George S. Schuyler and Black History Month(s)

February 23, 2004

Well, here it is the second Black History Month, and I'll bet you haven't heard one thing about George S. Schuyler (1895-1977). What's that, you say, there's only ONE Black History Month? Where have you been?

Nowadays, New Year's Day signals the beginning of Black History Month I (or is it Martin Luther King Month?), and last summer in New York, for several weeks, some Harlem institutions held celebrations that certainly made it sound like we were in BHM. About 12 years ago, pc director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) said that every month should be Black History Month, and we're well on our way towards realizing that dubious goal. Note, too, that while for years, racist black activists and second-rate comics have complained, "You see that they give us the shortest month!" the celebration was founded in 1926 by black nationalist scholar-activist Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) as Negro History Week in February, to coincide with the Great Emancipator's birthday. That all that time devoted to celebration and alleged learning has led to racist myths rather than enlightenment, is typical of contemporary racial "progress."

George S. Schuyler was, simply, the greatest black journalist this country has ever produced. From 1924-1966, he bestrode the negro press like a colossus. Working for Robert Lee Vann's (1879-1940) Pittsburgh Courier weekly newspaper, under his own name, Schuyler 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's 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).

Schuyler was also the greatest racial 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 that Black No More appeared, 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! Usually, the only time he gets noticed during one of the Black History Months, 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," it is to slight him, to insult him, to misrepresent him.

George Schuyler's problem was that he was (gasp) . a conservative!

In the mid-1990s, the New York Times 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 so, when the alleged newspaper of record commissioned Phyllis Rose to review Kathryn Talalay's 1995 biography of Schuyler's daughter, Philippa, Composition in Black and White, the reviewer devoted only one sentence to the father, whom she reduce to a crank.

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, LIU, the Times and the Daily News (and Daily News columnist E.R. Shipp) celebrated aged mediocrities, while assiduously refusing to so much as mention the one person responsible for the award: George Schuyler. (The newspapers both refused, as well, to publish my letters mentioning Schuyler.)

And in 1999, the PBS "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."

We live in a time in which pygmies are celebrated as giants, and giants are either blacked out of history or their stories revised beyond recognition. But if we are to honestly understand black history, and thus, American history, we must understand the life and work of George S. Schuyler. And so, we must toss out the dogmas we have been taught, and continue to be taught about American history. And we must understand Schuyler - he was that important.

It will take time, but the truth will out, the universities and the public schools and the mainstream media notwithstanding.

Next column: George S. Schuyler, Part II.

Nicholas Stix