The First Month of Black History Week

Today's Graphical History Tour should have been the one I didn't post on the last Saturday of my vacation three weeks ago. Better late than never, I hope.

Exactly 100 years ago this month, historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) declared the second week of February "Negro History Week," expanding on earlier observations of Frederick Douglass's birthday. I didn't find that any of America's Black editorial cartoonists were drawing about Black history that week or that month, although each of their newspapers took note of the proposal from Woodson and the ASNLH.

Here's what America's Black editorial cartoonists were drawing about in February of 1926.

Given the Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 mission of pressing the Courts to invalidate same-sex marriages like mine (and a law just passed in Tennessee legislating a right to discriminate against us), I was particularly interested to find that the state of Virginia was in the process of outlawing mixed-race marriage exactly 100 years ago this week.

"The Mongrel Bays at the Moon" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 27, 1926

Leslie Rogers's cartoon was accompanied by a sarcastic "fable" summarizing the history of the "small shipload of outcasts" from England who settled in Jamestown, only to decide twelve years later "that work was obnoxious to them," so they contracted with the Dutch to supply them with slaves from Africa. From that editorial:

"Now, seeing that there were among the slaves many comely maidens, the lusts of these outcasts were aroused, and since the slave-women could not protect themselves, their masters threw themselves upon them and bred children by them. And it came to pass that a great war freed these slaves and made them citizens of a great state and country. But interbreeding went on merrily until the land was filled with a mixed race whose people spoke out against their former masters and kinsmen.

"'We will have no more illegitimate babies,' they cried. 'If you would cohabit with us. you must marry us.'

"And the masters raised their hands and eyes to holy heaven in horror. 'How can we, the salt of the earth, marry with these people who were once our slaves? Heaven forbid! Let us hasten and pass a law to prevent intermarriage in that we may breed with their women without fear of punishment. It is our God-given right. Our law will dull their will and keep them from thinking that they, as human beings, are entitled to live, love and marry according to their desires. We will hasten this law and shroud it in a pretense that we seek to preserve the integrity of all races.'

"And so they did."

Appropriately enough, it was a case out of Virginia that eventually overturned anti-miscegenation laws. Not that the ruling in Loving v. Virginia is certain to stand against the present Project 2025-26 backlash against civil liberties.

By the way, I would have liked to include any cartoons by Black editorial cartoonists from Virginia here, but none of the Black newspapers in that state appear to have employed their own cartoonists at the time. (The Norfolk Journal and Guide did start running its own editorial cartoons later that year.)

"And It Never Says a Mumblin' Word" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 6, 1926

Leslie Rogers employed what had become a common metaphor for President Coolidge, in this case accusing him of having little to say about the lynching of Black Americans by "mob rule in enlightened society." 

"Silent Cal" did not have a lot to say about a great many things; but he did support the Dyer anti-lynching bill (which never passed Congress) and spoke against the so-called "Americanism" of the Ku Klux Klan. In October of 1925, he told a convention of the American Legion:

"Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to-day is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat."

"Taking a Black Prisoner from the Jail to the Courthouse" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 13, 1926

Meanwhile, Kentucky Governor W.J. Fields sent 1,000 troops to secure the safety of a Black defendant in a triple murder case as he was transported from jail to courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky.

The defendant, Ed Harris, stood accused of killing a White man and his two children, and assaulting the man's wife — exactly the sort of case that often excited mobs to take matters into their own hands; so Gov. Fields sent in eight infantry companies, four cavalry troops, two machine gun squadrons, and a tank company, with orders to shoot to kill.

Leslie Rogers here added dirigibles and the "U.S.S. Mobqueller," in a cartoon that reminds me very much of the style of Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist John T. McCutcheon.

"New Use for U.S. Air Fleet" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 27, 1926

Fred Watson proposed enlisting the U.S.'s new air fleet to ferry Black prisoners past the volatile mob.

"Trial by Troops" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 20, 1926

If Wilbert Holloway was not impressed, it was because there was no chance of Ed Harris being found anything but guilty. He pled guilty and was sentenced to hang, his trial lasting all of sixteen minutes.

Elsewhere, Delaware Governor Robert Robinson called out the National Guard to prevent angry mobs from interfering in the trial in Georgetown of 21-year-old Harry Butler, who pled guilty to critically assaulting a 12-year-old white girl. He, too, was sentenced to death by hanging.

As for Tennessee, Holloway may have been referring to the trial of John Franklin Webb, convicted of raping a 17-year-old white girl. The trial and jury deliberation took a combined thirteen minutes; he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.

"Finally Hooked" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 6, 1926

Holloway didn't limit himself to explicitly Black issues (two of his four February cartoons were about the weather). I can't be sure what his opinion of U.S. involvement in the World Court was; reported elsewhere on the pages of that edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, a southern Senator made his opinion crystal clear.

"The Drunken Driver" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 6, 1926

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Cole Bleas (D-SC) offered as an argument against U.S. participation in the World Court that Liberia and Haiti were members of the League of Nations and would therefore have a say in the selection of World Court judges. If you were triggered by that Tourette's advocate blurting out an obscenity at the BAFTAs on Sunday, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.

"I call the attention of Senators from the South," Bleas fulminated, "while they are voting on this reservation, to the fact that they are voting for a court where we are to sit side by side with a full-blooded [the N-word], who has as much right as we have in the election of judges of this court. I ask them if they are aware of the fact that there may be and probably will be a  representative of Haiti as a judge on this court so that the southern Senators are voting to throw the destinies of southern women and southern men into the lap of a black man?" 

Bleas used that N-word several more times in the course of his argument, mostly to describe what kind of republics Haiti and Liberia are.

"State's Rights or State's Wrongs" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 20, 1926

Here's a rare cartoon that includes criticism of California's treatment of Japanese Americans. The topic occasionally came up in the context of protests from the Japanese government, but most white cartoonists and their newspapers approved of cutting off immigration from the Orient, and were content to overlook the restrictions against Japanese-Americans owning property.

Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie's moves to undermine Prohibition would be a topic for another day, but serves as a segue to a couple of editorial cartoons about local issues.

"An Unwelcome Serenader" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 13, 1926

Watson cites a song popularized by the California Ramblers to express the plight of Black school teachers in his native Baltimore. Given that the story he appears to be editorializing about concerned two female Black high school teachers, Mabel Jackson and Mary Craft Cottrell, who filed lawsuits against the Baltimore school board for hiring two White women for positions for which Jackson and Cottrell were more qualified.

Jackson had passed the state examination for teachers of domestic art in 1924, placing first and second on the eligibility list; but the Baltimore School Board instead hired Susie Jennings and Elizabeth Burrell, neither of whom had a college degree or a graduation certificate from an accredited normal school, nor had they passed a competitive examination for teaching domestic arts.

The School Board contended that tailoring and dressmaking are trade vocational subjects not requiring a teaching degree. Jennings and Burrell, in their view, were not high school teachers per se, in spite of instructing high school students in a high school building during high school hours.

"An Alarm He Doesn't Heed" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 20, 1926

In Chicago, Blacks could apply for and qualify for employment as city firefighters, but would have to wait for a vacancy at the Taylor Street station, the one and only fire station open to Blacks. Any vacancies at any other fire station in town could only be filled by White applicants.

Even if their only qualifications involved tailoring and dressmaking.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But you get the general idea of where race relations were in this country 100 years ago.

✍

Well, this is a little off-topic, but since Fred Watson brought up Prohibition a couple cartoons ago, I'll close with one of Leslie Rogers's other regular features in Chicago Defender, a more or less non-topical panel titled "The Hardest Job in the World." 

"The Hardest Job in the World" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 20, 1926

Anyone who has had to live with dietary restrictions should understand.