Nestled between the February 1918 start of the influenza A pandemic and its end in April 1920 is 1919, a famous year of unrest. The year 1919 was one of worker strikes, such as a five-day general strike in Seattle and a three-month strike by the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. It was also, as James Weldon Johnson noted, a “Red Summer” of race riots (341). The “red” in this case denotes blood not bolshevism. This summer begins perhaps in April with the Jenkins County, Georgia, riot, continues with the May Charleston riot, and then intensifies in July, first with the Longview, Texas, riot, followed by the Bisbee, Arizona, riot and the Garfield Park riot. In the third week of July the Washington, DC, riots began. And then two weeks after that, the Chicago riots.

Because all these riots were begun by white Americans with lynch mob intentions, many read 1919 as just another year, if an unusually intense one, in the longue durée of American white supremacy. But as David F. Krugler notes, to read 1919 merely through the lens of white-on-black violence is to miss the moments when white supremacy was resolutely challenged. In July, black residents—first in Washington, DC, and then in Chicago—fought back against this intensifying violence in ways not seen before in the history of the United States. Krugler documents how these moments of resistance were inclusive, crossed class and gender divisions, and involved “Black veterans and active-duty servicemen” and “working class and professional black men.” Black women also “took up arms to defend besieged homes in Washington and Chicago” (4). Many died in this effort in July, and there were weeks of looting and burning.

The riots that defined 1919 are not usually understood as having anything to do with the ongoing pandemic. The year 1919 was complicated, full of epoch-changing events. United States soldiers were returning home from World War I. Worker revolutions and uprisings were a regular occurrence in Europe. Some, such as the Russian Revolution, were even successful. In the United States, new technologies were bringing on the second industrial revolution, a wave of mechanization and automation. It was a time, much like our own, of unprecedented economic inequality and racial tension. The Great Migration was in progress, reshaping both the south and the north. These changes were reconfiguring the United States and can in some way explain the Red Summer of that year. But pandemics also regularly come with some form of social upheaval. As Richard J. Evans writes in “Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” epidemic diseases can seldom accommodate “the emotional structures” that shape societies, and the result is often social tensions, “violence and even, ultimately, revolt and revolution” (124). The list of examples is long here and includes the seismic changes that the Black Death of 1347–51 brought to the feudal system, the eighteenth-century plague riots in Russia, and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century plague riots in Calcutta, Bombay, Puna, and Kampur. Evans notices numerous instances where revolutions, riots, and other disturbances followed cholera outbreaks, concluding that “the general coincidence of cholera epidemics with years of upheaval and revolution has proved too obvious to ignore” (131). It has been argued that both AIDS and the swine flu of 1983 played a major role in the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti (Evans 123). And the intensity of the response to the murder of George Floyd during our current pandemic might be yet another example.

However one understands Johnson's Red Summer, it is impossible to miss how 1919 was also a major year for poetry. The Crisis, The Crusader, The Defender, The Messenger, The New York Call, and Negro World are all examples of publications from a strong radical black press that regularly printed militant poems that encouraged resistance to white lynch mobs. Claude McKay's “If We Must Die” is the poem of this moment, one that captured the zeitgeist as if McKay were a prophet, not a mere writer. The poem first appeared in the July 1919 issue of The Liberator. But it was repeatedly reprinted just a few months after it was first published. In September, Cyril Briggs reprinted it in The Crusader. In the next issue, Briggs would announce the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood, a militant organization that he created to agitate for armed self-defense. The Messenger also reprinted the poem that same month in an editorial called “If We Must Die” appearing alongside another editorial called “Defense of Negro Rioters.” In the United Kingdom, Sylvia Pankhurst published the poem in Worker's Dreadnought. That same month, the poem showed up for the first time, but not the last, in the Congressional Record. The Commission on After-War Problems of the African Episcopal Church included the poem in their plea for Congress to investigate the July riots and prevent similar ones in the future. Within a few years, the poem would begin to be regularly anthologized. In 1922, it appeared in Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry and then again in Clement Wood's 1924 Negro Songs. It would begin to be treated almost as if it were reportage. When Johnson talks about the Red Summer of 1919 in his autobiography Along This Way, he includes the first and third stanzas, along with the concluding couplet, of “If We Must Die.” Johnson calls the poem “a cry of defiant despair sounded from the last ditch” (341).

Most discussions of “If We Must Die” present it as foreshadowing the DC and Chicago riots. Many politicians at the time saw it as provocative, seditious even, and as a call for insurrection that incited those riots. The Senate demanded that the attorney general investigate “Negro publications” such as The Crisis and The Messenger for violating the Espionage Act. The result was a report entitled “Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications,” a section of a larger report on antigovernment activity commissioned by the Senate (United States Department of Justice 162, 161). That section concluded by worrying about the “dangerous spirit of defiance and vengeance at work among the Negro leaders, and to an ever-increasing extent, among their followers” (187). McKay, though, points out that the poem was responding to violence, not inciting it, and that his call for resistance was based on, as he writes in A Long Way from Home, the “clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings” that he was reading about in the “Negro newspapers” at the time (29). Given this context, the poem might best be understood as a eulogy that helps us move through loss into action.

Part of the power of “If We Must Die” is its mix of simplicity and complexity. The poem suggests that if we have to die, then we might as well make it matter. It is a sonnet, with fourteen lines in three stanzas and a concluding couplet. The first two stanzas both begin with a telling conditional that is also an inevitability: “if we must die.” And with this vaguely oxymoronic conditional inevitability, the poem makes us all into resistant subjects. The first stanza suggests that if we have to die, and we all do, we might as well resist and “nobly die,” not as hogs being hunted by dogs. The second stanza is a call for noble death. The poem turns on the third stanza, as is traditional, and it calls us into the “we” with the apostrophe “O, kinsmen!” This stanza also urges us not just to fight back despite being outnumbered but more specifically to use a “death blow.” And then it reminds once again of the inevitability of our death: “What though before us lies the open grave?” The concluding couplet asserts that to fight back is to insist on being recognized as human. McKay again twists the terms. The we, which at the beginning of poem are as hogs, have become as men. But the threat, those who hunt, remain as dogs in the “the murderous, cowardly pack.” At no point does McKay racialize the fight. Nor does he specify who must be fought, who must fight. The poem is all invocation, little specification.

Melvin B. Tolson called the poem “a pillar of fire by night in many lands” (290). The fact that “If We Must Die” is also a poem about how to exist on the threshold between life and death probably explains why it has been such a poem of comfort for the imprisoned. In January 1967, George Jackson quoted the poem in full, without line breaks and without attribution, to describe his relation to the prison industrial complex in a letter to his sister. The poem would later be reprinted in an August 1971 issue of The Black Panther that was dedicated to Jackson after his death, on a page that announced a “revolutionary memorial service” for him (“Revolutionary Memorial Services”). This elegiac use of the poem, as Katherine Stanutz writes, acknowledges how Jackson “understood the politics of mourning and knew that grief could be a major resource for change” (48). In 1971, the prisoners at Attica would insist on a reading of the poem as revolutionary, as literally seditious. They circulated the poem before the riot (“War at Attica” 22). And in 1973, Assata Shakur was shot by the police before being arrested. She opens her autobiography with a chapter on her incarceration in a hospital. Her leg was shackled to her bed. A black nurse, one of the few who were sympathetic to her, gave her a book of poems that included “If We Must Die.” And as Shakur tells it, she read it and other poems over and over “until I was sure the guards had heard every word. The poems were my message to them” (16). She notes that it was through her reading that she realized she “was in communion with all the forces on the earth that truly love people, in communion with all the revolutionary forces on the earth” (17).

Much of the power of this poem lies in how McKay adapted the Shakespearean sonnet, a constricted and slight form that has traditionally been used to talk about desire in the Western tradition. His adaptation of the sonnet makes it suddenly and resonantly political. He puts resistance, the moment of fighting back, in the position of the beloved. And the lover, or the speaker of the poem, represents not the sonnet's usual besotted individual but a collective, a “we.” However, part of the power of “If We Must Die” is that it does not specify who “we” are. Sometimes readers have embraced this lack of specification in idiosyncratic ways. This is probably what allowed Tolson to claim, in the same review in which he called the poem a pillar of fire, that Winston Churchill read the poem before the House of Commons (287). Arna Bontemps also claims that Churchill quoted it as the conclusion to his address before the joint houses of Congress before the entrance of the United States into World War II (xviii). However, there does not seem to be any evidence that either story is true (Caplan 141; “Churchill”).

But these same ambiguities, I believe, can make “If We Must Die” into a pandemic poem of comfort, and not just because in 1919 almost everyone in the United States would have known someone dead from either war or pandemic, making the title and opening line poignant. The poem also suggests a way forward in these moments when we find ourselves on the threshold between life and death. It provides us with the comfort of alliance and resistance, a way through the chaos that is both tender and tough. The comfort that poetry best represents is the revolutionary possibility to overturn what has made our lives fragile. The prism of “If We Must Die” reminds us how grief can call us to action in this moment, our own version of 1919.