Felipe Smith: On "The White City"
The work of Du Bois and Johnson undoubtedly set the tone for the imagery of entrapment and despair in the northern metropolis that permeates the poetry of Jamaican-born Claude McKay, an immigrant like Du Bois and Johnson in the American city famed for its "openness" to outsiders. McKay reached New York in spring 1914, already embittered by two years in the South and Midwestern plains of Kansas over the cruel race prejudice for which his Jamaican upbringing had not prepared him.