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. The story about which he appears to be editorializing 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 and Cottrell 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 were 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.

Q Toon: Mutare Decisis

Amy Coney Barrett has been spending this week telling a Senate panel that as a nominee to the highest court in the land, she can't imagine how she might rule in cases involving abortion rights, gun control, the Affordable Care Act, or marriage equality,  or any of the other hot-button issues she has written about — not even whether Donald Trump can unilaterally postpone a federal election fergawdsake! — because the role of a Supreme Court Justice is not to prejudge cases before they come before the Court.

Meanwhile, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who no longer have any Senate confirmation hearings to worry about, just told the nation last week how eager they are to get a case before them that would allow them to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that established marriage equality under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Now that two of the five Justices who ruled in the majority are no longer on the Court, Thomas and Alito are not only telegraphing how they would rule in a case challenging Obergefell, they are openly inviting such a case to come their way.

If it seems peculiar that I should ignore the newest nominee to the Court to draw a cartoon about the Justice who has been around the longest, it's partly because opposition to the Coney Barrett nomination is already a lost cause, and always has been. So was opposition to the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and support of the nomination of Merrick Garland.

Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have been committed to packing the courts of this country, at every level, with right-wing activist judges come hell or high water. They have had a few disappointments along the way: Nixon named Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court to advocate aggressively for business interests, only to have Powell write the decision in Roe v. Wade. Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign pledge by putting Sandra Day O'Connor on the Court, only to have her earn a reputation as the swing vote there. Gerald Ford nominated John Paul Stevens, and George H.W. Bush named David Souter to the Court, only for them to side with the Court's liberals.

Right-wingers came together and vowed "No More Souters," and for thirty years — a full generation — there hasn't been. Republican senators scuttled George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers not over the issue of cronyism, but because she had not previously demonstrated a commitment to toeing the party line from the bench. So we got Thomas's fellow home-wrecker Samuel Alito instead.

If the present Coney Barrett nomination is a lost cause, the resistance to right-wing activism must look to the future. As the longest-serving Justice on the Court, Clarence Thomas may very well be the next to retire. But don't count on it; Justice Steven Breyer is ten years older than he.

What you can count on is that there will be at least one other Supreme Court appointment in the next four to eight years, and I for one would prefer to see a Democratic president when that happens, and — given Republican Senators who promised four years ago not to let Hillary Clinton fill any vacancies on the Court even if she won the 2016 election — a Democratic-majority Senate.

In the meantime, you can count on the Supreme Court to gut the Affordable Care Act, women's reproductive rights, gun control legislation, and marriage equality. That's what the mission of Republican court-packing has always been, confirmation hearings testimony notwithstanding. Again, I would prefer to see a Democratic president and a Democratic-majority Congress in office to pick up the pieces when those rulings come down.

But that's a discussion for another day. Shall we make it Saturday?

Q Toon: Gettin' Jiggery-Pokery With It

When I read Jen Sorensen's email about drawing a cartoon for Fusion about the Supreme Court's decision for marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, I only had time to draw one cartoon before her deadline and Q Syndicate's. (My drawing LGBT-themed cartoons for anyone other than Q Syndicate is also something of a contractual issue.) Had my time and my relationship with my editors been freer, I could easily have made two separate cartoons out of this one:

The idea on the left side of the cartoon is essentially a follow-up to the cartoon I drew last October illustrating Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s quotation about the arc of history bending toward justice. In an early sketch of this week's cartoon, the dissenting justices on the right side of the drawing were sitting on a porch in rocking chairs, shaking their fists at nothing in particular; no rainbow, no pot of gold wedding bands.

Now, I could argue that the rainbow clarifies what the topic of the cartoon is. The Supremes issued major rulings one on top of another last week, and people could get confused. (Heck, some people are sure to get confused. Chip Bok drew a cartoon yesterday about Justice Roberts's Obamacare ruling, and no small number of the commenters at GoComics thought it was somehow about marriage equality instead.)

I did, after all, include Justice Scalia's "jiggery-pokery" epithet in my cartoon, even though it came not from his Obergefell dissent but from his fulmination against Chief Justice Roberts's King v. Burwell opinion. I did try to find some equally obscure contumely in Scalia's Obergefell dissent to use instead, but Scalia had apparently misplaced his English-to-Flobbadob dictionary when writing it and settled for "Go ask a hippie."

By the way, when researching what I wanted to say in this blog entry, I looked up the dissenting opinions in the court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which ruled unconstitutional state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. I couldn't find any, because there were none. That court's ruling was unanimous.

Judging from the four, count 'em, four dissenting opinions in Obergefell, I'd be willing to bet that there would have been a dissenting opinion in Loving had Roberts, Scalia, Thomas or Alito traveled back in time to sit on the high court in 1967.

Q Toon: Virginia Is for Loving

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D) announced last week that his office would ask a federal court to find his states constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage to be a violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution -- a 180̊ turn from his Republican predecessor, jurisprude Ken Cuccinelli.

Mr. Herring cited legal cases in which he said Virginia’s leadership had failed its residents by arguing against school desegregation in Brown v. the Board of Education, interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia, and women’s admission to the Virginia Military Institute, a state-supported military college, in United States v. Virginia.
“Too many times in our history, our citizens have had to lead the way on civil rights while their leaders stood against them,” Mr. Herring said. “This will not be another instance. It is time for the commonwealth to be on the right side of history and the right side of the law.”

I've overlooked Virginia's laws against mixed-race marriage in this week's cartoon in favor of some sillier laws, even though the parallel with its laws mandating mixed-sex marriage is fairly obvious. My source for the other laws in the cartoon -- apparently still on the books -- is Dumb Laws in Virginia, where you'll find that an anti-bribery law exempts political candidates, it is illegal to hunt on Sunday unless you're after racoons, and the women of Norfolk are required to wear corsets after sundown.

Q Toon: Maryland! My Maryland!

The cause of marriage equality in Maryland was dealt a surprise setback last week when the state House of Representatives unexpectedly failed to pass a bill that had already passed in the more conservative Senate. Lacking enough support to pass, the bill was sent back to the Judiciary Committee -- a committee that had almost killed the bill the week before.

From an editorial in the Washington Blade:

A couple of political careers likely imploded during this process, including those of Dels. Jill Carter (D-Baltimore City) and Sam Arora (D-Montgomery County). Carter and Del. Tiffany Alston stunned backers of the Civil Marriage Protection Act by staying away from a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee in which a vote on the marriage bill was scheduled to take place, and announced they would not vote on the measure until Democratic leaders paid more attention to other issues they feel are equally important. Both Carter and Alston are co-sponsors of the marriage bill. Where was House Speaker Michael Busch when we needed him to keep these selfish renegades in line?

And Arora, who campaigned as a supporter of marriage equality and accepted financial contributions from LGBT people across the state and beyond, also yanked his support, triggering a flood of angry responses on his Facebook page and calls for him to refund those donations. Arora represents liberal Montgomery County. And his betrayal represents the end of his young political career.

A major factor in the debacle was the opposition from African-American delegates, pressured by clergy in their districts, who took offense at LGBT claims that marriage equality is a "civil rights issue." From the Baltimore Sun:

Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr. delivered the day's longest speech, blasting same-sex marriage supporters for calling the issue one of civil rights.
"Those who want to ride on our coattails are historically incorrect," said Burns, an African-American Democrat from Baltimore County. He said gay people had not endured the struggles of blacks, had not had crosses burned on their lawns or been thrown in a police wagon.

I drew about this argument several years ago:



To comment on race relations is to step into a mine field, at least if you're a person of no color; no less if one is a cartoonist putting words into the mouths of other people. The United States has a shameful history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation and pervasive discrimination against African Americans (which continues today in the stubborn refusal of many people to accept the overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama is in fact a natural born citizen and duly elected President of the United States). But I cannot accept the idea that my civil rights are not civil rights because the term "civil rights" is the exclusive property of African Americans. Are women's civil rights "historically incorrect" because crosses weren't burned on their lawns?

The U.S. Supreme Court has had to address marriage equality before. Within my lifetime (and the lifetime of President Obama and every member of the current Court), it was illegal in many states for persons of different races to marry. If Loving v. Virginia was not a civil rights case, what was it?

The Court rejected the state's argument that the statute was legitimate because it applied equally to both blacks and whites and found that racial classifications were not subject to a "rational purpose" test under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also held that the Virginia law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Under our Constitution," wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."

Each struggle for civil rights has something to differentiate it from other struggles -- gas chambers, rape, employment discrimination, having one's land taken away or being taken away from one's land. There are also things that we have in common. Contrary to Rev. Burns, we were indeed thrown in the backs of police wagons. Likewise, antebellum laws did not recognize slaves' marriage rights. To focus solely on the differences is as pointless as suggesting that the experiences of African-Americans in Hawai'i made them less deserving of civil rights than African-Americans in Mississippi.