Schuyler, George Samuel

Impact on the world

Schuyler’s early column “Shafts and Darts” for The Messenger caught the attention of H.L. Mencken, who called him one of the finest editorial writers of his generation, and led to a 1924 offer from the Pittsburgh Courier that began a partnership lasting more than forty years, during which he became the paper’s chief editorial writer and its highest-circulation columnist. His 1926 essay “The Negro-Art Hokum,” arguing that no distinctly “Negro” art existed in America, provoked Langston Hughes’s celebrated rebuttal “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in the same magazine, while his 1931 reporting from Liberia on forced-labor conditions made him one of the first African American foreign correspondents for a metropolitan daily. Schuyler’s political views shifted sharply rightward over his career, and by the 1960s he had become an outspoken critic of the mainstream civil rights movement and a member of the John Birch Society, a controversial turn that alienated him from much of Black America by the time of his death.

Life & background

Born February 25, 1895, in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Syracuse, New York, Schuyler served seven years as a U.S. Army officer before joining the Socialist Party and, in 1923, taking a position with A. Philip Randolph’s magazine The Messenger. He began his long association with the Pittsburgh Courier in 1924, served as business manager of the NAACP’s The Crisis from 1937 to 1944, and married white Texan writer Josephine Cogdell in 1928, with whom he had a daughter, the noted pianist and journalist Philippa Schuyler; he died in New York City on August 31, 1977, at age 82.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia.com; African American Registry; Syracuse University Libraries