ZORA NEAL HURSTON, TONI MORRISON, and ALICE
WALKER. Significantly, many of the early literary
scholars, critics, and anthologists of this literary
tradition, including Nick Aaron Ford. RICHARD
BARKSDALE, Arthur P. Davis, STERLING BROWN, and
SAUNDERS REDDING, served on the faculty of these
institutions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashley, Dwayne, and Juan Williams. I’ll Find a Way
or Make One: A Tribute to Historically Black Col-
leges and Universities. New York: Amistad/Harper
Collins, 2004.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights.
“Historically Black Colleges and Universities and
Higher Education Desegregation.” Available on-
line. URL: http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list-
locr/docslhq9511.html. Accessed October 17,
2006.
Derrick R. Spires
Home to Harlem Claude McKay (1928)
Home to Harlem, CLAUDE MCKAY’s first published
and most successful novel, tells the story of Jake, a
black World War I veteran, who returns to Harlem
after deserting because of the racism he encoun-
ters in the military, England, and Europe. It depicts
what McKay called the “underworld” of Harlem
life, a social spectrum that includes everyone from
pimps, day-laborers, gamblers, and prostitutes to
exotic cabaret partiers, jazz musicians, members of
the black intelligentsia, and others. However, much
of the novel centers on Jake’s adventures with sex,
alcohol, and gambling as he searches for his “little
brown girl,” a part-time prostitute with whom he
has become smitten at a cabaret his first night back
but cannot find again.
McKay also addresses labor issues, particu-
larly the exploitation of the common worker (the
Marxist proletariat) through Jake’s experience as
a waiter on the railroad. Not only are the workers
referred to as animals, as mules, but also, in their
overnight run between New York City and Pitts-
burgh, the workers are forced to sleep in a bug-in-
fested “hell of a dump” (146). Equally significant,
through Jake and Ray, McKay questions the ar-
bitrariness and validity of racial designation and
categories. Ray declares, “Races and nations were
like skunks, whose smell poisoned the air of life”
(153–154).
McKay’s frank portrayal of the Harlem masses
was key to the book’s success; until RICHARD
WRIGHT’s NATIVE SON (1940), Home to Harlem
was the best-selling book by a black author. Black
intellectuals’ response was more mixed. W. E. B.
DUBOIS, who emphasized an educated “talented
tenth” of blacks, was upset at the novel’s descrip-
tion of less respectable black life; he famously
wrote that after reading Home to Harlem, he
wanted to bathe. Younger writers, such as LANGS-
TON HUGHES, were more enthusiastic. At the same
time, unlike “proletarian” novels by other leftist
authors (such as Mike Gold, with whom McKay
had worked on the socialist Liberator), Home to
Harlem is not a political novel per se and does
not turn Jake into a working-class hero; rather, it
uses politics to imbue Jake with a sense of dig-
nity and worth. Thus, while Jake displays class-
consciousness—most strikingly, when he refuses
to help break a strike by white dockers—he also
has real human foibles. And while he refuses to
scab, he also refuses the union’s offer to join. In
part, this reflects the fact that by 1928, McKay had
already become disillusioned with the commu-
nist movement. Another theme woven through-
out the novel is the question of “home”: Despite
the novel’s title and the Jake’s yearning to return
to Harlem, none of the main characters are actu-
ally from Harlem. Instead, the novel is inhabited
by various rootless cosmopolitans, especially mi-
grants from the South (such as Jake) or the Carib-
bean (such as Jake’s alter ego, Ray). Further, many
of the characters have jobs that involve traveling,
such as dockers, railway employees, and sailors.
Instead of being a literal “home,” McKay suggests,
Harlem is instead the figurative home of the black
diaspora. In the end, Jake leaves Harlem in search
of a more fulfilling life. Harlem proves not to be
the black mecca he envisioned at the beginning
of the novel.250 Home to Harlem