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CHAPTER 4 The Victims The next mob may get me or may get you. -William J. Butler, white Springfield attorney. Illinois State Register, 19 August 1908. I ain't got a thing left in the world but my panama hat. -James "Dandy Jim" Smith, black saloonkeeper. Illinois State Journal, 16 August 1908. I N mid-July, about two weeks after Clergy Ballard's death, Springfield 's Illinois State Journal added a new comic strip to its Sunday entertainment section, Sambo and His Funny Noises. Sambo's debut was not the first time this newspaper or others in Springfield caricatured blacks or foreigners. Neither was Springfield's comic-strip population of slow-witted, bumbling Germans or infantile and cowardly blacks unusual in early twentieth-century America. Such cartoon creatures were merely one expression of the racial and ethnic stereotypes that pervaded American culture all over the nation. 1 TheJournal's new character Sambo displays many traits calculated to amuse a white readership. An ink-black child of indeterminate age, Sambo is silly, pretentious, sneaky, and cowardly. He often wears loud or outlandish clothing. He speaks in what his white creator took to be black dialect, and his speech is replete with "yo'aIls" and "yassahs." Sambo embodies comic stereotypes of blacks common in this period , but another, more covert theme emerges from his antics in the Sunday entertainment section: Sambo is usually a victim, a moving target for white aggression. The comic's other main characters are two white boys, lower-class urchins, whose varied attacks on Sambo provide the dramatic action for most of the stories. In Sambo and His Funny Noises one can see a miniature, sanitized, but perpetual interracial conflict acted out in the Journal's Sunday comics. It is an unequal battle. Not only are there always two whites against one black, The Victims 125 but when attacked, Sambo may not retaliate in kind. While the white boys frequently belabor him with bricks or clubs studded with nails, Sambo has to resort to his wits, or, more frequently, to his heels. An armed black, however tiny, probably would not have impressed white readers as "funny." Sambo occasionally gets token revenge on his little tormentors by playing pranks on them. For example, knowing that the urchins plan to steal a box of snuff from him, Sambo laces the powder with a generous helping of pepper. Sure enough, the two boys steal the box, and when they open it, they are seized with a bout of uncontrollable sneezing. Sambo watches from under cover, laughing at their well-deserved distress. But in this case and others where Sambo achieves a measure of vengeance, he must pay for it in the end. After the snuff escapade Sambo cannot go home, for the urchins, armed to the teeth, are stationed outside his front door.2 Sometimes Sambo's mere appearance on a street is enough to precipitate conflict. But one thing sure to provoke the white boys was the sight of Sambo working. If Sambo has a job at the beginning of a story, ropes and bricks are sure to appear. On the first Sunday following the race riots, Sambo appears as a tidily uniformed delivery boy. The two urchins spot him on the street delivering a large expensive vase. "How dares woik! De very idea!" the two exclaim. "Yous a disgrace to us!" They throw rocks at Sambo and trip him with a rope. Sambo falls, the vase is broken, and the reader may safely assume by the end of the strip that Sambo has lost his job.3 However amusing the small-scale battles in Sambo and His Funny Noises may have been to Springfield's white newspaper-reading public , the comic strip's underlying hostility toward blacks is clear. The type of black-white conflict that informed the Sambo comic made sense to the Springfield white reader because it was based on commonplace , everyday social realities. A successful white Springfield business or professional man and his family, for example, settling down to read their newspaper on Sunday morning in a quiet residence comfortably distant from black districts and the turbulent street life downtown, would have quickly grasped the comic urchins' outrage at the sight of Sambo employed. The appearance of weapons in response to this "disgrace" would not have struck them as odd, for Sambo out of his proper place was somehow naturally a threat to lower-status whites. William English Walling thought he detected similar feelings of resentment...

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