Free Republic

It's been a hard Kwanzaa this year. I haven't received a single card, and the "holiday" is almost over. I received a lovely letter yesterday from a black New York reader, but she didn't say a word about the black supremacist holiday. She wrote to give me a heads-up that while Halle Berry and Alicia Keys are making a movie about George S. Schuyler's daughter, Philippa, they don't even know how to correctly pronounce "Schuyler." My reader, an admirer of George S. Schuyler, pretty much ordered me to rectify the matter. I was looking forward to getting Kwanzaa notes and...

Well, it's Black History Month, and I'll bet you haven't heard one thing about George S. Schuyler (1895-1977). George S. Schuyler was, simply, the greatest black journalist this country has ever produced. (Normally, I eschew qualifiers like "greatest black," as opposed to "greatest," period, but this is journalism we're talking about. I will never, in five lifetimes of sitting in newspaper morgues, looking at microfilms of ancient newsprint, be able to read enough to determine who America's greatest journalist was.) From 1924-1966, he bestrode the black press like a colossus. Working for Robert Lee Vann's (1879-1940) Pittsburgh Courier weekly newspaper,...

Well, here it is the second Black History Month, and I'll bet you haven't heard one thing about George S. Schuyler (1895-1977). What's that, you say, there's only ONE Black History Month? Where have you been?Nowadays, New Year's Day signals the beginning of Black History Month I (or is it Martin Luther King Month?), and last summer in New York, for several weeks, some Harlem institutions held celebrations that certainly made it sound like we were in BHM. About 12 years ago, pc director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) said that every month should be Black History Month, and...