Philippa Schuyler

It was reported in 2004 that Halle Berry owned the film rights to Schuyler's biography. Berry intended to co-produce the biopic with Marc Platt, starring Alicia Keys as Schuyler.

Schuyler's mother was profoundly affected by her death and committed suicide a few days before the second anniversary of her death in 1969.

Hailed as "the Shirley Temple of American Negroes," Schuyler performed public piano recitals and radio broadcasts by the age of four. She performed two recitals at the New York World's Fair at the age of eight. Schuyler won numerous music competitions such as the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts at Carnegie Hall. She became the youngest member of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors at age eleven. Schuyler encountered racism as she grew older, and had trouble coming to terms with her mixed race heritage. She later became a journalist and was killed in a helicopter crash in South Vietnam in 1967.

In 1966, Schuyler traveled to South Vietnam to perform for the troops and Vietnamese groups. She returned in April 1967 as a war correspondent for William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader and served as a lay missionary. On May 9, 1967, Schuyler was killed in a crash of a United States Army helicopter during a mission in Da Nang to evacuate Vietnamese orphans. The helicopter crashed into Danang Bay. While she survived the crash impact, her inability to swim caused her to drown. Schuyler had planned to leave Vietnam a few days prior, but she extended her stay to bring Catholic children from Hue, where there was tension between Catholic and Buddhist factions. 2,000 mourners attended her funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on May 18, 1967. She was the second of two American women journalists to die in Vietnam.

Although Schuyler engaged in a number of affairs, she never married. In 1965, she endured a dangerous late-term abortion in Tijuana after an affair with Ghanaian diplomat Georges Apedo-Amah, because she did not want to have a child with a black man. Schuyler wanted to marry an Aryan man to boost her career and produce offspring she deemed ideal.

As her concert schedule decreased in the early 1960s, Schuyler followed her father George Schuyler into journalism in her thirties. She supplemented her limited income by writing about her travels. She published more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles internationally, and was one of the few black writers for the United Press International. Schuyler published four non-fiction books: Adventures in Black and White (a biography, 1960); Who Killed the Congo? (a summary of the Belgian Congo's fight for independence, 1962); Jungle Saints (about Catholic missionaries, 1963); and Kingdom of Dreams (a quixotic study of scientific dream interpretation written with her mother, 1966).

In later life, Schuyler grew disillusioned with the racial and gender prejudice she encountered, particularly when performing in the United States, and much of her musical career was spent playing overseas. She fled to Latin America, where people of mixed races were more prevalent. She chose a voluntary exile of traveling and performing in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Europe. She played at the inauguration of three successive presidents in Haiti. In Africa, she performed for various notables such as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, at Independence Day celebrations for Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu of the Congo, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and for Albert Schweitzer in his isolated leper colony in Lamberéné. She began passing for white in 1959, at first so she could travel in South Africa, then again years later thinking she would have a better career if she reentered the American concert scene as a white performer.

Schuyler's piano recitals and radio broadcasts attracted significant press coverage. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was one of Schuyler's admirers and visited her at home on more than one occasion. He declared June 19, 1940 "Philippa Duke Schuyler Day" at the New York World's Fair, where she performed two recitals. At nine, Schuyler became the subject of "Evening With A Gifted Child", a profile written by Joseph Mitchell, correspondent for The New Yorker, who heard several of her early compositions. He noted that she addressed both her parents by their first names. Schuyler completed the eighth grade at the age of eleven and by the age of fourteen she had composed 200 musical selections. She became the youngest member of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors in 1942.

Schuyler's mother was an over-bearing stage mother who entered her into every possible music competition. In June 1936, Schuyler won her first gold medal at the age of four at the annual tournament sponsored by the National Guild of Piano Teachers, where she performed ten original compositions. She won eight consecutive prizes from the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts at Carnegie Hall, then was barred from competing because the other children didn't stand a chance to win against her. She also won gold medals from the Music Education League and from the City of New York.

Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, a New York Herald Tribune writer in 1933 wrote about her as the "Negro Baby." Schuyler reportedly knew the alphabet at nineteen months and was able to read and write at the age of two. By four years old she could play Schumann and Mozart compositions, and she was writing her own compositions. Her intelligence quotient (IQ) at the age of six was found to be 185.

Philippa Duke Schuyler (/ˈskaɪlər/; August 2, 1931 – May 9, 1967) was an American concert pianist, composer, author, and journalist. A child prodigy, she was the daughter of black journalist George Schuyler and Josephine Schuyler, a white Texan heiress, Schuyler became famous in the 1930s for her talent, intellect, mixed race parentage, and the eccentric parenting methods employed by her mother.

Philippa Duke Schuyler was born in Harlem, New York on August 2, 1931. She was the only child of George Schuyler, a prominent black essayist and journalist, and his wife Josephine Schuyler (née Cogdell), a white Texan and one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and the granddaughter of slave owners. Her parents believed that intermarriage could "invigorate" both races and produce extraordinary offspring. They also advocated that mixed-race marriage could help to solve many of the social problems in the United States.