has been cited by scholars including Eleonore van Notten as having read out the poem to the United States Congress in 1919. Lodge allegedly intended the poem to serve as an example of "black radicalism". However, the scholar Lee M. Jenkins found no such reference. Winston Churchill allegedly read the poem without attribution to the US Congress and later during The Blitz in World War II. Melvin B. Tolson wrote in a review of McKay's anthologized poetry that "[d]uring the last world war, Sir Winston Churchill snatched Claude McKay's poem 'If We Must Die', from the closet of the Harlem Renaissance, and paraded it before the House of Commons, as if it were the talismanic uniform of His Majesty's field marshal". Jenkins considers it unlikely Churchill actually read the poem to Congress and found no evidence that he ever quoted it. Prisoners during the 1971 Attica Prison riot allegedly passed the poem's text around. The poem was recited in the film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. Eric Robert Taylor wrote a book about insurrections during the Atlantic slave trade and titled it If We Must Die after the poem. References External links "Kevin Young Discusses 'If We Must Die' by Claude McKay, September 30, 2020. "Claude McKay reads aloud his poems" Harlem Renaissance 1919 poems African-American poetry Jamaican poetry American poems Works originally published in American magazines Works originally published in political magazines Poems about death