"If We Must Die" is a poem by Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay (1890–1948) published in the July 1919 issue of The Liberator magazine.
McKay wrote the poem in response to mob attacks by white Americans upon African-American communities during the Red Summer.
[3] If we must die, let it be not like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.
McKay experienced the Red Summer personally, seeing violent mobs of white people while he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
[7] According to Jordanian scholar Shadi Neimneh, the poem "arguably marks the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance because it gives expression to a new racial spirit and self-awareness".
[11] Wallace Thurman considered the poem as embodying the essence of the New Negro movement as it was not aimed at arousing sympathy, but rather consisted of self-assertion.
[9] The scholar Jean Wagner cited the poem as inspirational to people experiencing persecution, writing that "[a]long with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses it voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom.
[7] Winston Churchill allegedly read the poem without attribution to the US Congress and later during The Blitz in World War II.
[7] Melvin B. Tolson wrote in a review of McKay's anthologized poetry that "[d]uring the last world war, Sir Winston Churchill snatched Claude McKay's poem 'If We Must Die', from the closet of the Harlem Renaissance, and paraded it before the House of Commons, as if it were the talismanic uniform of His Majesty's field marshal".
[7] The poem was recited in the film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.
[14][15][16] Eric Robert Taylor wrote a book about insurrections during the Atlantic slave trade and titled it If We Must Die after the poem.