One of the most important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance was George Samuel Schuyler. George Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1895. In 1912, Schuyler, at the age of 17, enlisted in the U.S. Army and was promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant, serving in Seattle and Hawaii. He went AWOL after a Greek immigrant, who had been instructed to shine Schuyler's shoes, refused to do so because of Schuyler's skin color. Following his release, Schuyler worked odd jobs in New York.
Starting out with an interest in Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” Movement and the UNIA, he eventually dissented. Instead, he engaged himself in a circle of socialist friends, including the Black socialist group Friends of Negro Freedom. This connection led to his employment by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen's magazine, The Messenger, the group's journal. They both were critics of the Back-to-Africa Movement. By 1924 he was also writing a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the two largest Black newspapers in the United States at the time.
Schuyler’s columns attracted the attention of social critic and editor of American Mercury H.L. Mencken. Their close working relationship and comparable political views led to Schuyler’s being labeled as “The Black Mencken.” In 1926, the Pittsburgh Courier sent Schuyler on an editorial assignment to the South, where he developed his journalistic protocol. He would 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 same year he published arguably his most famous editorial entitled “The Negro-Art Hokum,” a scathing criticism of the then-burgeoning cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. He chastised Black organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and figures like W.E.B. DuBois, especially his notion of a "Talented Tenth". Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", a response to Schuyler's piece, appeared in the same magazine. In 1927, at the invitation of H. L. Mencken, Schuyler published "Our White Folks" in The American Mercury which won him widespread attention.
During the 1925-1926 tour for The Pittsburgh Courier, it became his belief that the Black American could only succeed by working in cooperation with Whites within the democratic system toward mutual economic gain, a view he described as "economic self-help through consumers cooperation". In 1930 he attempted to implement this theory by establishing Young Negroes' Cooperation League. His work began appearing in The Freeman and other publications that he felt best expressed his new leanings. In addition, his work was published in literary anthologies.
By the end of the 1920s, Schuyler began to acquire a national reputation as an iconoclast. Despite his constant attacks on White racism, his commitment to exposing fraud, regardless of race, caused some African Americans to doubt his racial loyalty. In 1928, Schuyler married Josephine Cogdell, a White Texan actress, model, dancer, and painter. In 1931, Schuyler became the first African American writer to serve as a foreign correspondent for a metropolitan newspaper, when the New York Evening Post sent him to assess the controversy of Liberia's slave labor.
Also in 1931, Schuyler published "Black No More", which tells the story of a scientist who develops a process that turns Black people to White. It attacks myths of racial purity and White supremacy and the ways in which the perpetuation of racism serves economic purposes. The early half of 1931 was spent editing The National News. This was a small newspaper for the United Colored Democracy, a Harlem based Democratic Party club, even though Schuyler for much of his life voted Republican. The Scottsboro Boys trial in 1931 led Schuyler to make a pledge to himself to devote much of his writing to the cause of exposing what he saw as communist infiltration of Black civil rights movements.
Two of Schuyler's targets in the book were Christianity and organized religion. He believed these two to be filled with huckster preachers that allowed ignorance and racism to flourish. He called instead for a cadre of Black atheists who would reject a god forced on them through slavery, one that “permits them to be lynched, Jim-Crowed, and disenfranchised.” His mother had been religious but not a regular churchgoer. As Schuyler aged, he held both White and Black churches in contempt.
In his mind, the Black and White churches contained ignorant, conniving preachers who exploited their listeners for personal gain. White Christianity was viewed by Schuyler as pro-slavery and pro-racism. In the early 1950s during the investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Schuyler’s political views shifted from moderate to extreme conservatism. By the 1960s Schuyler's views were out of step with the growing civil rights movement. Schuyler criticized and condemned social activists such as W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and even Martin Luther King Jr. in journals such as the arch-conservative John Birch Society’s American Opinion.
He denounced rioting and marching alike as communist-inspired, made light of the "Black is Beautiful" promotion of African hair and clothing styles. He stated in an editorial that Martin Luther King was undeserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Schuyler attacked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as promoting a movement that was having a disastrous effect on Blacks in America. The Pittsburgh Courier refused to publish the latter editorial and distanced itself from Schuyler's viewpoints. The Courier went on to publicly stress that he was not an associate editor, while The Crisis represented his views as outmoded.
Schuyler’s conservative opinions eventually cost him his job at The Pittsburgh Courier, as many readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions in protest to his columns. In 1965 Schuyler became affiliated as writer and lecturer with the American Opinion, and with the American Opinion Speaker's Bureau. Much of Schuyler's work was published and aired through these two vehicles until 1970. Schuyler published his autobiography, Black and Conservative in 1966, which gives an inside track to the feuds among the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. George Samuel Schuyler never again attained the popularity he had in the 1920s or 1930s.
Schuyler opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While acknowledging that White discrimination against Blacks was “morally wrong, nonsensical, unfair, un-Christian and cruelly unjust,” he opposed federal action to coerce changes in public attitudes. The main outlets for Schuyler's writing during the 1970s were the conservative Manchester Union, where he was literary editor, and his "The Arts" column for Review of the News. Schuyler also had several literary alter egos. Between 1933 and 1939, he produced fifty-four short stories and twenty novels/novellas in serialized form under such pen names as Samuel I. Brooks and Rachel Call. George S. Schuyler died on August 31, 1977 in New York.