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| [1] March 16, 1946 |
At the end of the First World War Negro servicemen returned
home confident that their patriotism would be rewarded with equality, a dream
which was rudely shattered by reality. The Second World War led to similar
hopes, but this time returning soldiers demands would lead directly to the
Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties. Most Negro cartoonists whose
work appeared in the African American press had been soldiers who served their
country with honor, men who returned home expecting change only to find the
same closed doors that prevailed before the war. Editorial cartoonists such as
Elmer Simms Campbell and Robert S. Pious began drawing protest against the
status quo directly into their editorial cartoons, pointedly attacking Jim
Crow, lynching, and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan.
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| [2] March 22, 1947 |
E. Simms Campbell was the first black cartoonist to hit “the
big-time” by breaking the color line in commercial art. He drew a comic called
‘Elmer Stoner’ for the pulps, a syndicated one-panel called ‘Cuties,’ and
became one of the most popular “good girl” artists of the forties in the pages
of Esquire magazine. Another black cartoonist, Matt Baker, was concurrently
breaking the color line – in comic books. Cartoonist Teddy Shearer, who drew
the comic strips ‘The Hills’ and ‘Quincy’, recalled in 1953 that
“…about fifteen years ago, I
met the man who was to become one of the trail blazers in this business of
ours, Elmer (E. Simms) Campbell. I was seventeen then, with a little talent and
a great many dreams, and E. Simms, with his generous good humor, encouraged the
talent and fired the dreams.
Those were the early days of
his association with Esquire magazine; an association which was viewed with
awesome pride by most of the Negro public.”
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| [3] January 1, 1949 |
In 1939, about the time Shearer first met him Campbell was
living in a palatial house in Worthington, New York and his yearly income was
estimated at $30,000. His wife shot herself in the library room in 1939,
leaving the cartoonist to raise their first child, a toddler, alone. In a crass move the Baltimore African American pictured the event in a 4 panel cartoon on June 17, 1939.
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| [4] March 2, 1946 |
Robert S. Pious followed his artistic dreams from
Mississippi to St. Louis, Missouri, from there to Chicago and on to Harlem,
where he became a noted portrait painter. In Chicago Pious drew illustrations
for Bronzeman’s National Magazine and supplied commercial art for Murray’s
Superior Hair Product Co. He recalled taking up the pencil at seven years of
age in St. Louis.
“My mother threatened many
times to deprive me of room and board. At night I used oil lamps to draw in
order not to attract her attention and my teachers were forever communicating
with mother, due to the lack of interest I showed in my assigned subjects.”
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| [5] September 21, 1946 |
In 1948 Pious drew an educational comic strip called ‘Facts
on the Heroes in World War Two,’ narrated by St. Clair T. Bourne, for the
African American press. He also did illustrations for MacFadden publications.
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| [6] August 3, 1946 |
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| [7] October 12, 1946 |
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| [8] April 6, 1946 |
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| [9] August 17, 1946 |
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| [10] August 12, 1946 |
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| [11] January 26, 1946 |
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| [12] November 16, 1946 |
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| [13] March 14, 1946 |
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| [14] February 9 1946 |
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| [15] March 25, 1947 |
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| [16] May 8, 1945 |
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| [17] Robert S. Pious 1953 Lucky Strike advertisement |
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