Joy in the Woods

The poem’s combination of hope and frustration, anger and longing reflects McKay’s embrace of Communism not so much as a political ideology as a socio-economic cultural template, a philosophy that envisioned a global community of workers united to secure their right to dignity. For McKay, Communism offered a way to address entrenched racism in his adopted country. Racism, for McKay, reflected economic inequality.

At the turn of the century, in the Deep South, Black workers and their families began to migrate to Northern cities to seek better job opportunities. Since the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow legislation had institutionalized racism, denying Black residents in the South the right to vote, access to public education, job opportunities, as well as legitimizing violence as a way to maintain white control. This movement north, which historians now term the Great Migration, created Black neighborhoods in a number of Northern cities, most notably New York, Detroit, and Chicago.

The economic opportunities in the North, although helped by World War One, too quickly soured. As it turned out, racism was a reality in the North as well. When McKay arrived in New York, however, he perceived the conditions under which Black citizens lived were sustained not so much by racism as economic enslavement to capitalism. McKay embraced the nascent Communist Party movement, seeing in its heated rhetoric of global reformation a critical link between civil rights and economic liberation. Capitalism had done little for the generations of workers, whatever their ethnicity. “Joy in the Woods” reflects McKay’s belief that sustainable relief from the indignities of racism could only begin with upending capitalism itself and empowering workers enslaved by its oppression.