The Speech Churchill Never Gave

A Poetry Tale about Claude McKay, told by Hello Doggo.

Summer, nineteen nineteen. White mobs are attacking Black communities across America. They’ll call it the Red Summer.

A young Jamaican poet is waiting tables in a dining car on the Pennsylvania Railroad. His name is Claude McKay. In those days, he said later, a sonnet exploded out of him. It begins: If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.

A radical magazine, The Liberator, printed it that July. The same month, riots broke out in Washington and Chicago, and by September Black magazines were reprinting it.

It was the only poem, he wrote, that he ever read to his crew. They were agitated.

Now for the legend. Twenty-odd years later, so the story goes, Winston Churchill, during the war against Hitler, stood up before the House of Commons, or was it the United States Congress, and declaimed McKay’s poem as a battle cry.

It’s a wonderful story. Writers repeated it for decades.

It also appears never to have happened. A scholar called Lee Jenkins went looking. Hansard. The Congressional Record. The Churchill archive. The biographers. Not one line of McKay. The International Churchill Society now files it, politely, under myths.

Which leaves the true version, and frankly it’s better. The audience McKay remembered wasn’t Parliament. It was a dining-car crew of Black waiters, rattling down the line, in the summer the country turned on them.