George Schuyler - Early Journalist Days

Early Journalist Days

By the mid-1920s, Schuyler had come to disdain socialism, believing that socialists were frauds who actually cared very little about negroes. Schuyler's writing caught the eye of journalist/social critic H. L. Mencken, who wrote, "I am more and more convinced that is the most competent editorial writer now in practice in this great free republic." Schuyler contributed ten articles to the American Mercury during Mencken's tenure as editor, all dealing with Black issues, and all notable for Schuyler's wit and incisive analysis. Because of his close association with Mencken, as well as their compatible ideologies and sharp use of satire, Schuyler during this period was often referred to as "the Black Mencken."

In 1926, the Courier sent Schuyler on an editorial assignment to the South, where he developed his journalistic protocol: ride with a cab driver, then chat with a local barber, bellboy, landlord, and policeman. These encounters would precede interviews with local town officials. In 1926, Schuyler became the Chief Editorial Writer at the Courier. That year, he published a controversial article entitled "The Negro-Art Hokum" in The Nation. (Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," a response to Schuyler's piece, appeared in the same magazine.) Schuyler objected to the segregation of art by race, writing about a decade after his "Negro-Art Hokum" article, "All of this hullabaloo about the Negro Renaissance in art and literature did stimulate the writing of some literature of importance which will live. The amount, however, is very small, but such as it is, it is meritorious because it is literature and not Negro literature. It is judged by literary and not by racial standards, which is as it should be."

In 1929, Schuyler's pamphlet, Racial Inter-Marriage in the United States, called for solving the country's race problem through miscegenation, which was then illegal in most states.

In 1931, Schuyler published Black No More, which tells the story of a scientist who develops a process that turns black people to white, a book that has since been reprinted twice. Two of Schuyler's targets in the book were Christianity and organized religion, reflecting his innate skepticism of both. His mother had been religious but not a regular churchgoer. As Schuyler aged, he held both white and black churches in contempt. Both, in his mind, contained ignorant, conniving preachers who exploited their listeners for personal gain. White Christianity was viewed by Schuyler as pro-slavery and pro-racism. In an article for the American Mercury entitled "Black America Begins to Doubt", Schuyler wrote: "On the horizon loom a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists, young black men and women who can read think and ask questions; and who imperdiently demand to know why Negroes should revere a god that permits them to be lynched, Jim-Crowed, and disenfranchised." He also positively reviewed Georg Brandes' book Jesus: A Myth in an article called "Disrobing Superstion".

Between 1936 and 1938 he published in the Pittsburgh Courier a weekly serial, which he later collected and published as a novel entitled Black Empire. Schuyler also published the highly controversial book Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, a novel about the slave trade created by freed American slaves who settled Liberia in the 1820s.

In the 1930s, Schuyler published scores of short stories in the Pittsburgh Courier under various pseudonyms. He was published in many prestigious black journals, including Negro Digest, The Messenger, and W.E.B. DuBois's The Crisis. Schuyler's journalism also appeared in such mainstream magazines as The Nation and Common Ground, and in such newspapers as The Washington Post and The New York Evening Post (forerunner of the New York Post).