Comics’ ‘Golden Age’ was awfully white

The same week the NAACP issued an advisory about traveling to Florida, where Amanda Gorman’s stirring poem “The Hill We Climb” was banned from a grade school, I received two new books that restore respect to African American artists who’ve worked in cartoons and comic books.

 

Florida has passed laws “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the NAACP said, adding that Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by, African Americans and other communities of color.”

Challenges may be new (or renewed) in Florida, but racism limited work and recognition for many for decades, including the talents producing comic books and cartoons.

“Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics,” edited by Qiana Whitted, is a 358-page trade paperback featuring 15 essays about almost-forgotten artists in that Golden Age – which was pretty white.

Obviously, reality is more complicated than clumsy, but hurtful images were too common for too long.

From the 1930s through the ’50s, cartoons and comic books were immensely popular, in Peoria on shelves at Ben Franklin and the Book Emporium, plus wire racks at Rexall drugstores, plus Black newspapers. Like the rest of U.S. society, African American fans enjoyed comics. Unfortunately, however, comics frequently reflected biases derived from Jim Crow and the entire painful history after Reconstruction was dropped. So, many readers asked publishers to eliminate the frequent representation of race and stereotypical, even crude, depictions of Black people.

Whitted’s anthology of observations and analyses by 15 esteemed academics from around the world, including three from Illinois, is somewhat scholarly but well-researched and readable. Besides assessments of artists profiled and their backgrounds, it delves into years of dialogue between readers, artists, distributors and publishers, and the debates that eventually started steps to show fuller pictures of life, history and even fantasy.

“Desegregating Comics” features tales about the original Lobo, the 1965 title about a “Buffalo Soldier” who becomes a cowboy; biographical comics about 1950s figures such as real-life ballplayer Roy Campanella and fictional spaceman/adventurer “Neil Knight of the Air” (whose storylines included one with a villain called “The Trump”); “All Negro Comics”; and “Negro Romance.”

Two pioneers stand out. The first, Alvin Hollingsworth, was born in Harlem and from the age of 12 worked in comic books alongside legends Joe Kubert, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in war, romance, crime, horror and adventure titles. His first signed work was the story “Robot Plane”: in 1945, and a year later he created the character Bronze Man in “Blue Beetle.” But when the comic was printed, the publisher had changed the superhero’s skin color (!). Eventually, he worked on the aerial adventure strip “Scorchy Smith” and did his own syndicated comic strip in the mid-1950s, “Kandy” – an action-driven blend of adventure, romance and sports featuring young engineer Kandy McKay, co-owner of an auto-racing business with her dad and boyfriend. In retirement, Hollingsworth became an avant-garde painter working with a group of artists supporting the Civil Rights Movement, and a professor.

The other standout here was Jackie Ormes, who was born in Monongahela, Pa., and moved to Pittsburgh, where she was a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, which became the nation’s most prominent Black newspaper, with a circulation of more than 350,000 from coast to coast by 1947. There, Ormes worked alongside author Zora Neale Hurston during the novelist’s stint as a Courier investigative reporter. Ormes gradually achieved her real goal, comics, and at the Courier and later at the Chicago Defender, Ormes “used her pioneering comics as a form of progressive Black journalism,” wrote scholar H. Zahra Caldwell, “using a Black female voice and citing Black women’s concerns.” Throughout Ormes’ work, most of her characters were Black or brown, and her storylines addressed the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban north, Civil Rights, and more – all with a light, biting touch.

The second book, “Jackie Ormes Draws the Future: The Remarkable Life of a Pioneering Cartoonist,” is a 40-page hardback children’s book by writer/illustrator/cartoonist Liz Montague.

As Montague shows, Ormes is an inspiration for youngsters with dreams despite obstacles or setbacks. For instance, she endured personal grief: Her father was killed in a car wreck when she was 6 years old; her daughter passed at the age of 3.

As an adult, Ormes’ various characters were bright and confident strong role models with a political edge. In 1937, her “Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem,” about a small-town Southern girl to moves to New York City to find fame as a Cotton Club entertainer, made Ormes the country’s first Black woman with a national comic strip. In the 1940s, she was a Defender reporter and in 1945 created a one-panel cartoon, “Candy,” about a wisecracking maid. Soon, she returned to the Courier and launched “Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger,” about a lively, thoughtful  girl and her big sister, a single-panel cartoon continuing for 11 years. In the mid-’50s, she revived her Torchy character in “Torchy in Heartbeats,” where the independent young women sought romance with a Black doctor while organizing to stop a chemical plant from polluting the water around the Black neighborhood Southville.

Ahead of her time, she ventured into merchandising, designing the popular Black doll Patty-Jo, a chic alternative to the cliched dolls then marketed to African American families.

In retirement, Ormes was stricken with arthritis, forcing her to stop drawing, but she devoted the rest of her life to produce fund-raising fashion shows and served on the board of he DuSable Museum of African American History.

Finally, a slow collaboration between the creative and business sides – and fans – changed storytelling and caricatures, yielding figures such as Marvel’s Luke Cage and Black Panther, and DC’s Cyborg and Black Lightning. But it was a long struggle that should be remembered.

Contemporary Black comic-strip artists and characters have been successful

“Curtis,” from Ray Billingsley, starting in 1988.

“Jump Start,” by Robb Armstrong, launched in 1989.

“Knight Life” (and spinoffs “K Chronicles” and “(Th)ink,” all by Keith Knight, started in the early 1990s.

“Wee Pals,” by Morris Turner, ran from 1965 to 2014.

 

(All except “Curtis” are online at no charge at gocomics.com)

 

Business gets GOP to OK child labor

Kris Kristofferson’s song “Bobby McGee,” best known as sung by Janis Joplin, has the line “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

This Independence Day, Republicans emboldened by the U.S. House’s Right-wing Freedom Caucus are ensuring children could increasingly face losing their health and education and who knows what else.

Taking effect July 1 in Iowa is the latest attack on labor in general and kids in particular.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on May 26 signed a bill to eliminate many child-labor protections – creating a state law that violates federal statutes, too.

U.S. Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda said the legislation “appears to be inconsistent with federal child-labor law in several respects.”

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) “establishes federal standards with respect to child labor, and states cannot nullify federal requirements by enacting less protective standards,” the agency wrote. “Therefore, if Iowa law were to conflict with the FLSA and the Department’s regulations by permitting minors to work in occupations and during or for hours that they are otherwise prohibited from working under federal law, those state law provisions would be inconsistent with FLSA.”

Nanda added that the U.S. Department of Labor – which has current investigations of breaking child-labor laws numbering about 600 – “will continue to closely monitor the status of child-labor laws in Iowa and their potential ramifications for federal child labor law enforcement.”

Despite such clear warning, Republican lawmakers continue to use political power to prioritize business interests and force their beliefs on others.

In Iowa and nine other states (Arkansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee) business has lobbied for the dramatic changes.

“It helps fill a need,” Reynolds told Iowa Public Radio, meaning the jobs that employers can’t fill because of low wages, unsafe working conditions and lousy management.

So Iowa’s version will let young teens work later and longer, work in jobs currently prohibited (in meat freezers, serving liquor, selling fireworks, working in demolition and excavating, for instance).

Only Republicans voted for Iowa’s measure, and two Republicans joined all Democrats in opposing the legislation.

The GOP is not just interfering with businesses that don’t kowtow to extremist conservatives’ agenda (from Disney to everyday retailers who during the pandemic asked workers and customers to show proof of vaccinations). They’re eager to limit regular Americans’ free expression and education.

“I don’t think it is a coincidence at all that the same groups that we are seeing attempt to roll back child-labor laws are also the same groups that are part of this relentless attack on public education and, more broadly, public institutions,” said Nina Mast, a state economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute. “These goals are part of the Right-wing agenda that’s attempting to dismantle policies in place to regulate labor, institutions in place to serve the public and educate our children.”

Thus harming education, such efforts apparently show that the GOP values cheap labor more than well-rounded adults.

The nation dealt with child labor in the early 20^th century, when it became a social crisis. In 1911, for example, statistics showed some 2 million children were working – many in 12-hour days.

“Textbooks, ever since the middle of the 20th century, have been applauding the reform movement that gradually put an end to the child-labor horrors that ran widespread throughout the early Industrial Age,” comments Sam Pizzigati of the Institute for Policy Studies. “Now those horrors, here in the 21st century, are reappearing.”

Such backward actions are just another way to let employers break federal law. Children will pay the price.

Teamsters could take on UPS

Most important national news stories aren’t just something happening elsewhere, but locally.

Everywhere.

One of the summer’s most important stories is that a Teamsters strike at UPS could be just six weeks away. It would be not only the first UPS strike since 185,000 workers walked out in 1997, but the biggest work stoppage of the 21st century, involving more than 340,000 workers.

In West Central Illinois, Teamsters leader Gregory Wheet, President of Teamsters Local 627 in Peoria, is watching developments closely.

“All Teamster agreements have a clause that protects members for honoring picket lines,” Wheet tells the Labor Paper. “I am not involved in negotiations, but what I’m hearing is the bargaining unit is sick and tired of the workload that they have to endure and, yes, they will picket if they have to.”

The Teamsters’ contract talks with UPS, the nation’s largest unionized private-sector employer, could be a defining moment in the struggle for family-sustaining jobs. Despite its enormous profits, UPS is managing its workers to extremes, demanding six-day work weeks from some full-timers while part-timers can be paid just $15.50 an hour for 3.5-hour shifts.

“We won’t really know until mid-July where things are at, but I think there’s obviously a different model that UPS wants to impose on its workforce,” said Joe Allen, a former Teamster in Chicago and Massachusetts for almost 10 years and author of “The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS.”

“People call it ‘Uberization,’ or the digitizing of the UPS workforce,” he continued. “They want a much more casual workforce.”

UPS, once known as United Parcel Service, dates to 1907 when teenager James Casey started a bicycle messenger service in Seattle, expanding to packages in 1919. Later, Casey invited the Teamsters to represent its labor force.

Today, headquartered in Atlanta, UPS delivers about 24 million items a day, according to the Pitney Bowes logistics company. That’s some 6% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, UPS says – millions more packages than a few years ago.

That’s boosted UPS’ yearly profits to about three times what they were before COVID – $8.6 billion in shareholder dividends and stock buybacks on $100 billion in revenues last year alone, and economists forecast $8.4 billion more this year.

Teamsters at UPS have serious issues:

■ time, particularly the pressure to make x-amount of stops a day,

■ company surveillance,

■ safety and working conditions in trucks that are sweltering or freezing, depending on the season,

■ forced overtime and split shifts,

■ improving pay for part-timers,

■ independent contractors such as using Personal Vehicle Drivers (PDV), and, especially,

■ the two-tier wage system that separates workers’ pay, benefits and hours, from clause 22.4 in the current contract, which expires July 31.

 

“The two-tier wage scale is a big issue for UPS as well as other workers across the country,” Wheet says.

Other carriers such as FedEx and DHL aren’t likely to accept more than about 10% of the daily volume from existing customers, according to Mark Solomon from the industry magazine FreightWaves, so there could be chaos in commerce.

But UPS CEO Carol Tome in an earnings call last summer downplayed the tension, saying, “Our goal with the Teamsters is win-win-win.”

Still, she ordered managers not to take time off in July or August and has indicated plans to try to keep operating with management employees and scabs.

“As far as what the corporate guys claim they will do if a strike happens,” Wheet says, “they should be thinking about the issues that their workforce is telling them and sit down and negotiate accordingly.”

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has about 1.2 million members – and about one-fourth of them work at UPS’ package division or warehouses.

In 1997’s 15-day strike, the Teamsters won 10,000 additional full-time jobs and significant wage increases. In 2018, however, a Tentative Agreement was voted down by the rank and file, but the union’s administration – led by James Hoffa for almost 25 years – imposed it, with the two-tier language.

After the controversial move, Sean O’Brien – a fourth-generation Teamster who’d led Boston’s Local 25 since 2006 – broke with the Hoffa team and easily won the Teamsters presidency as the insurgent candidate and revived the membership, especially at UPS.

“The days of concessions and walking all over our members are over,” O’Brien said. “We’re going into these negotiations with a clear message to UPS that we’re not going past August 1.

 “It’s going to get bloody. It’s going to get painful,” O’Brien warned business leaders. “So, ice up, because when you take one of us on, you take all of us on. If you are corporate America and you want to take us on, put your helmet on and buckle your chinstrap, because it’s a full-contact sport.”

In Peoria – where Wheet makes clear Local 627 doesn’t represent UPS workers – he stresses the union’s unity.

“The Teamster union [locals] have one thing in common and that is solidarity,” he says. “We support all brothers and sisters who are on strike, trying to make a better life for their family.

“Currently, all labor organizations are inspired, and workers have had enough of taking it on the chin,” Wheet continues. “If the workers at UPS have to strike, it would have big implications nationwide, when you consider everything that they deliver each day.”

The implications go beyond the disruption of one corporation, said Allen, the ex-Teamster writer.

“A strike at UPS not only has the potential of putting into motion something like 340,000 workers, and shutting down a very important corporation,” he said. “It has the possibility of elevating the struggles that we’ve already begun to see throughout the industrial sector of the economy and some of the new organizing and the possibility of injecting that spirit and organizing into the larger non-union sector of the logistics industry, most notably Amazon.

“The potential for building a new industrial labor movement is here,” Allen added.

Back in Peoria, at Local 627’s building off Allen Road, Wheet adds, “The American worker, union and non-union alike, is fed up with Corporate America, and they feel it is time act to make a better life for them and their families!”