Schuyler became famous in the 1930s for her talent, intellect, mixed race parentage, and the eccentric parenting methods employed by her mother.

Hailed as "the Shirley Temple of American Negroes,"[1] Schuyler performed public piano recitals and radio broadcasts by the age of four.

Schuyler won numerous music competitions, including the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts at Carnegie Hall.

[1][2] Her parents believed that intermarriage could "invigorate" both races, produce extraordinary offspring, and help solve social problems in the United States.

For three years before Schuyler's birth, her mother ate only natural and raw food, avoided meat, and went on a body- and mind-preparing regime to cleanse her system and prepare to bear a "superior" child.

[5] In June 1936, four-year-old Schuyler won her first gold medal at the annual tournament sponsored by the National Guild of Piano Teachers, where she performed ten original compositions.

[8][9] 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 had little chance to win against her.

[11][6] At nine, Schuyler became the subject of "Evening With A Gifted Child", a profile written by New Yorker correspondent Joseph Mitchell, who heard several of her early compositions.

Acclaim for her performances led to her becoming a role model for many children in the United States, but Schuyler's own childhood was blighted when, during her teenage years, her parents showed her the scrapbooks they had compiled recording her life and career.

The books contained numerous newspaper clippings in which both George and Josephine Schuyler commented on their beliefs and ambitions for their daughter.

Realization that she had been conceived and raised, in a sense, as a genetic experiment, robbed the pianist of many of the illusions that had made her earlier youth a happy one.

[15] 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.

In Africa, she performed for various notables such as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia,[18] at Independence Day celebrations for Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu of the Congo,[19] President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and for Albert Schweitzer in his isolated leper colony in Lamberéné.

[5] She increasingly became a vocal feminist and made many attempts to pass herself off as a woman of Ibero-American descent named Felipa Monterro y Schuyler.

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.

[29] A court of inquiry found that the pilot had deliberately cut his motor and descended in an uncontrolled glide – possibly in an attempt to give his civilian passengers an insight into the dangers of flying in a combat zone – and lost control of the aircraft.