Innocence Lost
McKay’s migration from Jamaica to America and his transformation into an original leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance came at the expense of a deep-seated longing for an innocent childhood that among a community of blacks who were entirely independent. Over time, this memory of an idyllic time in childhood took on a mythic status expressed in much of his poetry as a thematic yearning to recapture that lost innocence and reinvoke the experience through the perspective of recognition as experience to be savored.
Racial Oppression
That Jamaican community of self-sustainment doubtlessly also informed another powerful theme to be found especially in his early American work: the oppression of the black man in American. McKay’ unabashed adoption of the principles of communism can be found in the protest poetry that speaks out loudly against the economic dependence enforced upon black people living in the ghettoes of New York City. This became the rallying cry behind his powerful collection Harlem Shadows and the opening line of the title poem of that collection indicates the extent to which he took economic deprivation as the root cause of the so-called “black problem” in America. The imagery of "the halting footsteps of a lass" which commences that poem could take the subject just about anywhere; what was genuinely striking at the time was the unexpected path McKay took as he followed that lass into the world of prostitution which itself become a metaphor for economic oppression of the black race.
Black in White America
It is not just systemic oppression that runs like a motif through much of the strongest poetry of McKay. At every turn, there is the expression of a feeling that a black person is an outsider in America anywhere where he is not surrounded by others members of his race. This more subtle form of racism which falls short of outright oppression fueled the kind of anger that any outsider will recognize. Indeed, a common complaint is that some poems of outrage at this state of affairs—sonnets with titles like “The White House” and “To the White Fiends” pass from the state of aesthetic artistry and into the sphere of political didacticism. One cannot deny the sheer intensity of emotion at a situation which stimulate outright, however.
