by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier
Everyone has a novel they’d suggest for a group discussion during Black History Month. I’d select George Schuyler’s Slaves Today, published in 1931.
Bio
Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 25, 1895, and raised in Syracuse, New York. At 17, he joined the army. Schuyler eventually went AWOL due to the military’s mistreatment of Black soldiers. He did nine months of a five-year sentence for desertion. He was dishonorably discharged in 1919.
Since Schuyler was an autodidact with a flair for writing, he embarked on a journalism career and became one of the most controversial social commentators of the 20th century. He condemned Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, questioned the character of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the methods of Martin Luther King Jr., and the leadership of Malcolm X.
Schuyler also lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.
In 1964 Schuyler ran against Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as the nominee of the newly formed and short-lived Conservative Party and published his autobiography Black and Conservative in 1966.
He died in 1977 at the age of 82.
The Novel
Schuyler wrote in his autobiography, “Toward the end of 1930, I got a call from George Palmer Putnam, the publisher. He was much disturbed about the conditions in Liberia, where a League of Nations mission had rendered its frightening report on the selling of “boys” to the Spanish Plantations on the island of Fernando Po off the coast of Nigeria and on the deep involvement of the President and highest officials of Liberia.
They were getting fifty dollars for each “boy” recruited and this was being split three ways; one-third to the district commissioner who “recruited” the laborers with his armed forces, one-third to the President, and one-third to the Spanish consul, also a Liberian.
The usual method, it seemed, was to surround a village before dawn, fire rifles, pick out the “boys” wanted as they rushed out of their huts, and then march them tethered to a coast warehouse to await the Spanish vessel which would transport them to the island.
Mr. Putnam thought there was a book in it, and he was looking for someone to write it.”
Schuyler researched the novel by becoming an investigative reporter in Liberia for three months.
The novel is about what happened to a village chief’s daughter and husband after they were married. Following the wedding, corrupt government officials demand a percentage of the village’s sale of crops. The village chief refuses, the chief is killed, his daughter is taken as a concubine, and her husband is sold into slavery and shipped to a plantation on the island of Fernando Po.
In the forward, Schuyler explained what he wanted to expose. “In Liberia, this modern servitude is strikingly ironic because this Black republic was founded by freed slaves from the United States a century ago as a haven for all oppressed Black people. Its proud motto reads, “The love of liberty brought us here”, but the aborigines find little liberty under their Negro masters.”
Schuyler added, “If this novel can help arouse enlightened world opinion against this brutalizing of the native population in a Negro republic, perhaps the conscience of civilized people will stop similar atrocities in native lands ruled by proud White nations that boast of their superior culture.”
Most Black critics condemned the novel. They claimed modern-day slavery was produced by colonialism and imperialism, and Schuyler’s focus on Liberia ignored the larger atrocity, but one biographer of Schuyler said the novel “deserves credit for promoting a realistic attitude toward African politics sorely lacking in the popular Black mindset of the 1920s.”
Discussion
Here are The Borgen Project’s statistics about slavery in the 21st century.
1). An estimated 28.8 million people live in modern-day slavery
2). Slavery generates $32 billion for traffickers globally each year
3). Approximately 78 percent of victims are enslaved for labor, 22 percent for sex
4). 55 percent of slavery victims are women and girls
5). 26 percent of slaves today are children under the age of 18
When #4 and #5 are added, it equals 81 percent. That means out of 29.8 million slaves today, 23.1 million are women and children.
If slavery is so reprehensible, why are there more discussions about reparations for past slavery than arousing “enlightened world opinion” against slavery today?
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