Sedition

Oscar Williams' George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative relates an anecdote of the type of wartime executive power only dreamed of by the Bush administration:

Another reason for the (Pittsburgh) Courier's change of position was the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) pressure on African American newspapers to stop printing stories on racial violence against African American soldiers and civilians. The FBI documented articles they considered seditious and visited the offices to intimidate the Courier staff. Courier journalist Frank Bolden recalled FBI agents visiting the office and lecturing them: "They'd tell us to shut our mouths, you're hurting the war effort, and we'd just laugh at them." Schuyler, however, may not have been laughing, as the FBI's vigorously documented editorials of his that were seen as pro-Japanese and potentially seditious.

. . . Schuyler's articles addressing racial discrimination against African Americans were included in the FBI's investigation. In one such article, in the February 20, 1943, Courier, Schuyler commented on Robert Moses, an African American who, when sentenced to three year's imprisonment for evading the draft, stated, "I have no country." Schuyler noted that, "what Moses said, many Negroes could be thinking and it is up to American white people to make them think otherwise. Jailing them will not change their minds but democracy, fair play, citizenship rights, and equality of opportunity will."