Abstract
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education decision, thus ushering in the modern civil rights movement. George Samuel Schuyler, associate editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, praised the decision in an editorial: “Has any other country with a comparable racial, religious or nationalist problem met it more forthrightly and in keeping with the principles of republicanism?”1 In another Courier editorial, Schuyler proplv esied that Thurgood Marshall would be the next appointee to the Supreme Court.2 In a 1960 interview, Schuyler had a more somber view of the Brown decision. He replied that the success of desegregation would be dependent on whites, adding that “sometimes all you do is frighten and alarm people, and that makes them get up their defenses sooner than they ordinarily would have.”3
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Notes
George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1966), p. 4.
Kathryn Talalay, Composition in Black And White: The Life Of Philippa Schuyler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 67–68.
Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 1955, pp. 92–99
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–1928 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 140–141.
This was probably a reference to the lynching of Mack Charles Parker, a black man suspected of raping a white woman who was taken out of a Mississippi jail cell and murdered by a mob of white men. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent a team of agents to investigate the murder, but because of the refusal of the Mississippi courts to comply with the investigation, the case was dismissed. See Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 258–59
Howard Smead, Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews”, May 30, 1959; cited in C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 142.
Roy Wilkins, Standing Fast: The Autobiography Of Roy Wilkins (New York: Viking Press, 1982) p. 317
J. Daniel Mahoney, Actions Speak Louder (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1968), 214
Another source of Schuyler’s hostility toward Powell may have been the experience he and Roy Wilkins had in Powell Sr.’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in January 1933. Arriving from Mississippi to discuss their investigation of levee workers, hecklers from the Communist Party in Harlem disrupted their presentation and called them fakes and frauds. Even more disheartening, Powell failed to defend Schuyler and Wilkins, sowing the seeds of resentment in the bitter journalist. Will Haygood, King of The Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993), pp. 55–56; Wilkins, Standing Fast, p.125.
Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr., ed., Black Political Life in the United States (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972), p. 220.
The grand jury concluded that because Powell was armed with a knife and confronted Gilligan, the officer was acting in an official manner and therefore was not liable for the teenager’s death. The toll from the riot was 1 person dead, 118 injured, and 465 arrested. See Fred C. Shapiro and James W Sullivan, Race Riots: New York, 1964 (New York: Thomas Y Crowell Company, 1964), pp. 1–2
John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994), p. 514.
Letter from Robert Welch to George S. Schuyler, October 29, 1965, Schuyler Papers, Syracuse University. For more information on Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, see Donald Janson and Bernard Eismann, The Far Right (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 25–54.
Michael W. Peplow, George S. Schuyler (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), pp. 14–15.
See Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision Of Race in America, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
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© 2002 Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph
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Williams, O.R. (2002). The Lonely Iconoclast: George Schuyler and the Civil Rights Movement. In: Tate, G.T., Randolph, L.A. (eds) Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108158_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108158_10
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