People, Locations, Episodes

Josephine Schuyler, Author born

Josephine Schuyler

*Josephine Schuyler was born on this date in 1897.  She was a white-American author and poet.  

Josephine Cogdell was born into a wealthy family in Granbury, Hood County, Texas. She was the youngest of seven children of Daniel Calhoun Cogdell and Lucy Norfleet Duke. She was a white woman born to great wealth and privilege in Granbury, Texas. 

She was the granddaughter of Granbury’s bank founder and bank president.  He also owned many hundreds or thousands of heads of cattle and many, many acres.  The family had a great deal of money.  She was always determined to run away from the life she saw before her in Texas.  The life she was expected to lead was one in which she would marry a man of her social class she would, direct the household staff, and would do a little bit of philanthropy, and arrange dinners.  She said, “Uh-uh, this isn’t nearly interesting enough.  I want to be an artist.”  

Youngest of seven children, she married Jack Lewis in 1913.  Schuyler left for California after the brief marriage she had entered at sixteen ended. There, she spent time as a Max Sennett bathing beauty and a ballet dancer in a San Francisco opera company.  Eventually, she made her way to bohemian Greenwich Village. In New York, she met George Schuyler, who was becoming one of the best-known Black journalists in the country.  They married on January 6, 1928, and had one daughter, Philippa.  Together, they were profiled in national magazines as "America's Strangest Family"; nevertheless, Josephine kept her marriage and mixed-race daughter secret from her Texas family.   

Shunned by Blacks and whites alike, Josephine was isolated in the family's Harlem apartment, transformed by her radical interracial marriage into a conventional housewife. She reclaimed some voice for herself by writing an advice column as a black woman for The Pittsburgh Courier newspaper. She was also a poet and a painter and served as her pianist daughter's manager.  When daughter Philippa died in 1967 in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, her funeral was one of the grandest Harlem ever saw. Her silver casket was borne through crowded streets all the way to St. Patrick's Cathedral.  Josephine took her own life a week before the second anniversary of her daughter's death in 1969.

to be a Journalist or Reporter

To be a Writer