The Cartoons of Ollie Harrington, the Black Left, and the African American Press During the Jim Crow Era

“Stark tragedy and humor are separated by a mere hair’s breadth. That is why there is so much in Harlem,” dryly commented cartoonist Ollie Harrington in an introduction to his role in Harlem’s People’s Voice, one of two major African American newspapers in New York during the 1940s—the other being the Amsterdam News.¹ This remark immediately demonstrates what many African American cultural figures—including Virginia Liston (1923), Lead Belly (1935), Langston Hughes (1952), Lester Young (1958), the Isley Brothers (1963), Mississippi Joe Callicott (1967), Son Seals (1980), and Tyler Perry (2011)—have called “laughing to keep from crying.” But it also powerfully and efficiently presents comedy as a serious portrayal of social injustices.

Part of the purpose of this essay is to reaffirm Harrington as an important artist of the Black radical tradition in the United States and to extend the work that Brian Dolinar has already done in resituating Harrington’s work in the Left milieu that shaped it.² In addition, another goal is to look at how his cartoons, which were more widely circulated among Black readers than any others during the 1930s and 1940s, serve as a sort of metonym for the large and changing influence of the Black Left on the press with significant consequences for African American politics and culture during Jim Crow. There is not nearly enough attention paid to Harrington’s cartoons, and the attention he does receive almost always focuses on his most mainstream (and famous) work. Finally, in large part because of Harrington’s unusual position as a Black expatriate in the German Democratic Republic, he was able to maintain an openly Black Left stance in his work at a time when many radical African American artists in the United States were forced to keep a low profile, or were excluded from the public sphere altogether, due to the Cold War. As Harrington’s work kept the faith with the politics of the Popular Front while engaging new currents of Black Power and Black Arts in the 1960s, it can be seen as a bridge between different eras of Black radicalism.³

The significance of the Black press is often overlooked when scholars consider the impact of the organized Left, especially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), on politics and culture in the United States. With a few exceptions, notably Dolinar’s The Black Cultural Front, Bill Mullen’s Popular Fronts, and Fred Carroll’s Race News, most studies of the African American press give short shrift to the Left.⁴ Similarly, histories of the Communist Left in the United States and its impact on the African American community often pay little attention to Black newspapers. For example, Vernon Pedersen’s The Communist Party of Maryland, 1919–1957 concludes that the CPUSA made relatively little headway in Baltimore’s African American community, but does not examine the profound CPUSA influence on the Baltimore Afro-American, both an important local and national Black institution and for decades the most consistently left-wing major Black paper in the United States.⁵ In part, this is due to the fact that the apogee of left-wing influence on Black newspapers (and on most African American communities, including Harlem) was in the 1940s rather than in the 1930s, the so-called “Red Decade.” The 1940s in Harlem saw the election of local CPUSA leader Benjamin Davis to the New York City Council and the flourishing of the People’s Voice, the chief editors of which were Communists. This timeline contradicts the still-common declension narrative following the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 in histories of the Communist Left in the U.S.

During the extended Popular Front era from roughly 1935 to 1948 (and beyond, in some cases, notably in the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American), the Black Left, through publishers, editors, reporters, cartoonists, and columnists, deeply shaped the trajectory of many major African American newspapers including the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, Michigan...