Black No More is author George Schuyler’s deeply critical and satirical assessment of ignorant people—whom he identifies as those who blindly accept any ideology. He particularly focuses on the “white masses”—largely working class, Southern, rural, and Evangelical—as having little moral integrity but a deep desire to feel superior to others. (Though he also makes a few references to the same critiques of the Black working class.) He illustrates how people who accept ideologies blindly are then taken advantage of—by the Rev. Givens, by Matthew, or by Alex McPhule in the book’s final chapters. In showing how ignorant masses will follow any ideology to the extreme, the book suggests that ignorance is dangerous because it makes people easy to manipulate and often devolves into violence.
The white working class’s unthinking support for the Knights of Nordica ideology gives Matthew and Rev. Givens incredible power, and the book highlights how dangerous this collective ignorance can become. When Matthew first attends a Knights of Nordica town hall, posing as a white anthropologist, he is amazed at the attendees’ willingness to “believe anything that was shouted at them loudly and convincingly enough.” And so, he does just that, using their ignorance and their desire to feel superior to rile their anger up about Black people turning white. As a result, many of the attendees join up in the Knights of Nordica (giving the organization five dollars as a membership fee), and Rev. Givens gives Matthew a leadership position in the organization. All of this illustrates how ignorance makes people easy to take advantage of, and it also often enables leaders to gain power and influence as a result. Soon after, Rev. Givens starts giving radio addresses about a variety of topics in order to gain political support—usually invoking Christianity, denouncing Black-No-More, and disseminating white supremacist ideology. The book notes that in these addresses, Givens avoided “saying anything that was true.” Yet despite his lies the addresses enable Givens to gain political support as he runs for President because people are ignorant and susceptible to falsehoods. The latter half of the book illustrates how ignorance can rapidly devolve into violence. For example, people burn down one of Dr. Crookman’s birthing centers, resulting in a dozen infants’ deaths. Later, when newspapers print a story that Givens and other top Democrats have Black ancestry, a mob violently chases after these Democrats and even lynches several of them—despite the high likelihood that many of the mob members have Black ancestry as well. In this way, the book illustrates how ignorant people are dangerous because they can be easily moved to uncontrollable and violent extremism.
The residents of Happy Hill, Mississippi, ignorantly believe any ideology that makes them feel superior. And as a result, they become tools of a power-hungry man named Alex McPhule to violent ends. The book establishes the residents of Happy Hill as “blue-blooded Caucasians” who also might have boasted about the town’s “inordinately high illiteracy rate and its lynching record.” In this way, the book emphasizes again the connection between ignorance (reflected here in the illiteracy rate) and mob violence (the town’s lynching record). The story then illustrates how both of these things make people easily influenced. Rev. Alex McPhule arrives in the town claiming to be the founder of a new true faith that would save them from an “Evil One,” having been touched by an angel. Believing that they are being uniquely chosen for this religion, the townspeople take to the sect with complete fervor and McPhule becomes the de facto leader of the town. As a result, he receives anything he wants from the townspeople—even taking sexual advantage of the married women and young girls in the town. This again illustrates how those who are ignorant can be easily manipulated. McPhule then convinces the townspeople that there will be a “Sign” to convince them that his religion is the true, good faith. This fervor culminates when two powerful white men, Snobbcraft and Buggerie, flee their homes because they have been revealed to have Black ancestry. To disguise themselves, they use shoe polish to darken their skin. But when they have to stop in Happy Hill, the local townspeople take this as the Sign from God, believing that the two men are Black. McPhule works them up into a frenzy and convinces the town to lynch the two men—even when the men’s’ true identities are revealed. Thus, the book illustrates how ignorance not only gives McPhule incredible power over the town, but also leads people to act violently and dangerously.
The book occasionally criticizes the Black masses as well—but because their motivations stem not from ignorance but from wanting advantage or avoiding discrimination, Schuyler doesn’t criticize them as harshly. Matthew notes, for example, that the Knights of Nordica meeting resembles the “religious orgies of the more ignorant Negroes,” suggesting that religion can be just as much of a tool to manipulate and take advantage of ignorant Black Americans as white Americans. The book also begins with Black Americans taking the Black-No-More treatment en masse despite not being fully aware of the ramifications of this action on their lives and on Black society as a whole. And yet, the book makes a distinction between this and the white masses’ actions, because they are motivated by a desire to avoid discrimination and gain better advantage in society
Throughout his life, Schuyler was particularly critical of Christianity and other ideologies that people accept blindly. In Black No More, he clearly illustrates the dangers in this blind acceptance, showing how uncritical ignorance can be easily manipulated to the point that people become uncontrollably violent.
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Ignorance Quotes in Black No More
There are times when the welfare of our race must take precedence over law. Opposed as we always have been to mob violence as the worst enemy of democratic government, we cannot help but feel that the intelligent white men and women of New York City who are interested in the purity and preservation of their race should not permit the challenge of Crookmanism to go unanswered, even though these black scoundrels may be within the law. There are too many criminals in this country already hiding behind the skirts of the law.
The unreasoning and illogical color prejudice of most of the people with whom he was forced to associate infuriated him. He often laughed cynically when some coarse, ignorant white man voiced his opinion concerning the inferior mentality and morality of the Negroes. He was moving in white society now and he could compare it with the society he had known as a Negro in Atlanta and Harlem. What a let-down it was from the good breeding, sophistication, refinement and gentle cynicism to which he had become accustomed as a popular young man about town in New York’s Black Belt. He was not able to articulate this feeling but he was conscious of the reaction nevertheless.
The attitude of these people puzzled him. Was not Black-No-More getting rid of the Negroes upon whom all of the blame was placed for the backwardness of the South? Then he recalled what a Negro street speaker had said one night on the corner of 138th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York: that unorganized labor meant cheap labor; that the guarantee of cheap labor was an effective means of luring new industries into the South; that so long as the ignorant white masses could be kept thinking of the menace of the Negro to Caucasian race purity and political control, they would give little thought to labor organization. It suddenly dawned upon Matthew Fisher that this Black-No-More treatment was more of a menace to white business than to white labor. And not long afterward he became aware of the money-making possibilities involved in the present situation.
Unlike Givens, he had no belief in the racial integrity nonsense nor any confidence in the white masses whom he thought were destined to flock to the Knights of Nordica. On the contrary he despised and hated them. He had the average Negro’s justifiable fear of the poor whites and only planned to use them as a stepladder to the real money.
Matthew, who sat on the platform alongside old man Givens viewed the spectacle with amusement mingled with amazement. He was amused because of the similarity of this meeting to the religious orgies of the more ignorant Negroes and amazed that earlier in the evening he should have felt any qualms about lecturing to these folks on anthropology, a subject with which neither he nor his hearers were acquainted. He quickly saw that these people would believe anything that was shouted at them loudly and convincingly enough. He knew what would fetch their applause and bring in their memberships and he intended to repeat it over and over.
For an hour Matthew told them at the top of his voice what they believed: i.e., that a white skin was a sure indication of the possession of superior intellectual and moral qualities; that all Negroes were inferior to them; that God had intended for the United States to be a white man’s country and that with His help they could keep it so; that their sons and brothers might inadvertently marry Negresses or, worse, their sisters and daughters might marry Negroes, if Black-No-More, Incorporated, was permitted to continue its dangerous activities.
The great mass of white workers, however, was afraid to organize and fight for more pay because of a deepset fear that the Negroes would take their jobs. They had heard of black labor taking the work of white labor under the guns of white militia, and they were afraid to risk it. They had first read of the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated, with a secret feeling akin to relief but after the orators of the Knights of Nordica and the editorials of The Warning began to portray the menace confronting them, they forgot about their economic ills and began to yell for the blood of Dr. Crookman and his associates. Why, they began to argue, one couldn’t tell who was who! Herein lay the fundamental cause of all their ills. Times were hard, they reasoned, because there were so many white Negroes in their midst taking their jobs and undermining their American standard of living. None of them had ever attained an American standard of living to be sure, but that fact never occurred to any of them. So they flocked to the meetings of the Knights of Nordica and night after night sat spellbound while Rev. Givens, who had finished the eighth grade in a one-room country school, explained the laws of heredity and spoke eloquently of the growing danger of black babies.
Rev. Givens, fortified with a slug of corn, advanced nervously to the microphone, fingering his prepared address. He cleared his throat and talked for upwards of an hour during which time he successfully avoided saying anything that was true, the result being that thousands of telegrams and long- distance telephone calls of congratulation came in to the studio. In his long address he discussed the foundations of the Republic, anthropology, psychology, miscegenation, cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, curbing Bolshevism, the bane of birth control, the menace of the Modernists, science versus religion, and many other subjects of which he was totally ignorant. The greater part of his time was taken up in a denunciation of Black-No-More, Incorporated, and calling upon the Republican administration of President Harold Goosie to deport the vicious Negroes at the head of it or imprison them in the federal penitentiary. When he had concluded “In the name of our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, Amen,” he retired hastily to the washroom to finish his half-pint of corn.
Other Northern newspapers assumed an even more friendly attitude, but the press generally followed the crowd, or led it, and in slightly veiled language urged the opponents of Black-No-More to take the law into their hands.
Finally, emboldened and inflamed by fiery editorials, radio addresses, pamphlets, posters and platform speeches, a mob seeking to protect white womanhood in Cincinnati attacked a Crookman hospital, drove several women into the streets and set fire to the building. A dozen babies were burned to death and others, hastily removed by their mothers, were recognized as mulattoes. The newspapers published names and addresses. Many of the women were very prominent socially either in their own right or because of their husbands.
The nation was shocked as never before. Republican sentiment began to dwindle.
This section of the state had been untouched by the troubles through which the rest of the South had gone as a result of the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated. The people for miles around were with very few exceptions old residents and thence known to be genuine blue-blooded Caucasians for as far back as any resident could remember which was at least fifty years. The people were proud of this fact. They were more proud, however, of the fact that Happy Hill was the home and birthplace of the True Faith Christ Lovers’ Church, which made the prodigious boast of being the most truly Fundamentalist of all the Christian sects in the United States. Other things of which the community might have boasted were its inordinately high illiteracy rate and its lynching record—but these things were seldom mentioned, although no one was ashamed of them.
The crowd whooped with glee and Rev. McPhule beamed with satisfaction. The flames rose higher and completely hid the victims from view. The fire crackled merrily and the intense heat drove the spectators back. The odor of cooking meat permeated the clear, country air and many a nostril was guiltily distended. The flames subsided to reveal a red-hot stake supporting two charred hulks.
There were in the assemblage two or three whitened Negroes, who, remembering what their race had suffered in the past, would fain have gone to the assistance of the two men but fear for their own lives restrained them. Even so they were looked at rather sharply by some of the Christ Lovers because they did not appear to be enjoying the spectacle as thoroughly as the rest. Noticing these questioning glances, the whitened Negroes began to yell and prod the burning bodies with sticks and cast stones at them. This exhibition restored them to favor and banished any suspicion that they might not be one-hundred-per-cent Americans.
