Q Toon: Soda Jerk

When I was drawing this cartoon this past Sunday, my chief concern was that before anyone would have a chance to read the cartoon, its subject, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, would become the latest Trump administration official to go down in history as having had the shortest tenure of anyone in his position.

By Tuesday, that concern was replaced by the prospect of nuclear war breaking out first.

I can't help but be distressed by Mr. Sessions's decree that his Justice Department will not defend the civil rights of LGBTQ citizens; but if Messrs. Trump and Kim goad each other into turning millions of human beings into radioactive ash, civil rights for anyone becomes a largely moot point.

Q Syndicate✍Aug 10, 2017

As for this cartoon, however, I made the conscious decision to keep most of the image in black-and-white, since I associate the pre-civil rights era with black-and-white photography. Googling and checking Time and Life coffee table books for images of Woolworth's lunch counters, my results were almost entirely limited to finding photos of sit-ins or empty counters. Several of the latter were color photos of counters now in museums or in long-closed Woolworth stores now converted to other purposes.

In no photo did I find Woolworth employees behind the counter.

Fifty years after the sit-ins, New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer Bill Minor explained why:

"The people working behind the counter at Woolworth's were afraid to serve anybody," Minor says. "They just let them sit there. They wouldn't serve them. That's what they were ordered to do--not serve any blacks."

It may soon be equally difficult to find photos of  Justice Department officials on the job.