George S. Schuyler and Black History Month
By Nicholas Stix
web posted February 23, 2004
Well, it's Black History Month, and I'll bet you haven't heard one
thing about George S. Schuyler (1895-1977).
George S. Schuyler was, simply, the greatest black journalist this
country has ever produced. (Normally, I eschew qualifiers like
"greatest black," as opposed to "greatest," period, but this is
journalism we're talking about. I will never, in five lifetimes of
sitting in newspaper morgues, looking at microfilms of ancient
newsprint, be able to read enough to determine who America's
greatest journalist was.) From 1924-1966, he bestrode the
black press like a colossus. Working for Robert Lee Vann's
(1879-1940) Pittsburgh Courier weekly newspaper, under his
own name, he penned a column, "News and Views," of which
H.L. Mencken, remarked, "I am more and more convinced that
he is the most competent editorial writer now in practice in this
great free republic." Schuyler was in turn known as "the Negro
Mencken." Schuyler wrote the Courier's weekly unsigned, house
editorial. He traveled the world, investigating stories, which he
wired back to the Courier, such as his world scoop on the return
of slavery to Liberia, which had been founded in 1847 by
American freedmen. (He was also the first black journalist to
write, as a freelancer, for leading white publications, such as the
New York Evening Post (now the New York Post), Washington
Post, The Nation, and The American Mercury). And under no
less than eight pseudonyms, he wrote the serial pulp fiction that
proved to be the Courier's most popular feature (Samuel I.
Brooks, Rachel Call, Edgecombe Wright, John Kitchen, William
Stockton, Verne Caldwell and D. Johnson). And Schuyler
engaged black popular historian Joel A. Rogers to write a
cartoon feature on black history that was to prove one of the
newspaper's most beloved sections.
George S. Schuyler was, simply, the greatest black journalist this
country has ever produced. (Normally, I eschew qualifiers like
"greatest black," as opposed to "greatest," period, but this is
journalism we're talking about. I will never, in five lifetimes of
sitting in newspaper morgues, looking at microfilms of ancient
newsprint, be able to read enough to determine who America's
greatest journalist was.) From 1924-1966, he bestrode the
black press like a colossus. Working for Robert Lee Vann's
(1879-1940) Pittsburgh Courier weekly newspaper, under
his own name, he penned a column, "News and Views," of
which H.L. Mencken, remarked, "I am more and more
convinced that he is the most competent editorial writer now in
practice in this great free republic." Schuyler was in turn known
as "the Negro Mencken." Schuyler wrote the Courier's weekly
unsigned, house editorial. He traveled the world, investigating
stories, which he wired back to the Courier, such as his world
scoop on the return of slavery to Liberia, which had been
founded in 1847 by American freedmen. (He was also the first
black journalist to write, as a freelancer, for leading white
publications, such as the New York Evening Post (now the New
York Post), Washington Post, The Nation, and The American
Mercury). And under no less than eight pseudonyms, he wrote
the serial pulp fiction that proved to be the Courier's most
popular feature (Samuel I. Brooks, Rachel Call, Edgecombe
Wright, John Kitchen, William Stockton, Verne Caldwell and D.
Johnson). And Schuyler engaged black popular historian Joel A.
Rogers to write a cartoon feature on black history that was to
prove one of the newspaper's most beloved sections.
Schuyler was also the greatest black satirist this country has ever
seen, whose classic 1931 novel, Black No More, has twice
been reprinted in the past 15 years. In the same year Schuyler's
novel, Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, was published, in which
he presented, in fictional form, his discovery of the very real
Liberian slave trade.
As a journalist, I can't carry Schuyler's jock strap. And yet, this
giant has only 723 entries on Google (several from my articles),
less than even I do! And usually the only time he receives noticed
during Black History Month, is when I write about him. And
when Schuyler does get mentioned by what journalist Tony
Brown calls, in The Truth According to Tony Brown, the "Black
Unaccountable Machine" (B.U.M.), it is to slight him, to insult
him, to misrepresent him.
George Schuyler's problem was that he was a (gasp) …
conservative!
And so, when the New York Times commissioned a reviewer to
cover the 1995 biography of Schuyler's daughter, Phillippa,
Composition in Black and White, the critic reduced the father to
a one-sentence reference to him as a crank. Around that time,
the alleged newspaper of record hired Henry Louis "Skip" Gates
Jr. to do a hit piece on Schuyler in the Book Review, in which
Gates, who fancies himself the second coming of W.E.B.
DuBois, derided Schuyler as a self-hating black, a "fragmented"
man, and quoted pompous ass, Toni Morrison, along the way,
on the subject of black "self-hatred."
In 1998, when Long Island University gave a special George
Polk Award to the Pittsburgh Courier (not the black newspaper
that currently uses its name), and feted its few living former
staffers, the New York Times and Daily News (and Daily News
columnist E.R. Shipp) celebrated long-living mediocrities, while
assiduously refusing to so much as mention the person
responsible for the award: George Schuyler. (The newspapers
both refused, as well, to publish my letters mentioning Schuyler.)
And in 1999, the alleged documentary, The Black Press:
Soldiers Without Swords, written by Jill and Stanley Nelson,
Lou Potter and Marcia A. Smith, and directed by Stanley
Nelson, reduced Schuyler's connection to the Courier to the
phrase, "conservative columnist George Schuyler." (If you go to
the IMDB site for The Black Press, you will be erroneously told
that the movie is about
Marcus Garvey. Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the
Whirlwind, was made in 2001 by the Nelsons and Smith.)
(But who am I to criticize the Nelsons? After all, Stanley Nelson
is an official, accredited "genius," according to the MacArthur
Foundation, while his sister Jill bragged about successfully
agitating to get the Washington Post to misrepresent a rape
charge against then-D.C. Mayor Marian Barry, in her memoir
Volunteer Slavery, and who now twists young minds as a
professor of journalism at the once-great City College of New
York. The Nelsons are just the sort of phonies and petty
propagandists that Schuyler burned with his acid tongue.)
George Samuel Schuyler was born in 1895 in Providence,
Rhode Island, the son of a chef, and grew up in Syracuse, New
York. He served six years in the U.S. Army (1912-1918),
eventually attaining the rank of First Lieutenant, but went
AWOL, when a Greek immigrant shoeshine man in Philadelphia
called him the "n"-word, and refused to shine his shoes, even as
Schuyler wore the nation's uniform. Later, after Schuyler turned
himself in, he was convicted by a military court, and sentenced to
five years in prison, but released after serving nine months for
being a model prisoner. He never talked or wrote about his time
in prison.
He came to New York City, where he did menial jobs for a few
years, while studying on his own. Schuyler began associating
with socialists, less out of conviction than because they gave him
a social circle in which he could discuss ideas. Such circles
brought him to the magazine, The Messenger, which was
published by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, and from
there, in 1924, to the New York office of the Pittsburgh Courier,
an office which Schuyler would eventually run.
Though he joined the Socialist Party, would be identified early in
his career with socialism, and would experiment with some allied
ideas, such as cooperatives, Schuyler would never be a true
believer, and would always be an anti-communist. In the late
1930s he broke finally with socialism altogether. Schuyler's anti-
communism would become more and more influential in his
thinking, just as black Americans became less and less hostile
towards socialism in general, and leading communists, in
particular, as attested to by the acceptance of the circle around
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Writing for The Nation magazine in 1926, Schuyler attacked the
New Negro Movement's (which would come to be known as
the Harlem Renaissance) claims that there could be such a thing
as a "black" aesthetics. In "The Negro-Art Hokum,
" Schuyler famously (or notoriously, if you're an academic
or mainstream journalist) wrote, "the Aframerican is merely a
lampblacked Anglo-Saxon."
"Negro art ‘made in America' is as non-existent as the widely
advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge, the ‘seven years of
progress' of [New York] Mayor Hylan, or the reported
sophistication of New Yorkers. Negro art there has been, is, and
will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to
suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten
million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness."
Schuyler was denying that blacks and whites lived in
fundamentally different cultures and would produce
fundamentally different art. He pointed out that leading black
American intellectuals and artists (e.g., scholar W.E.B. DuBois
and sculptor Meta Warwick Fuller) were predominantly
influenced by European thinkers and artists.
Unfortunately, his hyperbole got the better of him, when he
denied the differences between the black and white cultures of
the time. And yet, regarding the notion that there could be a
black American "aesthetics," Schuyler was right.
The magazine's editors then showed Schuyler's broadside to
poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), whose response,
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," has been
forced on students ever since by racially correct professors and
teachers, most of whom never even read Schuyler's essay.
Hughes makes no argument. He simply insists that every black
artist be provincial, and browbeats any black who disagrees with
him, with the implicit charge of being an Uncle Tom, while
dishonestly saying that "an artist must be free to choose what he
does."
"So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, ‘I want to be a
poet, not a Negro poet,' as though his own racial world were not
as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the
colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the
painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because
he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist
must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also
never be afraid to do what he must choose."
In 1929, Schuyler's pamphlet, Racial Intermarriage in the United
States, called for solving America's race problem through
miscegenation, which was then illegal in most states.
In 1931, Schuyler published Black No More, a science fiction
satire heavily influenced by H.G. Wells, in which Dr. Junius
Crookman invents a machine for turning black folks white.
Schuyler mocked blacks' obsession with wanting to be white,
whites' obsession with blacks, and the way black leaders such as
DuBois and Marcus Garvey exploited the black masses. To
appreciate how times have changed since then, DuBois wrote a
blurb praising the book!
I believe that Black No More is the source for the Nation of
Islam's "Myth of Yacub," which insists that the white race was
created by an evil black scientist 6,000 years ago.
In the early 1930s, Schuyler denounced the communists who
had taken over the movement to free the nine "Scottsboro Boys,
" young black men who had been falsely accused of rape by two
white prostitutes, and who were eventually cleared.
In 1936, when Italy invaded Ethiopia under Mussolini, Schuyler
called for a black expeditionary force to free Ethiopia from the
grip of the Fascists.
In 1936-38, Schuyler penned the serialized novels, The Black
Internationale and Black Empire, under the pseudonym Samuel
I. Brooks. The novels helped double the Courier's circulation to
250,000.
(Note that the Courier was spread throughout the South by a
network of
black Pullman car porters, who would smuggle the paper,
which was the scourge of racist white sheriffs, hidden in the
floors of railroad cars, and drop off a total of 100,000 issues
each week in bundles outside of every major southern city. The
newspaper gained the cooperation of union leader A. Philip
Randolph (1889-1979), the founder of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters.)
The novels both centered on the work of ruthless, evil genius Dr.
Henry Belsidus, successful abortionist to and lover of wealthy,
white socialites, whom he uses to build his empire of criminal
enterprises, legitimate businesses, black Church of Love, and
secret, black expeditionary force, which he would use to win
back Africa from white colonialists, and eventually to cast whites
asunder in a racial Armageddon.
In the case of the Black Internationale, Schuyler was clearly
influenced by the Black Muslims (now known as the Nation of
Islam), just as he surely influenced them in Black No More.
Although Schuyler always mocked black nationalists such as
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), and referred to his pulp novels in
a letter as "hokum," he easily moved in and out of the nationalist
mindset. Recall that at the time, the terms "journalist," publicist,"
and "propagandist," were often interchangeable, and though the
latter term may have fallen into disrepute since World War II, the
underlying reality remains unchanged.
Later in Schuyler's career, with the rise of the civil rights
movement, many African-Americans became less tolerant of
intellectual diversity, and Schuyler had no patience for such
lockstep "discipline."
In 1964, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize, Schuyler wrote, in "King: No Help to Peace,
" "Neither directly nor indirectly has Dr. King made any
contribution to world (or even domestic) peace. Methinks the
Lenin Prize would have been more appropriate, since it is no
mean feat for one so young to acquire 60 communist front
citations…. Dr. King's principle contribution to world peace has
been to roam the country like some sable Typhoid Mary,
infecting the mentally disturbed with perversions of Christian
doctrine, and grabbing fat lecture fees from the shallow-pated."
In what was surely the beginning of the end for Schuyler at the
Courier, and thus in the black press, the Courier refused to
publish the editorial; instead, white publisher William Loeb ran it
in the conservative Manchester Union-Leader newspaper. Note,
however, that just as the black press rejected Schuyler, the press
itself, in part through its own civil rights agitations, became
irrelevant, as blacks began reading white newspapers, and
talented young black journalists began working for those same
organizations.
After King's 1968 assassination, Schuyler wrote, "The
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tragically
emphasizes again the fact that non-violence always ends
violently."
Schuyler submitted the preceding essay, "Dr. King: Non-
Violence Always Ends Violently," to the North American
Newspaper Alliance, which would not publish it. In his last
years, Schuyler increasingly had difficulty selling his work, and
when he did sell it, it was often to conservative white
publications, particularly those published by the John Birch
Society. Hence, did he go from being read almost exclusively by
blacks to a virtually lily-white readership. The essay is, however,
published – as are most of the essays I've quoted in this article –
in the 2001 collection, Rac[e]ing to the Right: Selected Essays of
George S. Schuyler.
Schuyler was no less sympathetic towards Malcolm X (1926-
1965). In 1973, in his last published piece, "Malcolm X: Better
to Memorialize Benedict Arnold," Schuyler was his old, acerbic
self: "It is not hard to imagine the ultimate fate of a society in
which a pixilated criminal like Malcolm X is almost universally
praised, and has hospitals, schools, and highways named in his
memory!… We might as well call out the schoolchildren to
celebrate the birthday of Benedict Arnold. Or to raise a
monument to Alger Hiss. We would do well to remember that all
societies are destroyed from within — through weakness,
immorality, crime, debauchery, and failing mentality."
Schuyler's career at the Courier ended in 1966, with the
purchase of the newspaper by John H. Sengstacke, the biggest
owner of black newspapers, who also owned the Chicago
Defender. That year, Schuyler published his autobiography,
Black and Conservative.
In recent years, several of George S. Schuyler's works have
been republished or published for the first time in book form:
Ethiopian Stories, Black Empire, Black No More, Rac[e]ing to
the Right. Hopefully, Black and Conservative will be reprinted,
and some of Schuyler's thousands of newspaper columns and
editorials will be published in book form. At least one
unpublished Schuyler biography has been written in dissertation
form, and a history professor contacted me a year or so ago,
asking about a Schuyler essay I'd promised my readers (but had
failed to produce), as a possible source for a Schuyler-biography
he is writing. But one cannot expect too much from publishers,
after all, whose schedules are booked full with the next works by
such luminaries as Jill Nelson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Cornel
West.
Nicholas Stix can be reached at Add1dda@aol.com.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com