The Black Nationalism of George S. Schuyler

Bv Nicholas Stix
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
November, 1997

Decisions, decisions. Such is the life of a black man in America today. Whether to be a black nationalist, a black Muslim, an Afrocentrist, or simply a color-blind Christian—a.k.a. an “Oreo,” a traitor to the black race. Such choices are not new; they were made bv black Americans in earlier generations, dramatically in the ease of George S. Schuvler.

Now largely forgotten, Schuyler had more influence on black readers than any other black journalist in his time or since, and only W.E.B. DuBois (who was far less prolific as a journalist) could match him for talent. Soldier, journalist, satirist, pulp-fiction writer, editor, intellectual—the “Negro Mencken” (as Schuyler was known) was one of America’s most gifted observers. A radical individualist, Schuyler made a career of lampooning “race men,” many of whom he accused of secretly desiring to be white. And yet, at times, he wrote as a virulent race man, speaking approvingly “as a military man” of a coming racial conflagration. He spent most of his career (1924-1966) writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, long America's most popular national weekly Negro newspaper, written for colored people who did not mix with whites, but in 1928 he married a white woman, the former Josephine Cogdell.

Schuyler, the son of a chef, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Syracuse, New York. Schuyler’s Syracuse was a brewery and factory town, in which blacks and whites worked together, played together as children, and surprisingly often . . . married.

Schuyler took a snobbish pride in emphasizing that his family had been free for at least 150 years before he was born. However, he was no snob when it came to work and morals. He was not embarrassed by his mother’s and aunt’s decision to take in folks' laundry after his father died, when George was only nine years old.

As his biographer, Michael Peplow, noted in George S. Schuyler (1980), Schuyler was something of a black Horatio Alger, having been inculcated while in diapers “in traditional Yankee virtues like self-discipline, independence, thrift, and industry.” But that was the older Schuyler. Earlier in his career, Schuyler had a distinctly cosmopolitan understanding of culture and social relations. It was only late in life that he returned to his small-town roots and a simpler approach to life.

When second lieutenant George Schuyler returned to America following Army service, primarily in Hawaii (1912-1919), he found city ghettoes teeming with transplanted Southern Negroes, displaced by changes in agricultural technology. Faced with urban squalor, culture shock, and a racism without any gentility or paternalism to cushion its blows, the uprooted Negroes were not flourishing in the cracks. The urban black middle class, so far from encouraging the immigrants, treated them with contempt.

A new class of colored urban demagogues arose to minister to the new black masses, speaking in peculiar new tongues. Though they used biblical imagery, these new preachers painted images of salvation and retribution in this world, in which Negroes would not only be saved but would exact vengeance upon their white oppressors. In rapid succession, Noble Drew Ali (murdered by rivals within his church in 1916), Marcus Garvey (convicted of mail fraud in 1923, deported in 1927), and Wallace Fard (“disappeared” in 1933, perhaps murdered by his friend and successor, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad), arose to minister to impoverished, confused, and angry black masses.

Schuyler recognized that the Talented Tenth movement, like the NAACP (founded in 1909 by Jewish socialists led by Joel Spingarn, with DuBois as the token black) and the white-financed Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s, was a case of wealthy whites indulging their fantasy of a “black” movement. Schuyler excoriated the Renaissance men as “lampblacked Anglo-Saxons” (a precursor of the “Oreo” charge), and in a famous essay in The Nation, he mocked their movement as “The Negro-Art Hokum.” Schuyler denied the possibility, in a nation in which Negroes and whites lived side by side, of a separate “black” aesthetic.

In his satirical 1931 novel Black No More, Schuyler mocked the “race men” for secretly wishing to be white, “integrationists” such as the goateed DuBois (as “Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard”) for profiting from black misery, and racist whites for using blacks to act out fantasies of primitivism. Like many satires, Black No More takes an extreme idea to its logical conclusion, and asks: What if white America did not have any more Negroes to kick around?

As the story proceeds, the colored Dr. Junius Crookman invents an operation for making black folks white-skinned and straight-haired. In lightning speed, the nation becomes monochromatic, as its entire black population “vanishes.” Crookman becomes an instant millionaire, as blacks flock to him, whereafter they change their names, rewrite their pasts, and take up with unknowing white consorts. No lack of comic and dramatic complications ensue when it becomes clear that the operation does not change the genetic program for the pigmentation of one’s offspring. The black nationalists and their white spouses then have a rude awakening, as their first-born are all mulattos. And so America goes from being Negro-free to being white-free.

In Black No More, Schuvler assumed that most of humanity is closer to the Devil than to angels (his favorite metaphor for American race relations was an “insane asylum”); that the majority of men are con men, and that the few who truly believe in anything, as in the case of the novel’s white supremacist leader, are even more pathetic. For Schuyler, DuBois’ Talented Tenth of colored society was of no more help to the average Negro than the leaders of the racist white order. Indeed, he saw those who made a profession of railing against Jim Crow as having the strongest interest in its preservation: every lynching brought in more money from rich white reformers. Moreover, Schuyler saw black nationalist rhetoric as a smoke screen obscuring its practitioners’ contempt for their erstwhile constituents, whose pockets they were busy picking. We are all the same, argued Schuyler—and God help us! Ultimately, he surmises, if there were no color line, men would invent one.

Schuyler was clearly the most influential and most gifted black journalist this country has ever seen. His serials “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World” and “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa” were alone responsible for doubling the Courier's circulation to 250,000 between 1936 and 1938. Meanwhile, Schuyler was a regular contributor to an astounding variety of white and black socialist and white conservative publications, including W.E.B. DuBois’ The Crisis, A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, The Nation, and his friend and mentor H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury. The very people he so often satirized admired him in public and employed him as a writer, an editor, and a manager.

Following Schuyler’s ultimate break with The Courier in 1966, he published his autobiography, Black and Conservative, and became a regular staff member at William Loeb’s Manchester Union Leader. The once militant, colored socialist also began writing for the John Birch Society’s weekly, Review of the News; he had been writing for the Bircher monthly, American Opinion, since 1961. The break with The Courier came when its editors refused to publish Schuyler’s attack on the awarding of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize to Martin Luther King, Jr. William Loeb published it instead:

“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 principal 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.”

Though some of the major black newspapers continued to publish into the 1960’s, their owners’ eagerness to accommodate the civil rights movement merely hastened their demise as journalistic, as well as black, institutions. Those who control the “civil rights” apparatus today cannot comprehend a George S. Schuyler or the black America in which such a man could succeed. Thus we have DuBois, Jr., a.k.a. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, imposing DuBois’ least impressive notion—the hackneyed theory of the alienated, “schizophrenic” black American—on Schuyler, whom he handily disposes of as a “fragmented man.”

Gates’ case for Schuyler’s “fragmented” psyche is based on the two novellas Schuyler wrote as “Samuel I. Brooks,” which are collected as Black Empire—The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World and Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa.

The two main characters in both stories are the evil genius Dr. Henry Belsidus and the intrepid young reporter Carl Slater, who becomes Belsidus’s protege and confidante. Belsidus, abortionist to the “ladies” of white society and leader of a criminal organization marked by martial discipline, uses the money from the white women (who are variously his mistresses, patronesses, clients, and crime victims) and from the tithes of his cynical Church of Love to finance his scientific research and to raise a secret military force, with which he plans to liberate Africa from the yoke of white colonialism and eventually to take over the world.

Schuyler’s Black Internationale played to any number of supposed “black fantasies”: stealing from, ravishing, plundering, and ultimately killing pale white beauties; the violent, black criminal as liberator; the black church as a potentially unstoppable world power; the belief that the world is run by secret societies and conspiracies; and finally, the revanchist dream of a bloody, black insurrection against The Enemy.

In making Belsidus not only ruthless and violent, but suavely intelligent, Schuyler went beyond the literary tradition of the black liberator. A fan of science fiction, he also filled many of his stories with futuristic technology otherwise absent in black literature. But Schuyler also wrote articles and fiction of a black nationalist bent under his own name, such as his response to Mussolini's 1936 invasion of Ethiopia. He knew the history of heroic Negro achievement, and he engaged the popular black historian, J.A. Rogers, to write a feature on black heroes for The Courier.

But if Schuyler went, in a few years, from being the most popular to the most isolated black journalist in America, it was not because his views had grown eccentric; the man who had argued during the 1920’s and 30’s for intermarriage as the cure for racism had always been eccentric. He may have become increasingly anticommunist after the war, but anti-communism was sweeping the nation. Besides, as Schuyler tirelessly pointed out, communism posed one of the greatest threats to black survival in the United States: its revolutionary tacticians were ever ready to sacrifice blacks as revolutionary pawns.

No, it was not Schuyler so much as black America that changed for the worse. As black leaders marched and demanded and received “right” upon “right” and program upon program from the government, they lost all tolerance for Schuyler. Irony, satire, and rigorous criticism had no place in their world. Peplow is correct in seeing Schuyler’s criticisms of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X as being based on a desire to ensure the survival of black America. Schuyler saw that the civil rights and black power leaders, no less than Garvey in earlier years, risked provoking a racial explosion that would destroy blacks. As Schuyler wrote about Malcolm X:

“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.”

What George S. Schuyler understood was that there is no need for radical separation of the races, that there can even be cooperation and trade between the races, if blacks would learn to equate nationalism not with welfare or class warfare but with doing for one’s own, within indigenous, self-reliant institutions that tolerate criticism and irony. This requires, however, that blacks drop fantasies of slave-master relations and genocide. And what is true of black nationalism is also true for any white version, as a rise in one will inevitably provoke a rise in the other.

Nicholas Stix writes from New York City.