Black Empire

by George S. Schuyler, Brooks E. Hefner

Genres: African American; Satire; Alternative History sci-fi

Synopsis

A pioneering work of Afrofuturism and antiracist fiction by the author of Black No More, about a Black scientist who masterminds a worldwide conspiracy to take back the African continent from imperial powers

A Penguin Classic

“An amazing serial story of Black genius against the world” is how Black Empire was promoted upon its original publication as a serial in The Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938. It tells the electrifying tale of Dr. Henry Belsidus, a Black scientific genius desperate to free his people from the crushing tyranny of racism. To do so, he concocts a plot to enlist a crew of Black intellectuals to help him take over the world, cultivating a global network to reclaim Africa from imperial powers and punish Europe and America for white supremacy and their crimes against the planet’s Black population.

At once a daring, high-stakes science fiction adventure and a strikingly innovative Afrofuturist classic, this controversial and fearlessly political work lays bare the ethical quandaries of exactly how far one should go in the name of justice.


* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of additional notes and information on the writings of George S. Schuyler.

Release date: January 31, 2023

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 384

Sample

Introduction

African American writer George S. Schuyler is famous for two especially controversial things: his biting 1931 Afrofuturist satire Black No More and his hard turn to the political right wing after World War II. Unfortunately, both of these have obscured something rather extraordinary: Schuyler was one of the most prolific African American writers of popular genre fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. And he was, almost certainly, the most prolific writer of genre fiction about African Americans during this time. Indeed, in the 1930s, while working for The Pittsburgh Courier as an investigative reporter and editorial writer, he produced genre fiction on a weekly basis from March 25, 1933, through July 22, 1939, churning out stories and serial installments under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms for 328 consecutive weeks. During the first fourteen months of this run, he often published both a short story and a serial installment in each weekly issue of the Courier. With installments and stories running about fifteen hundred words each, over this period of slightly more than six years he published well over half a million words of genre fiction, including early examples of Black detective fiction, along with romance, adventure, sports, confessional, and speculative fiction.

Among the twenty-three serials that Schuyler published during this time, the two collected in this volume were the longest, the most successful, and the most aggressively promoted by the Courier. Published under the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks, “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World” (November 21, 1936–July 3, 1937) and its sequel, “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa” (October 2, 1937–April 16, 1938), represent, in many respects, a culmination of his years of experimenting with genre fiction formulas. Demonstrating his canny understanding of 1930s pulp fiction tropes, these serials together form an impressively radical early vision of the Afrofuturist imagination in a story designed to imagine an end to European imperialism and, as one character succinctly describes it, “white world supremacy.”

In many respects, Schuyler was the consummate newspaperman, and so it is no surprise that he makes the narrator of the Black Empire serials, Carl Slater, a reporter for the fictional Harlem Blade. Schuyler had a long association with several African American publications. He began his long-running editorial column “Views and Reviews” for The Pittsburgh Courier in late 1925, and he served as an editor of The Messenger, Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph’s socialist Harlem Renaissance journal, until its demise in 1928. Following this, he was tapped to edit the Illustrated Feature Section, a new tabloid insert, owned and distributed by William B. Ziff, a white advertising agent who secured advertisements for a significant number of Black newspapers. The Illustrated Feature Sectiondebuted—under Schuyler’s editorship—in November 1928 with the first installment of “Chocolate Baby: A Story of Ambition, Deception and Success” lavishly illustrated on the tabloid’s cover. This short romance serial was credited to Samuel I. Brooks, the first time Schuyler used this nom de plume to mask his identity and conceal his multiple roles in a publication. The Illustrated Feature Section initially claimed inclusion in “Sixteen Associated newspapers” (including The Pittsburgh Courier), and by mid-1929, its reach had extended to “thirty-four of America’s most prominent colored newspapers.”1 Schuyler soon found himself unhappy with this work on what he called “moron fodder” and with being in Chicago, and he left the Illustrated Feature Sectionafter only a couple of months. For the next couple of years, Benjamin J. Davis Jr.—later famous as the lawyer for labor organizer Angelo Herndon and as a Communist New York City councilman—took over editing the tabloid, which finally disappeared in 1932.2 While brief, Schuyler’s work with the Illustrated Feature Section helped establish a model and an expectation for the inclusion of genre fiction in African American newspapers that continued through the 1930s and beyond in weeklies like The Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American.

Upon his return to New York in 1929, Schuyler embarked on a few remarkable years. He began work organizing the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League in 1930. He published Black No More in January 1931, the same month he left for a nearly four-month trip to Liberia to investigate conditions there. This trip inspired a series of articles for the New York Evening Post, as well as Schuyler’s lesser-known novel Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, published in November 1931. At the beginning of 1932, he helped launch the National News, a Democratic-controlled effort to challenge the staunchly Republican New York Amsterdam News for Harlem readers. The National News lasted just seventeen weeks, but in nearly every issue of it, Schuyler featured genre fiction by other African American writers, including a compelling short story cycle about dancers in a Harlem nightclub written by Gertrude Schalk, an African American society columnist who had become a success writing about white characters for romance pulp magazines like Street & Smith’s Love Story. Over the winter of 1932–1933, Schuyler traveled to the Mississippi Delta, reporting on labor conditions there for the Courier and the NAACP. Once he returned from this harrowing trip, he threw himself wholeheartedly into his newspaper work and began writing genre fiction at a prolific pace, supplementing his many other roles as editorial writer, columnist, and lecturer.

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The fiction Schuyler published in The Pittsburgh Courier ranges across nearly every popular genre of the time: crime, romance, exotic adventure, espionage, science fiction.

In their afterword to the first book publication of the Black Empire serials, Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen made a compelling argument for the integration of Schuyler’s politics and fiction in the 1930s and identified a handful of texts Schuyler appreciated that exerted some influence on these serials. These include W. E. B. Du Bois’s revolutionary international romance, Dark Princess (1928); D. Manners-Sutton’s novel of mesmeric African power, Black God: A Story of the Congo (1934); and V. F. Calverton’s adventurous tale of mesmerism and hypnosis, The Man Inside: Being the Record of the Strange Adventures of Allen Steele Among the Xulus (1936).3 Additional evidence in Black Empire shows that Schuyler was a voracious reader, drawing on reports in popular science magazines and a variety of other popular reading material. Most evident in Black Empire, however, is Schuyler’s sophisticated understanding of the genre formulas of pulp magazines, which served as a crucible for the development of popular genres in the 1920s and 1930s. The hundreds of pulp magazine titles during this time helped develop modern genres like science fiction, hard-boiled crime fiction, and the “weird” tale. They also offered highly specialized titles for readers who wanted a magazine full of stories solely about newspaper offices (Front Page Stories), submarines (Submarine Stories), capitalist investing (Wall Street Stories), or romance in the West (Ranch Romances). Despite this wide range of niche titles, only Harlem Stories, which lasted just two issues, focused on African American life, and most (if not all) of its stories were written by white writers.

The Black Empire serials incorporate elements of many of these pulp magazines’ conventions and do so in a way that frequently reverses the conventional understanding of them. Instead of following an investigator trying to expose a crime ring, Schuyler shows us the internal operations of the crime ring itself. Rather than watching a secret agent investigate an international conspiracy, we see spies exposed and executed by this very conspiracy. Where Schuyler remains closer to conventions is in his use of romance formulas and even in his invocation of the exotic adventure story, when his characters are kidnapped by a group of extremely stereotypical cannibals in the West African jungle. He also incorporates the tropes of the niche pulp genre of aviation fiction—which focused on daredevil stunts and air battles—in the character of Patricia Givens, an African American aviatrix who leads the Black Internationale’s air force and engages in numerous air battles with European imperialists.

The Black Empire serials draw most explicitly, however, on the formulas of early science fiction. Schuyler’s interest in science fiction is evident in his archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which includes a “box of ideas” containing a host of story notes, many of which were written on index cards or scraps of paper (see Appendix C). These ideas range across genres, but the science fiction ones stand out, especially given Schuyler’s work with these formulas in Black Empire and Black No More. His idea for a futuristic story called “The Insect War” falls firmly in line with what The Author & Journalist, a trade magazine for writers, described in 1930 as one of the “four grand divisions” of the genre: “The Giant Insect Tale.”4 Other unexecuted story ideas clearly experiment with how science fiction might articulate and respond to the conditions of racism in the United States, from tales of violent revenge to satires about the disappearance of whiteness through interracial marriage. In other cases, Schuyler tied the futuristic to the continent of Africa. The unexecuted idea for “The Land Under the Ice,” for example, deals with the discovery of “a country where civilization has existed for millions of years; where black men have conquered telepathy, atomic energy,” and this brief plot outline resembles not only the world of Pauline Hopkins’s early speculative serial Of One Blood (1902–1903) but also Wakanda, the home of Marvel’s Black Panther.5

Published in the late 1930s, the Black Empire serials appeared at what historians of science fiction typically see as a transitional moment in the genre. Early science fiction, inspired by and published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories and its imitators, is associated with the technological optimism of Hugo Gernsback, the Amazing Stories editor who coined the term “scientifiction”—later “science fiction.” This early work featured great faith in technological advancement as well as lengthy descriptions of inventions and scientific processes. As Gernsback noted in his debut editorial in the magazine in 1926, this genre should include “a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” and he stressed that the realism of these stories should emphasize that “[n]ew inventions pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow.”6 Black Empire follows well in this Gernsbackian mode, featuring lengthy digressions on hydroponic farming methods, solar power, radio facsimile technology, and nutrition, as well as the mechanics and logistics of a “death ray.” In some cases, Schuyler has ripped details of these inventions directly from the headlines of newspapers or popular science magazines, sometimes incorporating new, experimental technologies (perfected, of course, by the Black scientists of the Black Internationale) only days after they first appeared in the national news.

In October 1937, just as Schuyler’s second Black Empire story was beginning serialization, John W. Campbell Jr. took over as editor of Astounding Stories, which began in 1930 as an imitator of Gernsback’s pioneering magazine but would soon overtake it in influence (and eventually be renamed Analog). Campbell’s vision for science fiction was less invested in technological utopianism and more interested in using the genre to explore social, political, and philosophical questions. In a sense, Schuyler had already reached this point, using his Black Empire serials to raise questions about how scientific and technological advancement could aid in the overthrow of white supremacy on a worldwide scale.

Schuyler’s vision of revolutionary, anti-racist technological utopianism, however, presented a stark alternative to the genre’s long history of racist and racialized tropes. In its early years, the genre routinely celebrated white knowledge and ingenuity, pitting these against non-white threats. In some cases, such threats were coded as differently colored or shaped aliens from another world; in others—as in Francis Nowlan’s Sinophobic “Buck Rogers” stories—they were explicitly non-white. These futuristic stories often imagined a world where white supremacy had been overthrown, and the plucky Anglo-Saxon scientists and adventurers needed to act to restore some kind of natural “order” to it.

Futuristic racial conspiracies were quite common in the early science fiction pulps, and one text in particular seems to have profoundly inspired Schuyler. David H. Keller’s “The Menace,” published in the Summer 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, follows a detective who investigates a racial conspiracy to overthrow and destroy white civilization, placing Black leaders in power. The conspirators—never successful in Keller’s story—try multiple methods to achieve their goals; one of these is the use of a race-changing technology that can turn the Black people white. As one character notes: “Once these millions of negroes are made white, we will start them in business. With white skins, unlimited capital and boundless ambition, they will easily secure control of the commerce of the nation. We will fill Congress with them. The whites will elect a President, a white President, but he will be one of our race. . . . With the States in our control, we will go on and conquer the world.”7

“The Menace” includes elements that appear both in Schuyler’s Black No More and in the Black Empire serials, but Schuyler—in characteristic fashion—has turned what Keller saw as a terrifying threat into a revolutionary and, in Black Empire at least, utopian possibility. There is some precedent for this. Another possible inspiration for Schuyler’s work is the 1915 novel The White Man’s Burden: A Satirical Forecast, by white writer Robert Sherman Tracy, writing under the pseudonym T. Shirby Hodge. Advertised and promoted by W. E. B. Du Bois in the NAACP’s journal The Crisis, The White Man’s Burden follows the fortunes of an African American scientist who has developed a revolutionary new energy technology. Barred from work in the United States due to his race, he takes his discovery to Africa, where it helps advance civilization on the continent into an anarchist utopia, while North America and Europe descend into barbarism. When it was later serialized in the Baltimore Afro-American in 1919–21, the newspaper promoted Tracy’s novel as “A Story of Africa and the War Predicted by Marcus Garvey.”8

The Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey also looms large over Schuyler’s Black Empire serials; the narrator Carl Slater even describes Dr. Belsidus’s plans as “rather Garveyistic.” And the serials do contain a host of references to Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Notably, a couple of the Black Internationale vessels share names with the ships of Garvey’s ill-fated Black Star Line. But Belsidus, the leader of this vast racial conspiracy, emphasizes secrecy, noting that “one of the great mistakes made by minority leaders in the past has been ballyhoo.” In this respect, Belsidus is far less in the mold of Marcus Garvey and more akin to the ubiquitous fictional villain Fu Manchu, who first appeared in Sax Rohmer’s 1913 novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, but who had become, by the 1930s, a cross-media phenomenon. Rohmer brought the character back after a fourteen-year hiatus in the 1931 novel Daughter of Fu Manchu, and published seven Fu Manchu novels between 1931 and 1941, many of which were serialized in major American magazines. Fu Manchu also appeared in several films from 1929 to 1932, as well as in radio dramatizations and comic strips during the decade. The popularity of Fu Manchu also led to imitators, such as the short-lived pulp magazine titles The Mysterious Wu Fang (1935–1936) and Dr. Yen Sen (1936), which also trafficked in Sinophobic stereotypes about depraved Asiatic criminal masterminds.

A mysterious and shadowy genius leading a worldwide criminal conspiracy, Fu Manchu shares many characteristics with Henry Belsidus of Schuyler’s Black Empire serials. Schuyler seems to highlight this similarity by emphasizing the orientalist elements of Belsidus’s bedchamber, which features a kind of sensuous luxury associated with pulp stereotypes of Asian cultures. Early in the first serial, Belsidus even describes his method of melting down stolen gold into dishes and flatware as preserving wealth “in the oriental manner.” The difference, of course, is that Fu Manchu is the unquestioned villain of Rohmer’s novels, while Belsidus is a much more complex figure designed to elicit reader sympathy and admiration. In the Black Empireserials, Schuyler has, in part, rewritten the Fu Manchu novels from the perspective of a Black Fu Manchu, and the criminal mastermind appears not as a threat to world order but rather as a figure of anticolonial revolutionary struggle.

It was precisely this aspect of Belsidus’s character that featured prominently in the promotion of the serials by The Pittsburgh Courier. Promotion for Schuyler’s newspaper serials was largely nonexistent before the appearance of “The Black Internationale,” the first of these two. The newspaper might tease a forthcoming serial in the text, but rarely more than that. In January 1937, however, Chester L. Washington, a member of the Courier’s editorial staff, wrote to Schuyler that “we sent out twenty-five thousand inserts like the one enclosed and three thousand placards on your splendid story ‘The Black Internationale.’ ”9

The promotional flyer, held in Schuyler’s papers at Syracuse University, highlights the story’s subtitle—“An Amazing Serial Story of Black Genius Against the World”—and describes “The Black Internationale” as “not a story exclusively about American Negroes, but about Negroes everywhere, united by a common bond of hatred of white exploitation, persecution and ostracism.”10 It further centers Belsidus as a hero in this work: “One determined black man, educated, suave, immaculate, cruel (at times) and unmoral, gathers around him the genius of the Negro world, and using every device imaginable, organizes the greatest conspiracy in history against White Supremacy!”11

No other Schuyler serial received such treatment, and the Courier’s staff and readers were especially enthusiastic about “The Black Internationale.” W. G. Nunn wrote to Schuyler that “ ‘The Black Internationale’ should be the answer to a circulation man’s prayers. It is getting better and better and everyone in the office makes a grand rush when it comes in.”12 Schuyler even seemed to take creative input from Nunn, who wrote in another January 1937 letter that “Incidentally your story ‘The Black Internationale’ is going over mighty big. If you will just go along now and inject the woman angle, I think it will be one of the best serials we have ever run.”13 Ten days later, Schuyler’s installment introduced the beautiful aviatrix Patricia Givens, who would become the narrator’s romantic interest. Schuyler believed that the serials should have been “illustrated and presented to the public in good old ‘American Weekly’ fashion,” but the Courierfeatured only a stylized header, with a small illustration of a soldier in the Black Internationale, still far more than it had done for any other serial it had published to that point.14Correspondence suggests the paper planned to promote the sequel in much the same fashion, though no promotional material for “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa” survives.

“The Black Internationale” insert, The Pittsburgh Courier, 1937. George S. Schuyler Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

The serials generated more reader response than any other serial published by the Courier, and the presence of the serials in the newspaper format created a sense of reality that surprised and amused Schuyler and the Courier editors. The newspaper printed letters from many readers who appeared to believe that Belsidus and his worldwide organization were fact, not fiction, either because they received more of these letters or because editors found it advantageous to highlight the “real” utopian possibility the texts represented. These queries began in February 1937 with a simple question from Bernice Brownlee of Wewoka, Oklahoma: “Is the Black Internationale a true story?”15 Soon, however, reader interest and inquiry became much more specific. Matilda Howell of Brooklyn, New York, wrote to ask, “What is the address of the Temple of Love in the Black Internationale?”16Others sought to join up with Belsidus’s organization. Harry Louis Cannady of Avella, Pennsylvania, wrote, “Is the Black Internationale a true story? I was a member of the 367th Infantry regiment in the World war and if the Black Internationale is a real organization, I want to join it.”17 Lena Walker of Gary, Indiana, asked, “What is the address of Samuel Brooks, the writer who tells of the success of Black Genius against the world? If the story of Dr. Belsidus is true, I am sure that he can line up more than 1,000 persons in this town right away.”18 In letters that acknowledged the fictionality of Schuyler’s text, readers lauded the success of “Samuel Brooks” and idolized Belsidus as a champion of racial equality. Samuel L. Thorpe Jr. of Miami, Florida, for example, wrote, “One of the purposes in my life when I have finished my college career is to imitate in a rather modest way, ‘Dr. Belsidus.’ I have always longed for the day when racial equality will come to pass and until the day comes, I shall never be satisfied.”19

The enthusiasm for these serials produced a strange response in the notoriously acerbic Schuyler. In April 1937, he wrote to Percival Prattis: “I have been greatly amused by the public enthusiasm for ‘The Black Internationale’, which is hokum and hack work of the purest vein. I deliberately set out to crowd as much race chauvinism and sheer improbability into it as my fertile imagination could conjure. The result vindicates my low opinion of the human race. The story would have even more appeal if it was illustrated, as it should be.”20 Scholars have taken this statement at face value and assumed that Schuyler considered most of his fiction in the Courier as “hack work,” disposable and forgettable literature that has nothing to do with his literary or intellectual legacy. Schuyler’s opinion of his genre fiction, however, was far from static. A year and a half earlier, in October 1935, while traveling to bolster circulation of the Courier in the Deep South, Schuyler was delighted when he wrote to his wife, Josephine, that in the tiny town of Monticello, Mississippi, “they had been reading [him] for years! Everybody there liked ‘Georgia Terror.’ ”21 The serial “Georgia Terror” features an interracial vigilante group that seeks to assassinate the members of a mob that lynched a Black socialist labor organizer. “Our group,” one of the members notes, “is also determined to put an end to lynching in the only way it can be ended: by taking the life of every white man who participates in a lynching.”22

Schuyler serials like “Georgia Terror,” “Down in the Delta” (a tale of labor organizing), and “Strange Valley” (another story of building a revolutionary movement from Africa) all feed into the aesthetics and politics of the Black Empire serials. Schuyler’s snide dismissal of “race chauvinism” may be an early sign of the political shift that would take him to the far right in the decades to follow. It may be an indication that he was tiring of churning out sensational fiction on a weekly basis; after the second Black Empire serial, he would publish genre fiction in the Courier for only about another year. Or it may simply be Schuyler, who was occasionally characterized as the “Black Mencken,” channeling his most H. L. Mencken–inspired misanthropy and using it as an opportunity to highlight his “low opinion of the human race.” Regardless, it would be wrong to read the Black Empire serials purely through the lens of Schuyler’s dismissal of them. After all, Schuyler had been experimenting with ideas for science fiction stories throughout the 1930s. And not only do the Black Empireserials incorporate the latest scientific advancements that Schuyler was following closely in newspapers, popular science magazines, and science fiction pulps, they also feature a utopian society in Africa with a nutritional program identical to the one Schuyler and Josephine promoted as their own.

To some degree, it is this deep ambivalence that characterizes the Black Empire serials and Belsidus’s ruthless techniques for building a worldwide movement. The revolutionary methods of the Black Internationale include biological and chemical warfare that kills thousands in Europe. The narrator initially recoils from Belsidus’s violence but becomes inured to it over the course of the serials, seeing it as simply a reversal of a long history of colonial violence. Additionally, Belsidus’s recruitment practices show heavy disdain for the intellect and willpower of “the Negro masses,” which, as one character says, “always believe what they are told often and loud enough.” The rituals and services of Church of Love—the Black Internationale’s religious arm—are designed to “recondition the Negro masses in accordance with the most approved behavioristic methods,” a form of behaviorism (inspired by psychologist John B. Watson) that sounds a lot like sinister mind control. Interestingly, Schuyler’s early notes for these serials focused almost exclusively on the Church of Love plot and how a powerful religious charlatan might capture the imagination of African Americans in Harlem (see Appendix B).

At the conclusion of the first Black Empire serial, Belsidus proudly proclaims himself a “benevolent” dictator, which puts him in league with other 1930s figures like Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler and raises questions about whether Schuyler truly wants his readers to identify with this Black genius. Still, Schuyler never really backs off from this characterization, allowing Belsidus’s authoritarian impulses to guide the movement to its final success at the conclusion of the sequel. Perhaps in response to Schuyler’s seeming embrace of authoritarianism, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Courier’s chief rival for Black genre fiction, featured in the summer of 1937 William Thomas Smith’s twelve-part serial “The Black Stockings,” which followed the rise of a fascist presidential candidate in the United States and the multiethnic anti-fascist resistance movement that developed in opposition to him. Schuyler, too, experimented with critiques of authoritarianism in his unpublished and untitled story idea about the gangster-turned-fascist politician “Ape Carver” (see Appendix C).

Schuyler may have dismissed these serials as “hokum,” but, unlike his later shift to the political right, his politics in the 1930s were more firmly aligned with the Pan-Africanism of Dr. Belsidus. Four months after the conclusion of the second serial, Schuyler, under his own name this time, again invoked the name of Belsidus’s revolutionary movement in an essay for The Crisisentitled “The Rise of the Black Internationale.” He concludes this article by claiming that the “New Negro . . . knows that the fear of losing the colonial peoples and their resources is all that prevents another World War. He believes that to combat this White Internationale of oppression a Black Internationale of liberation is necessary. ...