detailed explanation-4: -After this sojourn, McKay returned to Harlem and began working on A Long Way from Home (1937), a memoir describing his experiences as an oppressed minority, calling for an end to colonialism and segregation. In failing health, the lifelong agnostic embraced Catholicism and, in 1940, became a U.S. citizen.