George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative

Oscar R. Williams. George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative. University of Tennessee Press, 2007, pp. 207.

Historian Oscar L. Williams has written an overdue biography of African American journalist, George S. Schuyler. A leading journalist, polemicist, and conservative commentator of his day, Schuyler--who wrote primarily for the Pittsburgh Courier--pilloried political and cultural figures in the African American community from the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1920s, to civil rights leaders and the movement itself during the 1950s and '60s. Recently published by the University of Tennessee Press, George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative breaks new ground, and proposes that conservative figures such as Booker T. Washington were not as rare as the scholarly conventional wisdom suggests.

Williams, a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York at Albany, traces the early years of Schuyler from the influence of the self-help ethos of his grandmother and single mother, to his years in the segregated US military after dropping out of high school. While in the military, Schuyler wrote satirical pieces in a military magazine, skills that he put to use (after military service) after arriving in Harlem in the 1920s, first writing for A. Philip Randolph's The Messenger and later, as the New York correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier. It is within the intellectual milieu of the Harlem Renaissance that the autodidact Schuyler "opposed the idea that the Harlem Renaissance was a definitive moment for all African Americans." According to Williams, Schuyler skewered literary and intellectual luminaries such as Jessie Fauset, W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes, both for their literary pretentiousness, and as self-proclaimed arbiters of "the race."

Williams' most intriguing thesis was that Schuyler's "intellectual confusion," as the journalist reached his professional prime in the 1940s, was caused by "racial self-loathing" as well as a quest to achieve "mainstream status" by joining the "conservative intellectual bandwagon." Indeed, Schuyler unashamedly supported Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, which ran contrary to the views of the African American establishment. Williams provides evidence for racial self-loathing, but overreached by suggesting that writing for conservative white publications attacking the civil rights movement was a quest to join the mainstream--in fact, there is a distinction between the mainstream white press, and the conservative white press. Still, a very revealing section of Williams' work is the painful personal life that Schuyler inflicted on his family in the name of ambition--on wife Josephine and daughter Phillipa--a rare interracial family of his time and place.

Scholar Oscar L. Williams has added to African American scholarship in this judiciously written, well researched, and clear-eyed biography of George S. Schuyler. The volume sheds considerable light into the world of African American journalism by analyzing the travails and the many contradictions of what arguably was the career of one of the most prominent African American journalist of the mid 20th century. Indeed, George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative is a work of scholarship that belongs in the collections of academic libraries and public libraries with an emphasis on African-Americana.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group