black prisoners, astonished that they could write such poetry as If We Must Die; prisoners had left a copy of the poem lying on the ground. The magazine asserted that the men of Attica passed around clandestine writings of their own; among them was a poem written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching for its would-be heroic style.' Then Time quoted the first stanza of Claude McKay's poem, which McKay wrote to describe the lynchings in the South and which Winston Churchill