My older daughter was in the sixth grade when Black History month was inflicted on her for the sixth time. The year was 1996.
By this point, she had studied standard black heroes like Rosa Park and Martin Luther King, and her class was focusing on lesser-known contemporary blacks of note. Using a list of such figures provided by the school system, the teacher suggested that my daughter do a report on Mary Frances Berry, a pro-communist ideologue and nasty piece of work who was then the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
I was not amused.
My daughter had no problem with my suggestion that she decline to report on Berry. However, she needed a replacement.
That night Allan Keyes, an ultra-conservative African-American candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was on CSPAN giving a campaign speech. I recorded the speech and played it for my daughter. She liked it and agreed to make Keyes the subject of her Black History Month presentation, using portions of the video recording.
I was worried that her teacher would not be amused, but she was — literally. According to my daughter, the teacher sat in the back of room laughing while the video of Keyes played.
Was she laughing at Keyes or because she appreciated the humor of our heresy? I never found out.
Keyes is a formidable intellect and powerful speaker, and he did run for president (among other accomplishments). Students could do worse than to study him during Black History Month. Undoubtedly, they are doing worse.
But here’s an African-American who, in my opinion, should certainly be studied: George Schuyler. Mary Grabar discusses Schuyler and his erasure from official black history in this article for the American Spectator. She writes:
After his trip to Liberia in 1931, Schuyler became the first black international correspondent for a major newspaper. His novel Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia offered the “first attempt at a realistic assessment of Africa by a black writer,” and Black No More the first full-length satire.
This once famous, trailblazing writer has been memory holed because he sounded the alarm about communists from the time he first began working for a publication, the black socialist monthly the Messenger, in 1923. In 1936, Schuyler commented on “Chatwood Hall,” who had sung the praises of the new Soviet constitution in the NAACP’s Crisis.
“Mr. Chatwood Hall is an expatriate Aframerican parked on the Soviet payroll in Russia,” Schuyler informed readers. “His job is to beat out fantastic stories about the Bolshevist Valhalla for circulation in the Aframerican press.” With Du Bois, who had traveled to Russia in 1926 and was on his way there again, in mind, Schuyler wrote: “Let some vacationing Aframerican professor be greeted. . . cordially in Leningrad. . .Comrade Hall tosses red nosegays all over the place. The inference always is that Communist Russia treats Negroes better than capitalist America.”
Schuyler disagreed:
Badly off as are peons in Mississippi, they are not hustled off to the prison farm at Parchman if they fail to shout hosannas every time the name of “The Man” Bilbo [then the governor of Mississippi] is mentioned. Negroes in Florida and Texas have loudly and persistently fought in the courts and complained in their newspapers and conferences against various acts and policies of their respective governments, and survived to continue the battle. Such action in Russia would bring the OGPU down on them like a hailstorm and the next thing they knew they would be in … northern Siberia.
Chiding black leftists who touted the Soviet Constitution, he added:
Under these conditions, I would like to ask these Red Uncle Toms, who glibly condone murder, calculated famine, torture and denial of elementary liberties, what difference it makes what the new Soviet Constitution says?”
Chatwood Hall was Homer Smith. Other “Red Uncle Toms” whom Schuyler attacked included Paul Robeson and, as noted above, W.E.B. DuBois. I have little doubt that Robeson and DuBois are often lionized during Black History Month.
Schuyler, who started out as a man of the left, was prescient about the Soviet Union to a degree that few liberals — white or black — were. In the early to mid-1920s, he was already warning blacks about the evils of the USSR. A column from 1925 ridiculed Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first African American to attend a Comintern training school in Moscow.
Fort-Whiteman met an early, horrific death in one of the worst gulags in Siberia.
It’s ironic that Schuyler has been erased from “black history.” He campaigned all of his adult life to promote the study of it. In 1937, Schuyler called “the general ignorance of the part colored people have played in the history of this and other countries” a “tragedy.”
But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when “black studies” became all the rage, Schuyler immediately perceived the distinction between these programs and the teaching of black history. Says Grabar:
Writing in Human Events, Schuyler blasted the capitulation to the “belligerent demands of black militants and assorted prospective teachers of these arcana.” It was “indoctrination in black racial mythology,” intended to “flatter frustrated Negro youth … while at the same time brainwashing white students.”
Talk about prescient.
By contrast:
Schuyler, in his reporting, offered stories about countless successful black American entrepreneurs, farmers, and professionals that defied the communist narrative.
Are black entrepreneurs, farmers, and professionals given their due during Black History Month? They weren’t in the 1990s when my daughters were in school. I’d be very surprised if they are today.
Are they given their due in AP African-American Studies? I don’t think so. Clarence Thomas isn’t. He’s omitted.
Today’s leftist are little more interested in “defying the communist narrative” about blacks in America than was the pro-Stalin left in this country back in the day. Their project remains “indoctrination in black racial mythology,” intended to “flatter [and enrage] frustrated Negro youth. . .while at the same time brainwashing white students.”
For standing against this project at its inception and for his prescient anti-communism, Schuyler is a heroic figure who deserves recognition. But to afford him that recognition would raise issues the left would rather remain dormant.
So can Paul do something about this? How about running for the Montgomery County Board of Education, or whatever the relevant government agency is, and making an issue of the paternalism and condescension of the curriculum? For instance, if the curriculum asserts that private property is racist, then denounce the curriculum supervisors by name for peddling white supremacist propaganda; the point is that the claim that private property isn't suited to blacks was one of the arguments once made against freeing the slaves, as are others recently revived among progressives. Get personal and get nasty, or you just aren't as serious about winning as the left is.
This piece is very welcome. Schuyler has been no more than a familiar name to me. I will try to find out more about him.
I will add, though, that DuBois and Robeson deserve to be lionized, in Black History Month or in any other circumstances. DuBois' "Souls of Black Folk" is an excellent book. Robeson was a remarkable man. He was a star athlete, a successful lawyer, but most importantly, he was one of the very greatest American singers of the 20th century. He sang all kinds of music, including opera, popular music (of the Great American Songbook variety), and spirituals. Go listen to him singing "Ol' Man River" on youtube if you doubt his excellence.
It is unfortunate that both these distinguished men turned to Communism. Most African-Americans had too much sense to do so. But if we are to assess them, we should remember that as Blacks they had far more reason, in the U.S. of the first half of the twentieth century, to reject America and what it stood for than the innumerable white intellectuals who were Communists or fellow travelers. Not to mention today's progressives, who mostly do not call themselves Communists but deny everything that is good about America. We should be able to note this failing in Robeson and DuBois while "lionizing" them for their remarkable contributions to American culture.