The poems of Claude McKay were brutal and direct. His poems echoed the spirit of Harlem and the spirit of racial tension throughout the United States. The amazing thing is that this Harlem Renaissance poet was traveling Europe during Harlem’s most prolific and famed period.

Claude McKay lived in Jamaica until he was 23. The year he moved to America (1912) he published two volumes of poetry written in a style of Jamaican vernacular. His poem “If We Must Die” was written during the …

“Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”

Countee Cullen was one of the most respected poets with the intellectual patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. His work was highly revered by Alain Locke, one of the major spokespersons of the literary movement. Perhaps it was because his poetry was of a more traditional and “sophisticated” style than the gritty blues influenced verses of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown.

Born in 1903, Cullen was adopted by …

Concord, a small country town about 15 miles northwest of Boston, was where the colonial American militia stockpiled their guns and ammunition in the months preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The British attempted a surprise attack on the weapon stores in Concord on the night of April 18, 1775.

The colonials had already anticipated this, and on the first sign of British movement Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott and William Dawes rode ahead of the British armies to spread the word. American defenders …