British intelligence tracked and blocked Claude McKay’s movements for two decades
Evidence
- Wayne Cooper and Robert C. Reinders, “Claude McKay in England, 1920,” New Beacon Reviews, Collection One, 1968, pp. 3–21 (reprinted from Race, ix, 1967). Cooper and Reinders recount: “McKay escaped arrest but his ‘big black grin’ [McKay’s description] did not prevent the Home and/or Foreign Office from preparing a dossier on him. In 1930 McKay wrote to Max Eastman that the English government prevented him from visiting Gibraltar (McKay was still a British subject) and that a French official in Fez told him that the ‘British Secret Service had me listed as a propagandist.’ Two years later McKay was having trouble with the British Consul in Tangiers and was prevented from entering British territory—including his home island of Jamaica. And in the following year he complained to Eastman that ‘those dirty British bastards working respectably in the dark’ were blocking his re-entry into the United States.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2390