George S. Schulyer
FBI Files on George S. Schulyer
- Born in Providence, Rhode Island, and initially attracted to socialism, George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) authored such bitterly funny highlights of the Harlem Renaissance as the essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and the novel Black No More (1931). By the era of the non-violent civil rights movement, Schuyler had become an idiosyncratic arch-conservative and an unfriendly critic of Martin Luther King Jr., whose Nobel Prize angered him nearly as much as it had J. Edgar Hoover. An ally of satirist H. L. Mencken and a longtime columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, Schuyler’s witty and acerbic journalism skewered communism, Christianity, and most every faith in between. While his anticommunism would seem to make him an unlikely FBI target, Hoover did not see it that way, considering Schuyler a grave domestic threat to the U.S. during World War II.