We continue our African American History Month comics, with a collection of Civil Rights cartoons.

Above, The Exodus from Dixie, by Robert Minor, Jr., originally published in the June 1923 issue of The Liberator, and reprinted in the 1926 collection, Red Cartoons.

Click on the above cartoon, to view it in more detail.

Below, the cover of the circa 1957-58 comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, used to teach methods and examples of peaceful civil disobedience. I originally had planned to scan my copy in its entirety, but then found that numerous websites already have. So…

Click on the below cover image, to be taken to a complete copy of this comic.

Below, You Can’t Vote, Yer Too Ignorant, by artist Jacob Burck. First published in the Daily Worker, November 29th, 1927, and reprinted in the book, Red Cartoons 1928.

Next, below, and directly referencing the same events found in the Martin Luther King comic book above — Iron Curtain, by Fred Ellis. Published September 22nd, 1957, in the Daily Worker. Found in the book, Worker — 36 Years of Drawings.

Also from Worker — 36 Years of Drawing, comes The Southern Cross, by cartoonist Art Young.

Finally, on the subject of “peonage” (forced labor in a state of near-slavery), we have the below June 30th, 1927 cartoon by Don Brown in the Daily Worker — The Great Mississippi Flood Exposes Peonage. It references an infamous episode from 1927, in which thousands of African Americans in forced work-gangs, labored at gunpoint against the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. then were abandoned to the flood waters.

Doug Wheeler

BlackHistory Ku Klux Klan