George Schuyler - Move To The Right

Move To The Right

From 1937 to 1944, Schuyler was the business manager of the NAACP. During the McCarthy Era, Schuyler moved sharply to the political right and contributed to American Opinion, the journal of the John Birch Society. In 1947, he published The Communist Conspiracy against the Negroes. Schuyler’s conservatism was a counterpoint to the predominant liberal philosophy of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1964, while working for the Pittsburgh Courier, Schuyler expressed opposition to Martin Luther King Jr.'s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, writing, "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." The Courier editor, Robert L. Vann, refused to publish the essay and subsequently dismissed Schuyler from the paper.

Outlets for Schuyler’s written work diminished until he was an obscure figure at the time of his death in 1977. As the liberal black writer Ishmael Reed notes in his introduction to a 1999 republication of Black No More, Schuyler's 1931 race satire, in the final years of Schuyler’s life it was considered taboo in black circles to even interview the aging writer.

He wrote a syndicated column (1965–77) for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Schuyler's autobiography, Black and Conservative, was published in 1966.