and unintentionally) over its content, it has man-
aged to weather the storm and stay in print with
outstanding success.
McGruder has published some of The Boon-
docks comic strips in book form, including The
Boondocks: Because I Know You Don’t Read the
Newspaper (2000), Fresh for ‘01... You Suckas:
Boondocks Collection (2001), and A Right to Be
Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury (2003). McGruder
has also worked as a coauthor for the graphic novel
Birth of a Nation. McGruder and The Boondocks
have received national and international media
attention from such mainstream venues as Time,
Newsweek, People, National Journal, The Washing-
ton Post, and London’s The Guardian, as well as
many newspapers and magazines. McGruder was
awarded the “Chairman’s Award” at the NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED
PEOPLE Image Awards.
McGruder represents an astounding voice of
the hip-hop generation. His thought-provoking
work challenges established stereotypes and famil-
iar and widely accepted negative images of African
Americans. McGruder lives and works in Los An-
geles, California.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McGruder, Aaron. The Boondocks: Because I Know
You Don’t Read the Newspaper. Kansas City: An-
drew McMeel Publishing, 2000.
———. A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Trea-
sury. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.
Carlos Perez
McKay, Claude (Festus Claudius McKay)
(1889–1948)
Festus Claudius McKay (Claude, as friends called
him) was born on September 15, 1889, in Sunny
Ville, in the Clarendon hills of Jamaica, to peasant
farmers. His mother, Hannah Ann Elizabeth Ed-
wards, was said to have come from Madagascar;
his father, Thomas Frank McKay, from the Ashanti
nations in West Africa. As a wealthy propertied
man, McKay’s father was able to provide his chil-
dren with the education requisite to garner a place
in Jamaica’s rising black middle class. For young
Claude, this meant being tutored—between ages
seven and 14—by his elder schoolmaster brother,
Uriah Theodore (U. Theo), who introduced
Claude, an “omnivorous read [er]” (McKay 1937,
12), to a library dominated by the ideas of the
great free thinkers, particularly Thomas Huxley
and Herbert Spencer.
While working in Kingston as a constable,
McKay became the protégé of Walter Jekyll, a Brit-
ish gentleman and anthropologist who also placed
his personal library at McKay’s disposal. Encour-
aged by Jekyll to record and validate the voice
and folk culture of the Jamaican peasantry he had
known as a boy, McKay published Songs of Ja-
maica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), his first
two volumes of poetry, written in the island’s rich
dialect, before he migrated to America to study
agronomy at BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama and the University of Kan-
sas. “Hard Times” is representative of the poems
in these collections, in which speakers champion
the cause of the peasantry—the proletariat—as
McKay’s later socialist leanings would lead him to
identify members of the working class: “De mo’
me wuk, de mo’time hard, / I don’t know what fe
do; / I ben’ me knew an’ pray to Gahd, / Yet t’ing
same as before” (McKay 1972, 53).
McKay’s Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and
Harlem Shadows (1922) were published during
the height of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Although
he would spend most of the period associated with
this “movement” outside the United States, spe-
cifically in Russia, England, France, and Morocco,
McKay is often identified as one of its significant
writers. While for some scholars, McKay’s very
formal English sonnets “Harlem Shadows” and
“Innovations,” published in 1917 in the Libera-
tor, place him among Renaissance harbingers, for
most his more militant sonnets, “If We Must Die,”
“The White House,” and “America,” first published
in 1919, epitomize the voice of the “New Negro
movement.”
The empowered “New Negro” is evident in
the martial and militant “If We Must Die” and
“America.” In the former, the speaker calls upon
his “kinsmen” to meet their “common foe”:McKay, Claude 347