Black Empire


 
 
 
 Penguin Classics
 BLACK EMPIRE
 George S. Schuyler (1895–1977), a satirist, critic, and eminent African American journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Providence, Rhode Island. After a seven-year stint in the army, he moved to New York City, where he joined the staff of The Messenger, the official magazine of the Friends of Negro Freedom, a Black socialist group. His writing for The Messenger caught the eye of H. L. Mencken, who became a mentor figure to Schuyler; Schuyler soon began writing for Mencken’s The American Mercury, as well as The Nation, The Washington Post, and The Pittsburgh Courier, Black America’s most influential newspaper. He became the first Black journalist to attain national prominence and was known for his controversial opinions. In addition to Black Empire, Schuyler published the novels Black No More and Slaves Today as well as several novellas and an autobiography.
 Brooks E. Hefner is a professor of English at James Madison University. He is the author of Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow and The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism, as well as the codirector of the National Endowment for the Humanities–funded digital humanities project Circulating American Magazines.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Introduction, suggestions for further reading, and notes copyright © 2023 by Brooks E. Hefner
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 Originally published as “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World” and “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa” in The Pittsburgh Courier, 1936–1938
 This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Schuyler, George S. (George Samuel), 1895-1977, author. | Schuyler, George S. (George Samuel), 1895-1977. Black internationale | Schuyler, George S. (George Samuel), 1895-1977. Black empire | Hefner, Brooks E., editor.
 Title: Black empire / George S. Schuyler; edited with an introduction and notes by Brooks E. Hefner.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022037750 (print) | LCCN 2022037751 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137078 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525508571 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Science fiction.
 Classification: LCC PS3537.C76 B54 2023 (print) | LCC PS3537.C76 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23/eng/20220808
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037750
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037751
 Cover art: Hold It in Your Mouth a Little Longer, 2013. © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
 Adaped for ebook by Cora Wigen
 pid_prh_6.0_142389075_c0_r0
 
 
 Contents
 Introduction by Brooks E. Hefner
 Notes for the Introduction
 Suggestions for Further Reading
 A Note on the Text
 BLACK EMPIRE
 The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World
 Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa
 Appendix A: Original Headline Titles and Publication Dates
 Appendix B: Notes for “The Black Internationale”
 Appendix C: Notes for Speculative Fiction Serials Never Executed by Schuyler
 Appendix D: Bibliography of Schuyler’s Genre Fiction
 Notes
 Credits
 
 _142389075_
 
 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