"George Samuel Schuyler (February 25,1895-August 31 1977)

Was an African American author,journalist and social commentator known for his conservative views.Was born on Providence,Rhode Island to George Francis (a chef) and Eliza Jane (Fisher).His paternal great grandmother was believed to be a Malagasy servant who married a ship captain from Saxe-Coburg in Bavaria.George father died when he was young.He spent his early years in Syracuse,New York,where his mother moved their family after she remarried.In 1912,George at age 17,enlisted in the U.S. Army and was promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant,serving in Settle and Hawaii.He went AWOL after a Greek immigrant,who was tasked to shine his shoes,refused to do so because of George skin color.After turning himself in,he was convicted by a military court and sentenced to five years in prison.He was released after nine months as a model prisoner.After his discharge,he moved to New York City,where he worked as a handyman,doing odd jobs.During this period, he read many books which sparked his interest in socialism.He lived for a period in the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel,run by black separatist Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and attended UNIA meetings.George dissented from Marcus philosophy and began writing about his perspectives.Not fully comfortable with socialist thought,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 Asa Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen magazine,The Messenger,the group journal.George column,Shafts and Darts:A page of Calumny and Satire,came to attention of Ira F.Lewis,manager of the Pittsburgh Courier.In 1924,George accepted an offer from the Courier to author a weekly column.By the 1920s,George had come to disdain socialism,believing that socialist were frauds who actually cared very little about negroes.George writing caught the eye of journalist/social critic H.L. Mencken,who wrote "I am more convinced that he [George} is the most competent editorial writer now in practice in this great free republic." George contributed ten articles to the American Mercury during H.L. tenure as editor,all editor,all dealing with Black issues,and notable for his wit and incisive analysis.Because of his close association with H.L.,as well as their compatible ideologies and sharp use of satire,George during this period was often referred to as "the black Mencken."In 1926,the Courier sent him 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,George 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 "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,"a response to George piece,appeared in the same magazine.)George 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,George 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,he 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 his 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 he aged,George held both white and black churches in contempt.He also famously remarked,"There are a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists,young black men and women who can read think and ask questions;and who impertinently demand to know why Negroes should revere a god that permits them to be lynched,Jim-Crowed,disenfranchised.Between 1936 and 1938 he published 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 The Crisis.George journalism also appeared in such mainstream magazine 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).From 1937 to 1944,he was the business manager of the NAACP.During the McCarthy Era,George 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.George 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,George expressed opposition to Martin Luther King Jr being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,writing,"Dr King's Principal contribution to world peace has been to roam the country like some Typhoid Mary,infecting the mentally disturbed with perversions of Christian doctrine,and grabbing fat lecture fees from the shallowpated.The Courier editor,Robert L.Vann,refused to publish the essay with subsequently dismissed him from the paper.Outlets for his 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,George 1931 race satire,in the final years of George life it was considered taboo in black circles to even interview the aging writer.He wrote a syndicated column (1965-1977) for the North American Newspaper Alliance.George autobiography,Black and Conservative,was published in 1966.In 1928,George married Josephine Lewis Cogdell,a liberal white Texan heiress.Their daughter,Philippa Schuyler (1931-1967),was a child prodigy and noted concert pianist who later followed her father's footsteps and embarked on a career in journalism.