Turner wouldn’t feel that way again for a long time. In four short months, his hero Martin Luther King Jr. would be dead. In seven, Wee Pals’s audience would increase tenfold. After that, Turner said, “I didn’t know how to feel.”
Racism, Albert Camus once said, is absurd. Chester Himes famously elaborated, “Racism generating from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism. Absurdity to combat absurdity.”14
THE KIDS GET COLORIZED
Above Turner’s desk hung an original 1946 Blondie strip from Chic Young and an original 1965 Gordo strip from the pioneering Mexican American cartoonist Gus Arriola, gifts from each. Shortly after Turner’s syndicated debut, Arriola decided to give the new guy some advice. He took a piece of tracing paper and copied Turner’s strip. He placed big X’s over all of the superfluous background Turner had drawn—the trees with their knotted bark and careful leafage, the picket fences to nowhere. Turner had wanted to impress his fellow cartoonists with his skill. But Arriola was letting him know to prepare to be doing this for a long time.
Hanging in the center of Turner’s living room wall was a Sunday strip original of Steve Canyon, a December 7 memorial from 1969 that opened with a splash panel of an exploding Pearl Harbor battleship. It was a gift from Milton Caniff, the skilled draftsman and storyteller, one of America’s most famous midcentury Orientalists, and Turner’s early mentor.15
On one end of the wall was a 1966 strip from John Liney, who took over the duties of drawing Carl Anderson’s bald-headed boy, Henry, after Anderson’s death. In this strip, Henry is walking home when he passes a furniture store sign that says, “Add Some Color to Your Living Room.” He encounters his father snoring in an easy chair. By the final panel, he has decorated his still snoozing father in an American Indian headdress. On the other end of the living room hung a single-panel Graffiti by Leary strip done by Bill Leary in the early Seventies. On a white wall someone has paint-brushed in black: “Morrie Turner Sees Everything in Black and White.”
Turner actually found it vexing to move beyond black and white. The palettes for the Sunday color pages were constraining; only a pinkish tone was called “flesh.” Presenting the skin tones of a polycultural cast, especially a range of Black characters, was a weekly problem. Nipper might be rendered in a muddy brown, Randy in orange, Mikki in purple. When Turner complained, the syndicate asked him, “Did you get your check?” Turner registered his protest in four panels. “Boy!” Oliver mused in the final one. “The manufacturers of flesh-colored Band-Aids would go broke in this neighborhood!”
The 1970s were about to begin. Sly Stone, the Bay Area flower child who had ooo-sha-sha’d about everyday people, was now singing “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey.” In a decade, protests would break out in the Bronx over the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx and at a downtown Manhattan gallery against an exhibition of charcoal works called The Nigger Drawings, perhaps the Lexington and Concord of the multiculturalist art movement.
But in Wee Pals, Turner’s vision of multiculturalism aspired to be patient, innocent, unhardened. He knew that casting kids allowed him some freedom. “If a Black kid was saying it, it was funny,” Turner said. “But if a Black man was saying it, it would be fighting time.” He drew five boys walking down the street, side by side, having this conversation:
Rocky: “Red Power!”
Paul: “Brown Power!”
Randy: “Black Power!”
George: “Yellow Power!”
Jerry: “Bagel Power!”
Randy: “Bagel Power?”
Most of Wee Pals’s punch lines hinged on cultural misunderstandings and mistranslations. But conflict could be defused by common sense and collective action. After one meeting of the neighborhood club, the boys counted their dues and decided to buy ice cream with the surplus. As they slurped up their reward, Diz, a Black boy sporting a black beret, kente cloth shirt, and Wayfarer glasses, said to the others, “There’s gold at the end of Rainbow Power!” The idea seemed to migrate from the funnies into the movement when the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots announced a coalition of the same name in the summer of 1969.
Kid Power! paperback cover. Published July 1970. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.
By 1972, Turner had four top-selling paperback collections out and had attracted the interest of cartoon powerhouse Rankin/Bass and ABC. Suddenly there were writers, producers, voice actors, casting agents, Japanese animators, and lots of execs. There were recording sessions and toy deals and lunch boxes, an album and a stage musical, and trips to New York City for meetings in which he was given a seat at the table and the right to be ignored, which studio heads exercised often.
The Kid Power cartoon, named after one of the book collections, first aired on Saturday mornings in September 1972 on ABC, opposite Bill Cosby’s CBS cartoon Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. The cartoon lasted seventeen episodes before being canceled in an executive shake-up at ABC.
But the comic strip continued to be influential. To fill the extra space afforded by the Sunday strip, he and Letha began Soul Corner, a box devoted to documenting the lives of great African Americans. Turner had anticipated multiculturalism’s obsession with positive representation and America’s fetishization of diversity.16
His crossover success made him a minor celebrity. He accepted a proffer to serve on President Richard Nixon’s White House Conference on Children and Youth. (It came not long after he published a cartoon in Negro Digest in which an Afroed woman looked up from her newspaper to ask her husband, “You mean President Nixon will only listen to me if I’m silent?”) He often traveled with John Madden and Daryle Lamonica’s Oakland Raiders. It was nearing the end of the era in which newspaper cartoonists were rock stars.
Soon, he said, “I was no longer alone representing the race.” During the eighties, with the rise of multiculturalism, Black cartoonists made breakthroughs, including Ray Billingsley (Curtis), Robb Armstrong (Jump Start), and Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From). All three had substantial success by Wee Pals standards. Both Curtis and Jump Start were featured in over two hundred papers, double the number Wee Pals had at its peak. Morrie’s kids still dressed the same way they had always dressed, played the way they had always played, spoke about the things they had always spoken about. Turner finally felt free to be just a cartoonist, without the modifier “Black.”
THE PRICE OF CROSSING OVER
In April 1999, Aaron McGruder, a prodigy from Maryland’s Black suburbs, launched The Boondocks. In that uniquely hip-hop-generation kind of way, he seemed to want to impress people and piss them off at the same time. The Boondocks had one of the most successful syndicated comic strip launches ever, opening in 160 newspapers. But soon enough, some readers began complaining the strip was “racist,” “angry,” “gangsta-oriented garbage.”
Six weeks after the launch, his modest Web site’s guestbook had exploded in flames, with commenters debating interracial marriage, racial stereotypes, whether the strip was anti-white, whether it harmed Black children’s self-esteem. McGruder seemed both satisfied and worried. He said, “I will regularly do whatever the hell I want to do.”
But he also added, “You try not to let it affect your work. You hope it doesn’t, but at the same time when you look at some place, like, damn, if I lose Chicago I lose three million readers on Sunday alone.…” McGruder embodied the opportunity and ambiguity of the post-multicultural moment. When the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers dropped The Boondocks over reader complaints, McGruder was twenty-five years old.
Turner noticed McGruder’s strips—as his had been—were meticulously plotted and lavishly drawn. He remembered the way white editors had regarded Wee Pals with disdain or disinterest, and sometimes disgust. He recalled how Caniff, Schulz, and Arriola had encouraged him. So he wrote a letter to McGruder to pass on the kind of advice he had once received. “Keep the faith,” Turner concluded, his standard parting words to good friends. McGru
der did not reply. Perhaps he was overwhelmed. Perhaps he was just busy. By the end of the year, The Boondocks had matched the readerships of Curtis and Jump Start. At its peak it appeared in three hundred newspapers.
In a time of turmoil, Turner’s kids had been earnest and lighthearted. Their message was that everyone wanted equality, they could work it out, and no one need be uncivil in the process. McGruder’s kids were products of the hypocrisies of a post–civil rights America, armed and armored with irony and attitude. Toward the failed promises of the civil rights generation and multiculturalism, the shuck-n-jive of hip-hop capitalists, the fake racial innocence of the nation, they declared their right to be hostile.
McGruder’s kids lived in a suburb that had long passed the racial tipping point. But they were hemmed in by clueless white exurban America on one side and aimless mixed-up urban America on the other. Turner’s kids had aspired to a dream of equality and harmony. McGruder’s kids mocked the dream, but their bravado also seemed to mask a profound sense that something dear had been lost. What was the price of crossing over? More money, more problems, more confusion about those problems?
On a rainy evening in 2007, I was scheduled to interview McGruder before a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center. I brought Morrie Turner backstage so that they could meet for the first time. They greeted each other with a warm hug.
They had a lot in common. Both dressed like cartoonists—they seemed to have put on whatever wasn’t stinking up the hamper that morning. McGruder, whose father was an air traffic controller, told Turner that he might have been a pilot had he not decided in high school to do comic strips. Although he had famously “censored” his own strips with “The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon” to mock the jingoistic, patriotic fervor after 9/11, McGruder spoke passionately of wanting to work on George Lucas’s then-long-rumored Tuskegee Airmen project, Red Tails. Turner took hold of McGruder’s arm, telling him, “I was in the 477th.” McGruder’s jaw dropped.
Turner asked whether McGruder was bringing back the comic strip. It was a sincere question, but Turner may not have understood it was also loaded. No cartoonist had ever attained the kind of star status McGruder had. People magazine had named him one of the country’s most eligible bachelors. In a Wolfe-ian New Yorker profile, he was portrayed as a latter-day Black Panther mau-mauing an audience of uptown white liberals.
In 2005, The Boondocks became the cornerstone of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming. McGruder had long fled his own Maryland boondocks for the twilight velocity of Los Angeles, where he kept an office full of Bruce Lee and Star Wars memorabilia and a staff of young hip-hop heads who helped him create his half-hour shows. When the TV series debuted, McGruder had already been subcontracting most of the artistic duties of the daily strip. In March 2006, the syndicate began reruns. By September, the syndicate announced that McGruder had ended the strip.
“Newspapers are dying. No one reads them anymore,” McGruder told Turner. “I had to think about my career.”
After our onstage interview, McGruder took a seat in the lobby to sign books and DVDs for hundreds of fans. Turner entertained a group of young Black and white cartoonists. As the lines wound down, I brought McGruder over and we snapped some photos for posterity. The two cartoonists clasped hands again. “Keep the faith,” Turner told McGruder. Then he pulled his old body up, leaned on his walking cane, and started toward the parking garage elevator. McGruder slipped his hoodie over his head and stepped alone into the wet night to find the chartered limousine that would take him back to his hotel.
A year later, a dozen young Black, Latino, and white cartoonists—led by Cory Thomas (Watch Your Head) and including Lalo Alcaraz (La Cucaracha), Darrin Bell (Candorville), and Keith Knight (The K Chronicles)—held what they called a “Sunday comics page sit-in,” using their strips to protest the continuing lack of cartoonists of color in the newspapers.17 After The Boondocks left the comics pages, a Washington Post Writers Group study found that of the 238 comic strips in syndication, only 17 were drawn by cartoonists of color or featured characters of color. More than three-quarters of the 1,413 newspapers surveyed did not run a single one of those strips.18
But McGruder surprised many by taking the side of the newspaper editors. He had always seen himself as a realist, not an idealist or a radical. “Despite the hurdles and the issues of race, I was given more than a fair shot,” McGruder said. “It’s like [the cartoonists are] the Black passengers on the Titanic protesting to get to the top deck, and overlooking the fact that the whole ship is sinking.”
In 2003, when Turner turned eighty, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cartoonists Society. It was not clear that there would still be a National Cartoonists Society when McGruder turned eighty. It seemed even less clear that the country might ever be able to discuss race in the way the Wee Pals did—with empathy, humor, and hope.
One summer day in 2009, over his favorite meal, a waffle at Lois the Pie Queen in North Oakland, Turner discussed whether President Obama’s election had changed the way Americans saw race. He had been watching these screaming white protestors on his digital cable color television, but feeling like he was back in 1961. They didn’t look so different from the screaming white protestors he had watched on his old black-and-white. He was thankful he had been able to see a Black man elected to the presidency in his lifetime. But what had changed? Was America still an ideal worth dying for, worth hoping for?
“It used to be that lower-class whites wanted to keep Blacks down because they had certain jobs that were theirs. But that’s gone ’cause there’s no profit in it,” he said. “But yet prejudice still remains. Why?”
For almost half a century, day after day, Turner had drawn his children asking variations of the same question. What other question was so absurd, so rich in comic potential? What other question was there to ask?
Sunday strip, September 16, 1984. Courtesy of Morrie Turner. The Mackites, of course, are the Oakland Athletics.
Die by Faith Ringgold. American People Series #20. 1967. Oil on canvas, 72 × 144 in. In the Artist’s Collection represented by ACA Galleries, NYC. © Faith Ringgold 1967.
CHAPTER 2
AFTER JERICHO
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST INVISIBILITY
I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then?
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
At the end of September 1956, the nation was still only beginning to deal with the implications of the far-reaching Brown v. Board of Education decision, a Jericho moment when the walls trembled, made imaginable by the clarion calls from the culture: the Southern Black church, pop radio, the baseball diamond.
It would still be almost eight years before a civil rights bill would reach President Lyndon B. Johnson’s desk. By then it was clear that even if “separate but equal” had been declared dead before the law, true integration would require much more. Culture would yet need to move the nation forward out of formal segregation toward its colorized future.
That future lay far ahead. At the end of September 1956, the young preacher Martin Luther King Jr. had been heading the tiny Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, for only twenty-eight months. It had been only ten months since the local NAACP chapter secretary, Rosa Parks, had refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, the precipitating event of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It had been just eight months since King had been arrested and his home bombed by white supremacists.
Boycotts were spreading across the South. Some municipalities were explicitly outlawing segregation, but Montgomery’s white elite vowed to hold the line. King, as the head and spokesperson of the Montgomery Improvement Association, had suddenly become a national, even international, figure. He toured the United States to explain the Association’s cause and raise money for their efforts, to tell the nation why he and the civil rights marchers found it “more honorable to walk in dignity than
ride in humiliation.”1 So it was that King found himself the single Black passenger on an airplane flight to Norfolk, Virginia, on September 27.
When his connecting flight departed from Atlanta it developed generator trouble and was forced to turn back. King had begun a conversation with a white passenger, a moment that King found significant—two men connecting across the gap of segregation—and as they deplaned and headed back into the terminal they were informed that repairs would take three hours. They were handed lunch tickets to the airport’s restaurant, the Dobbs House.
This concession was already notorious—its “Song of the South” theme was hard to miss. A portly, white-bearded Black man in an old suit sat out front next to a high bale of cotton, a low table set before him with a box of cigars and a dinner bell. His job was to greet guests, and sometimes entertain them with a tune or a tale.
A March 1955 issue of Jet featured a picture of this smiling “Remus Alfonso Smith” with a caption that concluded, “Negroes, using airport facilities during airport stopovers, have termed [this] sight ‘disgusting.’”2 When King retold this story to audiences, he admitted that it outraged him. “He’s the symbol of a dying off,” King would say, “an order which is passing away, and every time I look at him I see that.”3
At the host area, the headwaiter separated King from his white companion and led King to a small, curtained compartment in the rear of the restaurant. Realizing what was happening, King declared he would rather starve than eat under such conditions. He went back to take a seat in the main dining room. There he waited vainly to be served. In the Dobbs House, King was no fearsome civil rights firebrand, the scourge of the racist white South. He was just another invisible man.
King grew angry. The white hostess was apologetic, declared herself embarrassed. Some of the Black waitstaff quietly told him they would serve as witnesses if he were to file a lawsuit. He went to find the manager. And this incident—which, by the standards of his community’s fight to integrate the buses of Montgomery, was so small and insignificant—led to an epiphany for King. It became a central story in many speeches he would give in the years before the March on Washington.
Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659) Page 4