A Claude McKay Letter To Max Eastman

Essay, Research Paper

Moscow, April 3, 1923

Dear Max:

The chapter which includes my experience with the Liberator group shall remain

as it is, for in your letter I cannot find any convincing reason for omitting it; but, on

the contrary, there is every reason for publishing it, if it will provoke stimulating

argument and discussion, such as your letter reveals, on the Negro problem in America.

There are, however, a few knotty points in your exquisitely phrased letter which I have

picked out—points insinuatingly questioning my motives and charging me with

dishonesty, which I will take up with you in order as they appeared.

You will understand that I do not intend to argue with you about my motives and

honesty—to prove or disprove anything, I am only attempting to enlighten you.

(1) I had and have no intention of letting the public think I withdrew from the

executive editorship of the Liberator solely because of a disagreement over the

race question. As my letters to you and yours to me will show I was preparing to leave the

work of active editorship of the Liberator months before I finally gave up the job.

But I want to state emphatically, and to let those who are interested in the matter

understand, that my colleague on the executive editorship [Michael Gold] made the race

story in the June [1922] Liberator the basis of his attack on me, and his opinion,

your letters and the artist’s [Boardman Robinson.], and the discussions of the affair by

the Liberator group, revealed to me that the group did not have a class-conscious

attitude on the problem of the American Negro. I think it is very important that this fact

should be published especially if it will make for profitable discussion on the race

question. The race matter was merely incidental to my quitting the executive work, but it

was most important in that it disclosed the truth that the leading minds of the Liberator

group did not, to me, have a comprehensive grasp of the Negro’s place in the

class-struggle.

(2) You write respectively in a single paragraph: "In your discussion of the

disagreement which did exist about the race question, you distort completely the

nature of that disagreement" (second italics mine) and "There was never any

disagreement between you and the editors of the Liberator, so far as I am aware

about the proper communist policy towards the race question in the United States." I

cannot reconcile these sentences. You know very well that you were virtually the boss of

the magazine and that you made me your assistant and later announced it to the

readers and the other editors. But, as is implied in your letter, you never discussed the

Negro problem as a policy of the Liberator with me. Nor did any of the other

editors. The Liberator group, therefore, could not be in "complete

accord" with me as you write about my policy on the race question, when we never

discussed it as a group. In fact as a group we never even discussed the labor movement

seriously. My position on the Liberator I discussed seriously only with the radical

Negro group in New York. As I quite remember, I tried to discuss the Irish and Indian

questions with you once or twice with a view of getting articles on them for the magazine,

but with little sympathy you said that they were national issues. I never once thought you

grasped fully the class struggle significance of national and racial problems, and little

instances indexed for me your attitude on the race problem. It was never hostile, always

friendly, but never by a long stretch revolutionary.

However, I remember one day when we could not find a decent restaurant to accommodate

us both on Sixth Avenue, and we finally had to lunch in a very dirty place, that you

remarked, perhaps jestingly, "If I were a Negro I couldn’t be anything but a

revolutionist!" I don’t know why, my dear Max, but the atmosphere of the Liberator

did not make for serious discussions on any of the real problems of Capitalist Society

much less the Negro.

(3) But you write: "You say that in joining the staff you were moved by a desire

to further a solution of the Negro problem in the revolution. I refuse to believe that you

were moved solely by that consideration, because I know that you are not a more simple

person than others; rather you are more complex." You honor and flatter me by stating

that I am more complex than others. You ought to know for you are a learned Freudian

excelling in your judgment of human nature. However, I have not said anywhere that in

accepting the job you gave me on the Liberator I was moved solely by a

desire to further a solution of the Negro problem in the Revolution. I can afford to be

frank. My first necessity on returning from Europe in 1921 without any money was to get a

job so that I should be assured of shelter and food. My job on the Liberator secured

me these. But my attitude was not very different f

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