Commentary
Before dawn on a recent Saturday morning, another statue of a “slave owner” was removed—this time Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler, a pivotal figure in Albany and American history, who had stood in front of the Albany, New York, City Hall for nearly 100 years.
Nevertheless, Mayor Kathy Sheehan
explained that “Moving the Schuyler Statue is about realizing that as time marches on, times change, and we need to change and adapt with them. It is not about erasing history—it is about placing it in the context based on what we know now and based on what our residents are demanding we know.”
She thanked “those residents who made their voices heard, and those who have called on me to think about this statue differently,” who told her they were “reminded that people who look like me were enslaved by him.”
Sheehan referred to a “study” of the statue’s “
historic significance” by
teenagers in “
a teen program with the Underground Railroad Education Center,” which was called for by the mayor during the pandemic and partially funded with
tax dollars.
There was hardly time to weigh in on the teens’ study, though, when the George Floyd riots of 2020 caused a “
discussion” to take “place across the country” about “past and current race relation[s]” and prompted Sheehan to issue an
executive order on June 11, 2020 (the need for an “
engineering study” caused the delay). Though I wasn’t invited to that “discussion,” I do have a suggestion for a statue that would fill Philip’s old place.
This would be someone who “looked like” those in the community who allegedly unanimously implored Mayor Sheehan to take down the visage of the slave-holder.
In fact, he was a great-grandson of one of Philip Schuyler’s slaves who was freed for his service in the Revolutionary War.
This was the late, great George S. Schuyler (1895–1977), who wrote in his autobiography, “Black and Conservative,” that his father’s side of the family “came from the Albany-Troy area. A great-grandfather fought under General Philip Schuyler and after the war became one of the first workers at the famed Watervliet Arsenal.” No more was known about this great-grandfather except that his son was named Anthony Schuyler, whose son, George’s father, was named George Francis Schuyler. George Francis, who worked as the head chef in a hotel, died when his son was about 3 years old. During George Schuyler’s childhood in Syracuse, New York, “Aunt Harriet Tubman” was living in nearby Auburn, and Booker T. Washington made Syracuse one of his stops on his speaking tours.
George S. Schuyler left Syracuse at the age of 17 to join the Army and make his way in the world. He had written satirical sketches for an Army newspaper and then, after a stint as a handyman, moved to Harlem where he found lodging with a group of hoboes in the Bowery and began his journalism career in 1923 at the black socialist magazine, the Messenger. At the time, he felt that socialism was the best means for blacks to gain entry to the middle class. Schuyler used his talents in a column called “Shafts and Darts.” In 1924, Schuyler was asked to also write for the Pittsburgh Courier and became their star columnist, especially after he debuted with the irreverent “Our White Folks” in the December 1927 American Mercury. That began his long association with the prestigious magazine and its editor, H.L. Mencken. Schuyler was instrumental in propelling the Courier to top place in circulation among the hundreds of black weekly newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s. He would write for that paper until 1966, when it was sold. He wrote for the Messenger until it folded in 1928.
By 1933, Schuyler was writing “the most discussed column in Negro America.” As the poet Melvin Tolson wrote in the December 1933 American Mercury, George Schuyler’s opinions were “attacked and defended in barbershops, Jim Crow cars, pool rooms, classrooms, churches, and drawing-rooms.”
In addition to these accomplishments, Schuyler had many firsts. He was the first African American to write a full-length satire (”Black No More”) and a novel about Africa (”Slaves Today”) and to serve as an international correspondent for a major newspaper (while investigating slavery in Liberia for the New York Post).
Although Schuyler had had hopes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would usher in a “sensible, evolutionary program of socialism” that would offer opportunities for African Americans through the National Recovery Administration (NRA), he soon saw that the New Deal programs discriminated against blacks in housing, farming, Social Security, and jobs—while raising taxes and increasing inflation. In 1935, he proclaimed that the NRA stood for “Negroes Robbed Again.” At the same time, FDR was accommodating communists who were exploiting “Negroes” as the “spearhead of the revolution” and martyring them for publicity and fundraising, especially in the Scottsboro rape case.
FDR’s domestic and foreign policies converted Schuyler into a Constitutional, states’ rights conservative, who took up the mantle of Booker T. Washington, advocating job-training, farming, and entrepreneurship. Schuyler accused FDR’s protégé Lyndon Johnson of “welfare colonialism.”
Schuyler became an important figure in the postwar conservative movement, serving as an informal adviser to Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential campaign, as a delegate to the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1950 (quitting alongside James Burnham for its accommodation of communism), on the American-African Affairs Association with William Rusher, and on the organizing committee of the New York State Conservative Party with Suzanne La Follette. He worked on the Senatorial campaign of James Buckley, whose brother, William F. Buckley, thanked him. Schuyler traveled the world and was probably the most informed reporter on Africa.
If the statue of Philip Schuyler will remain gone from its spot of honor, the successful great-grandson of one of his slaves should take his place. A George S. Schuyler statue would fulfill Mayor Sheehan’s racial criterion and give long-overdue recognition to a great American.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
