Trial by Lynching: Stories About Negro Life in America
by Claude McKay

Moscow in 1925, and was left unpublished in English until 1977, only to remain largely ignored. When the Russian edition was discovered by McKay’s biographer Cooper in the 1970s, he briefly described its three stories “in one sentence, calling them ‘slightly and overtly propagandistic, concentrating directly on the very real problems of lynchings and racial discrimination.’” Yet to critic Marian McLeod this notably stands as McKay’s “first experiment in prose fiction.” Scholar J.A. Zumoff furthers that, saying it is “key to understanding McKay’s literary and political development” (Zumoff, Mulattos, 22-3).

The title work, “Trial by Lynching,” focuses on the often joking assessments by whites on their lynching of a Black man who is tortured, shot, and burned alive. “Mulatto Girl,” the only one of the three set in Harlem, is told from the perspective of a white man visiting his Black “comrade.” The white narrator speaks of a time in his Texas town when there were rumors of a relationship between Coleman, a college friend who is also white, and Mathilda, a mixed-race young woman. After she is ordered to leave town, they see Mathilda on the street, where she begs for help from Coleman but is viciously struck by him instead. The narrator recalls that it “had a greater effect on me than a lynching.”

The third work, “Soldier’s Return,” is a partly fictionalized comment on T.S. Stribling’s novel Birthright (1922), and speaks to the radically different experiences of returning WWI Black and white soldiers. To Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and other Harlem Renaissance voices, McKay, who died in 1948, was “a leading inspirational force” (ANB).