A fate similar to that of Booker T. Washington (see previous column) has befallen George S. Schuyler, once known as "the Negro Mencken," after Schuyler's friend and editor, the journalist and satirist, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). Whereas today, we hear the honor "black genius" bestowed variously on mediocrities, con men, and racist hoodlums, Schuyler was a renaissance man who dominated America's greatest black newspaper during the golden age of America's negro press. But then, none of today's humbuggery would have surprised Schuyler, who was so cynical that, compared to him, a Florence King comes off as a lovable humanitarian.

Schuyler's background couldn't have been more different from that of Booker T. Washington. A Northerner born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in upstate Syracuse, Schuyler bragged that his family had been free for 150 years prior to his 1895 birth. After serving in Hawaii as an Army officer during World War I, he came to New York. Schuyler had never attended college, much less journalism school, and yet he was arguably the greatest American journalist of his day, of any color.

From 1924-1966, Schuyler wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read newspaper of the golden age of America's negro press. Under his own byline, Schuyler wrote a column, "News and Views." He wrote the paper's unsigned editorials. He traveled to the Deep South, South America, Africa and Europe, to write some of the best investigative journalism of the day, including dispatches on slavery in Liberia. And penning a series of wildly popular, pseudonymous pulp fiction short stories and novels, the prolific Schuyler succeeded, by 1938, in doubling the Courier's normal circulation to 250,000 readers. Schuyler, who was quite the celebrity in black America, personally engaged pop historian Joel A. Rogers to contribute the long-running series on black history that would become the Courier's most popular feature. Ultimately, the paper's circulation reached 300,000 during the mid-1940s.

Schuyler, who was frequently published in the most influential black journals of the day — A. Philip Randolph's The Messenger, and W.E.B. DuBois' The Crisis — was the first black journalist to appear in the pages of many of the most respected white newspapers and journals (The Saturday Evening Post, American Mercury, Nation, etc.). In 1931, Schuyler published (under his own name) the most stinging satire ever written on America's obsession with race, the novel Black No More. Schuyler's metaphor for race relations in America was that of a "lunatic asylum."

And yet, today, Schuyler is variously ignored, maligned, misrepresented and reduced to footnotes. In 1998, over thirty years after the Pittsburgh Courier's demise, it was given the prestigious Polk Award for Journalism. (Seeking to steal some of the old paper's glory, a black, Pittsburgh newspaper today calls itself The New Pittsburgh Courier, but bears no relation to the original Courier, which shut down in November, 1966.) The Courier's few surviving alumni, most notably Harlem grand dame, Evelyn Cunningham (then on the Apollo Theatre board), were feted. None of the Courier alumni the articles praised was a major journalist. Meanwhile, not one word was devoted to Schuyler.

The New York Times and New York Daily News published glowing tributes to the Courier. The Times' silence regarding Schuyler was not surprising, given that the bosses of the "newspaper of record" have made it their business — with the cooperation of "their blacks" — to alternately ignore, impugn, and misrepresent Schuyler's life and work. More disturbing was the silence of Daily News columnist E.R. Shipp, who has at times bucked the politically correct tide. I sent letters on Schuyler's dominant role at the Courier to both newspapers; neither letter was published.

The same year also saw the broadcast of Jill and Stanley Nelson's documentary on the negro press, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords. Jill Nelson is the author of, among other works, the award-winning chronicle of her travails as a highly-paid, oppressed Washington Post staffer, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, and the editor of Police Brutality: An Anthology. Police Brutality piggybacked on, and sought to perpetuate, the racial profiling hoax. Stanley Nelson's 1997 documentary, Shattering the Silences: The Case for Minority Faculty, is, according to California Newsreel, about the terrible ordeal suffered by heroic, tenured, black, Hispanic, and American Indian college professors hired through affirmative action.

In her text to The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, Jill Nelson dwells at length on the Pittsburgh Courier, but reduces Schuyler to the phrase, "conservative columnist George Schuyler." But George Schuyler wasn't a "conservative columnist" at the Courier; George Schuyler was the Pittsburgh Courier. Schuyler provided a sweeping vision of the journalist as intellectual, social critic, storyteller.

Next column: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance.

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Copyright 2002 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved.
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