INTERVIEW NO. 10 WALT CARR

I’m Walter Robert Carr, Jr., and I was born in Baltimore, Maryland. We lived with my grandparents early on, my father’s mother and father, but then we moved into the Gilmore Homes, a housing project in Baltimore. They’re actually in the process of tearing it down now, because that was 1940 or 1943, something like that. And the neighborhood, a Black neighborhood, of course … stable and clean. It epitomized that mantra that it takes a village. That’s how tight the Black community was. And they were all two-parent families. They did not move into the projects with the mindset of staying two, three, and four decades. Everybody wanted to move out; save some money and move out and get a home, which everybody I knew did, including us. As matter of fact, we moved to Philadelphia. My father was working for a Black newspaper, the Afro-American newspaper, and he got a job transfer to Philadelphia. So we moved to Philly. My upbringing in Baltimore was stable. I lucked out on some great parents, and I lucked out on their outlook on life and dealing with the struggle. They both got arrested in 1941 on a sound truck for protesting police brutality. And this is 2022 and we are still dealing with it. I got my DNA, my activist DNA, from my parents, particularly my father.

He worked for the Afro-American newspaper. He was a circulation manager, and he was also a writer. He had a couple of short stories published years ago when I was a kid, but the job in Philadelphia when he got transferred was circulation management.

My mom never worked until after I was in college. She was always a housewife and stay-at-home mother. She was really the enforcer as far as it came to discipline and whatnot. I used to call her Hard-Hearted Hannah. And Hannah didn’t play! And I didn’t know she had a great sense of humor until I got about 19 or 20. I didn’t see a damn thing funny about Hannah when I was a kid. But she was a disciplinarian. I always joke with the guys that I think she helped me be the dancer that I became, because when she’d hold my wrist with one hand, and be whipping my behind with that strap with the other, I would bust a move!

One time, my sister said, “Yeah, hit him again, I wanna see, yeah, that’s the move!” She had a sense of humor that I may have developed over the years. My old man was a little more stoic. Loved music, loved jazz. Played a little piano. I was just blessed with two great parents. I really was.

I have a sister and a brother. My sister is 85. And she’s currently living in Ohio. She just moved into a senior development. I understand it’s really nice. She’s only been there about a year. I have a brother who lives in Baltimore, and he’s retired. He was the stage manager for Peabody Institute of Music—John Hopkins Peabody School of Music. And my sister is a retired schoolteacher. And those, those grandparents that I mentioned briefly? I don’t go to college without my grandfather. Neither does my sister. He paid for everything. I got one year of financial aid when I walked on the football team in my sophomore year, but my grandfather paid everything for my sister and I. Books, tuition, the whole nine yards. And I love to bring it up because I’m so grateful, but it’s also funny. He was the manager of a Black movie theater—because I lived in segregated Baltimore, of course, in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s. He managed two Black movie theaters in East Baltimore. As a matter of fact, the Dunbar Theatre was actually built by my great-grandfather, Josiah Diggs. And he sold it to a Jewish concern some years later, with the stipulation that his son-in-law, my grandfather, be the manager. And I lived with them. I didn’t live on campus—I didn’t live in the dorm on campus. I lived with my grandparents in Baltimore when I attended Morgan State. And I used to … they would leave their bedroom door ajar, and I would reach up on the chifforobe and get my coffee money and lunch money. And there would be mounds of quarters and dollar bills and 10s and 20s. For four and a half years, I thought they were movie receipts from the two movie theaters. I didn’t find out until almost four or five years after I graduated that my grandfather was one of the biggest numbers backers in East Baltimore. That was all policy money, street numbers. But like I said, I don’t see college or getting my degree without the largesse of my grandparents, my grandfather in particular.

My grandfather was from Eastern Shore Maryland. And, you know, when he came up, I mean.… Eastern Shore was like being in Alabama or Mississippi. In fact, any rural area in Maryland at that time. And I did get to know my great-grandfather: very stoic, always suit and tie, he was a businessman. But I don’t know where Papa was born, to be honest. My grandmother on my father’s side was born in Baltimore. My mother’s people, they were all from Virginia.

My great-grandfather Josiah actually started out selling coal and ice. And from the stories that I can recall, he was hustling. I don’t mean street hustling, you know, nothing illegal, but it was just honest hard work. Peddling and selling coal and firewood, and then he started buying property. I just found out in a book that he was engaged in politics. A friend of mine wrote a book recently. And when I went to the index and looked in the back, I saw Josiah Diggs. Seemingly, he was very prominent in Black politics when he was coming up in Baltimore. But he got his money through the very limited things that he was able to do being a Negro at that time. Selling firewood, coal, ice, that kind of stuff. And probably some other things that I’m not aware of, but his business acumen was on the money. He was saving and buying property and whatnot. And he did extremely well.

In fact, he wanted to send my father to mortuary school. But my father didn’t want to be a mortician. And he was doing so well that he even offered to give my mother and father a house. But my grandmother didn’t want us living on Etting Street. Etting Street was the next street over from the street that we lived on. But it was about that class thing that so many Blacks got so caught up in, you know. But they were all working class in that neighborhood. So there really wasn’t much of a difference. But on Druid Hill Avenue, McCulloh, Madison, you had, you know, the upside of segregation. Because the Bethlehem Steel worker lived in the same neighborhood as the Black doctor or dentist. But she didn’t want us living on Etting Street, and we didn’t get that house. But my grandfather did very well as a businessman, and he was the first Black to build a movie house in Baltimore City.

I think the second movie house was the Radio. It was around the corner from the Dunbar.

You talked about Baltimore being segregated to the core. Can you speak more about that?

Actually, it was something that was accepted. You knew the rules, you knew where to go, where not to go. The restaurants were all segregated. You know, we had our own restaurants. Of course, the movie houses were segregated. Schools were definitely segregated. I didn’t go to school with white kids until we moved to Philadelphia. That was a whole new experience for me. But schools are originally segregated, as were the neighborhoods, the redlining, the whole nine yards. When I spoke about living in a housing project, a lot of people don’t know that housing projects during World War II were built principally initially for whites. But of course, because of segregation, they had to build housing projects for Blacks as well. And whites, when they moved into the housing projects, their goals were the same. To have a place to get them on their feet, save some money, and buy a house. Same with Blacks.

The only thing is, when we decided to move and buy a house, we had the restrictions and the redlining. I’ve always credited white folks as the ones who started the hood—the ghetto—because of segregation.

The first time I ever experienced racism was as a kid going to Eastern Shore, Maryland, with my grandparents. We had to cross the Chesapeake Bay. And there was no bridge like the double bridge they have now. So you had to go on a ferry boat, you know, drive the car up on the ferry boat, much like you do in Martha’s Vineyard. You get on the ferry and go across to Eastern Shore. And that was the first time I’d seen segregated water fountains and segregated restrooms. And there was a long refreshment stand where you could buy refreshments. But the front of the stand was reserved for whites. Negroes, we had to go around on the side to get our Coke or Babe Ruth, Hershey bar or whatever.

Young Walt, pictured in 1945.

And then, on family vacation when I was about eight years old, in Virginia, I remember being puzzled. I didn’t question it, but I was puzzled because, once we [went further past] the Mason-Dixon Line, we had to move to the back of the bus. Once we left Baltimore and hit Virginia, we had to move our seats. Of course, at eight years old, I wasn’t aware of why, and my father didn’t want to explain that to me.

But when I first realized what was really going on, even though at 11, I still couldn’t fully grasp it, I found out why my father was upset. We were on our way over to his mother’s house, leaving the housing projects. And he was upset, and when we hit Baker Street coming down the steps, he said, “Junior, when you grow up, you’re gonna find out you’re gonna have to be 10 times better than the white man.” But he didn’t elaborate. And we just walked on.

But I found out a short time later. This was World War II. My father had learned how to weld. And so he taught a welding class at this war plant. And he taught white guys as well as Negroes how to weld. He found out two months later that the white guys he had taught how to weld, their hourly wage was higher than his. And that was the first time that I was aware that something was wrong with this world … but of course, I couldn’t grasp it at the time at 11 years old.

So those situations were my first encounters. I didn’t run into anything really blatant in Philadelphia. In fact, we even had two or three white families on our block in West Philadelphia. And, you know, played sports in high school. But a buddy of mine in Philly, Johnny Gross, Dr. Johnny Gross, didn’t make the varsity baseball team. And he told me he thought that West Philly, or our school, our coaches, had a quota system. All the coaches were white. Matter fact, I didn’t have any Black teachers in high school. But he thought there was a quota. And I had never thought about it, but when he said that, I believed it. Because I didn’t get moved up to the varsity football team until the end of the season. And right now, and I’ve been hanging onto this for years, I can name six or seven guys that I knew couldn’t so much as hold my jockstrap, okay? And one guy, Gene Toll, I even remember his name, he couldn’t even come close to being on my level. But for some reason, I didn’t make the final cut at the beginning of that last season.

I didn’t really find out until after I graduated that I was going to college. Because I wanted to go to the Air Force. But I didn’t know my mother and father had talked to my grandfather, and he had agreed that I could stay with him and that he would pay for all my expenses. So I was really blessed, no question.

I left Baltimore when I was about 12. I never tried to drink out of the whites-only fountains or anything because it’s almost like, and I hate to use this term, but it was about knowing your place. You didn’t even try to do anything like that. You didn’t even try.

When they had the segregated tennis courts, a bunch of Black people protested and picketed these white tennis courts. Swimming pools … everything was segregated in Baltimore. Matter of fact, my uncle was a lifeguard and my father was well known as a diver. My mother worked at the colored swimming pool the entire summer and there was no daycare. So my sister and I, we walked from the projects to the pool. And we were in the water six days a week. She had one day off. But that was segregated. Plus, they put the colored pool out there where they kept sheep. They used to have sheep in Druid Hill Park to keep the grass levels down. They put the colored pool out there near where they kept the sheep. But she worked on the women’s side one complete summer. We went to work with her every day for an entire summer.

Often, when I think about it, I wonder if my father had some Communist leanings. Because anytime Blacks stood up in the ’20s and ’30s, you had to be harboring some kind of Communist tendencies or admiration for their stance. I remember my parents’ arrest being reported in the Black newspaper that he later worked for, the Afro-American newspaper. It was in the headlines. It was he, my mother, and a driver. And I asked him what happened?

Because of segregation and redlining, Blacks only lived in two areas at that time. You either lived in East Baltimore or West Baltimore. We lived in West Baltimore. My father rented a truck with a sound system, with those old-fashioned big speakers on the top. But he was inside the truck, and my mother sat with the driver in the cab. And my father was on the mic. So they started in East Baltimore, because they knew they had to return the truck in West Baltimore. So they went to East Baltimore and he’s on the mic talking about how Black folks had to come together and demonstrate. I mean, the brutality among police in most metropolitan areas and cities was unreal in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. So he was trying to organize in the name of fighting police brutality.

Anyway, he said that when he got back to West Baltimore, they were driving on Robert Street, and when they crossed Division Street there, they saw a white cop. They had a reputation for brutalizing Blacks, and my father told the driver to follow the guy. You see, cops were walking their beats back then. The driver followed his orders and followed the cop. And my father was giving his spiel on the mic. The white cop took it for about two and a half blocks. Finally, he just stepped out into the street and started beating his night stick on the asphalt and telling them to pull over. He called a paddy wagon and they locked all three of them up. And the next day, it was all dismissed because my father had a permit and the whole nine yards. But they were arrested for protesting police brutality.

My grandfather, who was still in the numbers business then, he bailed him out. So my mother and father didn’t spend a night in jail. They were bailed out.

My father wrote short stories when he worked at the Afro-American newspaper. He wrote a newsletter in Baltimore called the Nitelifer. And it was a newsletter that you could read on the spot in the bar when you went out, in the barbershop, in the beauty parlor, or wherever. And my father lived to write that editorial.

I can pull down a Nitelifer from 1963, ’68, ’74, ’77. And the things he was talking about with regard to Black folks staying unified and demonstrating would still apply today. It was called the Nitelifer, and he was called a nightlifer. And it was convenient in size because if you were out socializing, you could just roll up, put in your pocket, and read it later. But any activist DNA I have, I got from my father.

He also was successful in a boycott. You know Black folks, we drink the best liquor. But the distributors never had any Black salesmen during the ’60s. So my father used the Nitelifer to start a boycott. And he was largely responsible for them hiring a Black liquor salesman. Same thing with Black cigarette salesmen, because there weren’t Black cigarette salesmen either. He was a bar guy, and he was a nightlifer. He ran that boycott, and it was very successful. But he lived to write that editorial every week. And every once in a while, I would furnish him with some cartoons to appear in the Nitelifer.

I’ve been drawing ever since I ever picked up a pencil. As a matter of fact, my mother saved everything, so I’ve got report cards from elementary school where, in the teacher’s comments section, it says, “Walter spends too much time drawing and doodling in his notebook.” I’ve always been drawing, ever since I was a kid. And then of course, back then, particularly in the ’40s, comic books were big among kids, Black and white. And trading comics was big. You would trade comics with your friends. And you would try to emulate styles. I don’t know if they still exist, and I know that art teachers didn’t like kids to use them, but there is something called a tracing book, where they actually had professionally-drawn line illustrations, and then a tracing sheet over top of it. And then you would come over with your pencil, pen, or whatever. My parents were very supportive of my drawing, and they always kept me supplied with tracing books.

In school, I wasn’t encouraged that much by my teachers. But I was eventually recommended to take Saturday art classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But the classes were on Saturday, and I did not want to go because I wanted to be in the schoolyard hooping. Playing ball with my friends. But my mother and father made me go, and I’m so glad they did. I learned so much during those two summers. And so I had parents who encouraged me.

The last conversation I had with my mother in Cleveland was.… Well, when we lived in the projects, my bedroom was right next to the kitchen. And whenever I brought home a bad report card, which was often, my comic books went to the trash. I mean, I could be a rich man today. She had no idea and I had no idea that they could be collector’s items one day. I mean, I had all the prominent comic heroes. And she told me in that conversation that after I had been sent to my room for whatever I had done, as punishment, that she would crack the door and look in on me, and she said, “You were just laying across the bed drawing in your notebook. And I wanted to take that pencil and paper from you because you weren’t suffering enough!” But she said she was glad she didn’t. And I’m glad she didn’t either.

My major at Morgan State was art education, but not because it was truly my first choice. I was an art education major for one reason: I played sports—football and track. There was an old building at Morgan called the Dust Bowl. This was one of the original buildings. It was actually the gym. But it wasn’t the contemporary gyms you see today with stands on both sides, spectators for games, but it was a gym where they had PE classes. And at one end was a stage where the drama group would hold their plays and whatnot. But it was also a favorite spot for guys to drop in when they were finished with classes to play some pickup basketball games.

I went into the Dust Bowl one day, and there was a guy standing to my left, I can remember it like was yesterday. Up on the stage was a football coach checking his watch and telling this young man in these gym shorts and T-shirt, “Come on. Come on son, I don’t have all day!” The guy on stage had to run to the end of the stage and do a no-hand flip off the stage down onto the gym floor on top of these mats. There were three or four spotters on each side, but he was scared to death. This happened in 1950. And I turned to the guy and asked, “Is this a tumbling club?” And he said, “No, this is tumbling 101.” I said, “This is a physical education class?” He said yes. I immediately walked out of the Dust Bowl, walked over to the main administration building, Holmes Hall, where the clock and everything is, went downstairs, pulled my file, and changed my major from physical education to art education. Because I was looking at an F. I know I wasn’t coming off that stage and doing a no-hand flip down to the gym floor. And that’s got to be an art education major!

Striking the Heisman pose!

What was your college experience like at Morgan?

It was great. It was like family, because it wasn’t that many students. The teachers were really dedicated, fine professors who really looked out for you. They kept telling you that you didn’t know what was waiting for you out there. This is 1950, and you had to be prepared. My only problem was, I wasn’t a great student in high school, and it took me a couple of years at Morgan.… I didn’t flunk out. I did what I had been doing all through school, which was I did just enough to get by. But I finally began to wake up probably in my junior year, and I would look at other students because I noticed that, even if they were athletes, they were serious about the business of education. Failure was not an option for them. And thankfully, I was beginning to mature and realize why I was in college. I managed to get the degree.

But after practice teaching, which I did very well, I realized that I really wasn’t sold on being a teacher. But I wound up getting a job. They were hiring college grads at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, a military installation in Maryland, and I was an ordnance instructor. I wound up interviewing and getting that job. But the job blew up on me. Instead of getting promoted from a GS-5 3670 to a GS-7, they closed the base in Alabama—the Redstone Arsenal—and the people with seniority came to Aberdeen, and they could bump you with their seniority in grade or experience. And instead of me going from a GS-5 to a GS-7, I wound up being a GS-1 at $3200. And I had just moved into my first apartment. My wife was still in school, and we had a kid.

So I left there after about eight, nine months, and I worked in recreation in Baltimore City for four years as a recreation leader. I loved working with kids doing arts and crafts classes. But I used to go to the post office from time to time and look at job announcements, and I saw a job opening at the Social Security Administration as an illustrator. I didn’t know beans about Social Security. All I knew was that it was something that everybody wanted to get. But I didn’t know anything about survivor’s benefits and insurance and the whole nine yards. But essentially, they had an art department—visual graphics—because they had to disseminate all the material and information out to the general public about the administration and its services.

They did that with leaflets and brochures, booklets, training films. We did all the training aids that the agency required. In-house publications, table model exhibits. The whole business of doing layout and design for publications was a whole new experience for me. I got the job based on my portfolio from Morgan. My drawings and illustrations, and a little bit of cartooning. But I didn’t know beans about layout design, typography, or dealing with printed matter. And I used to tell people that it was like getting paid to eat ice cream. I was learning something every day, and I stayed there for 29 years. I wound up being the Chief of Graphics when I left.

In 1960, working at any federal agency, for Blacks, was abominable. It was no chance for advancement. You weren’t in management, upper levels, not even lower levels of supervision. In fact, people used to call the Social Security Administration—which the headquarters is in Baltimore … in Woodlawn, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore—they used to call it “the plantation.” But for me, because I had that experience at Aberdeen … and then I was an oddity, I wasn’t in on the claims divisions and anywhere that you’re dealing directly with the public, I was in the art department, you know. So when I got to meet people, they didn’t have any problem. I’m in this art capacity job. They would ask for your grade, and when I said, “I’m GS-5,” they would look at one another and whisper, “He’s a 5? Him over there?” Meanwhile, they had 5s, 7s, 9s, 11s, 13s … but all Blacks were 2s and 3s. It wasn’t until the ’60s or the late ’50s, when they really started pressing to get equal opportunity boards and bureaus, that Blacks began to move into management.

But overall, it was a great experience. I learned an awful lot, and I started doing actual cartoons on the job. And also, that’s when I really started hitting the magazines as a freelance cartoonist. Of course, we had magazines that don’t even exist now. Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, for example. They all ran cartoons. You would send a batch of cartoons out and they would send you a nicely worded rejection slip in the self-addressed stamped envelope that you furnished. I did sell a couple cartoons to Playboy, but when I hit Ebony, that was a comfort zone for me. I’m probably in most of the magazines you have because I was a regular on Ebony’s Strictly for Laughs page.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a guy named Ray Billingsley. He’s a Black cartoonist, and he’s had a strip now in the mainstream press for 32 years. It’s called Curtis and he’s a little Black kid with his baseball cap backwards. He just won, I call it the Academy Award of cartoonists; the National Cartoonist Society awarded him the Reuben. In their 75-year existence, they never had a Black cartoonist win the Reuben Award, and Ray won it just recently.

I never had aspirations for wanting to do a strip because I had a nine-to-five. I didn’t have that needed hustle in me because I had a really good job. It was just a sideline hustle. You know, I could keep my hands in the pie, and do cartoons and send them out. And then, Players Magazine came out. That was like the Black version of Playboy, even though it wasn’t Black-owned. And I just stayed with that. I didn’t think seriously about doing a strip until I retired in 1990. And it really scared the devil out of me because I sent this cartoon strip idea to a syndicate out in LA called Creators Syndicate. And they actually responded and told me to send them some more.

And that’s what really scared me, because you’ve got to be really funny in the mainstream press, 365 days a year. I was scared to get it. And I finally heard from them, and they told me that it had nothing to do with the quality of the artwork, the penmanship, or the story ideas. They said they just didn’t feel like they could market it at that time, because their salespeople have to go out and sell it to the newspapers. And so that didn’t take off.

It dawned on me that you never saw the Black perspective or a Black point of view, a Black spin on global and national issues that impact the Black condition in America, in the mainstream press. On the editorial pages of mainstream press, the only time you saw Blacks in editorial cartoons, it was something negative or catastrophic. And I’ve been very critical of some of the cartoons I’ve seen even in Black newspapers. And that’s when I came up with the idea of attempting to provide that service for Black newspapers. I’ve been doing it since ’93 now.

There was never any conflict when I was working at the SSA and doing my illustrations on the side because that was on my own time, even though I was using their materials. I didn’t have to buy any ink or brushes, but no, there was never any conflict. Matter of fact, they wrote me up in the in-house paper a couple of times. They wrote about my work. Johnson Publishing, who published Ebony, not only did they do Jet, but years ago they had something called Negro Digest. It was a spin off from Reader’s Digest. Same size, same kind of format, but later that became Black World. Between Black World and Ebony, a couple of sales here and there, I was cool. Handling a strip at that time would have been difficult because that’s a time-consuming job. And I liked to hang out in the clubs and the bars, and in the cabaret parties to socialize, you know? But essentially, that’s how I evolved with regard to cartooning.

What was it like when you saw a magazine that had your cartoon in it for the first time?

Oh, that was sheer euphoria. Yeah, I’m pretty certain that was the first illustration that I did for Ebony.

There was a strip that was almost like a Black version of Peanuts, but it was called Wee Pals. Wee Pals by Morrie Turner. And it was an integrated group of kids. Black, Hispanic, Asian. And it took me a while to realize it, but after Morrie broke that ceiling with Wee Pals, a couple more strips came along. One was called Luther, and one was called Quincy. But it never dawned on me until years later that, while the syndication had opened up to Black cartoonists—because the door had been shut for years—they were reluctant to deal with adult scenarios. All these three strips I just named: Quincy, Wee Pals, and Luther, they were all for kids. They were all about children. And like I said, they paved the way. And you didn’t have another breakthrough until years later with a guy named Aaron McGruder. He did a strip called Boondocks.

He lived in Columbia, Maryland. And he really was the first one to come hard with a narrative regarding social justice, racism, and the like. In fact he had, at that time, one of the biggest intros into the cartoon market of anybody. I think he came in with, like, I don’t know how many hundred newspapers. But he was so controversial given certain areas, that sometimes they wouldn’t print some of his cartoons given the subject matter that he had chosen for that particular day. But that’s a big gap between McGruder and those earlier people that I mentioned.

Black cartoonists have been in that box for years with regard to mainstream press. And the irony of it is that one of the all-time greats in cartooning was a Black man, even though he passed as a white man. George Herriman. He did Krazy Kat back in 1910. He was from New Orleans, where that’s not uncommon, you know. Mixed heritage of Blacks and whites, and people who can pass. But his name was George Herriman. And William Randolph Hearst, who owned just about every paper in the country, was a big fan. And Herriman just took off with Krazy Kat. But he was a brother, though, even though he didn’t live as a brother. He passed as a white man.

When I was coming along, all my cartoon heroes were white. My first two major heroes were Milton Caniff, who drew Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, and then Will Eisner, who drew the Spirit. And he had a little Black sidekick kid called Ebony. But when I moved to Philadelphia, I saw every Black paper in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Afro-American. Saw the Pittsburgh Courier, which is one of my clients now. They started with me in ’93. And the Philadelphia Tribune. And it was in the Courier that I discovered my first Black cartoon heroes. Jackie Ormes, not only Black but a female, and then a guy named Ollie Harrington, who did a single panel strip called Bootsie. And, in fact, Harrington left his whole collection to Ohio State’s comic archive. So I’ve been a cartoon buff forever, it seems.

Going back to some of the other cartoonists’ work, you said that it seemed to be more of a market for kids, but not adults. Why do you think that was?

I think they didn’t want to deal with anything that heavy. With the focus on young people, little kids and whatnot, it’s more frolic and joy and fun. It’s full of all kinds of crazy things kids are known to do, and, you know, parents, kids, relationships, sports, and all that. But when you get into adults, I always figured that they were scared of a cartoonist like Aaron McGruder. Somebody who brought it right down to the wire and exposed all the hypocrisy. And I don’t think they were ready for it years ago, I really don’t. Even today, I get the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post. There are 43 or 44 comic strips in the Washington Post. Only two of them are Black. The Baltimore Sun has 22 comic strips. Only one of them is Black.

So we’ve been knocking. We’ve cracked the door, but we still trying to make ourselves known. And right now is not the best time because so many papers are failing. And the Black press has always been struggling from day one. I mean, Black or white, it’s never about paper sales. It’s about the advertising dollars. You know what I mean? And Black papers have always been struggling. But there’s almost I think 185 or 190 Black newspapers that still exist—even though a lot of them are online now. And in better days, all Black papers used to come out at least twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. Generally, I know the Baltimore Afro used to come out twice a week, and the Philadelphia Afro came out twice a week. But now all Black papers, all my papers, they can only come out once a week.

It’s a tough time now to aspire, perhaps, to be a comic strip artist in print. But there are certain other platforms that you can probably go to. I’m so far behind on what’s going on there. I’m still technologically challenged. But there’s a lot of stuff going on online with cartoons. There’s a woman named Barbara Brandon. You remember some years ago there was a Black female cartoonist in mainstream press, and it was just talking heads where they were all Black women?

Where I’m Coming From, I think it was called, by Barbara Brandon. Her father was one of the creators of one of those children’s strips that I mentioned earlier. Brumsic Brandon was the creator of Luther. And a guy named Ted Shearer was the creator of the strip called Quincy. Yeah. And, of course, Ray Billingsley did Curtis. But Barbara Brandon was exposed to cartooning all her young life because she used to help her dad with his strip Luther. And then she had some drawing skills. And for a while, for years, she was in mainstream press with these talking heads, all Black women, called Where I’m Coming From.

Right now, I’m thinking about giving it up. My eyesight is not what it used to be. Hand–eye coordination is pretty good. But I don’t know whether I’m burnt out or what, but I’m really getting pissed off more than I used to. Because at 89, I’m just sick of trickle-down citizenship. We’ve been doing this stuff ever since I’ve been on this earth. Dealing with the establishment, and the oppression that we’ve received over the years, and the indignities that we’ve suffered in life.

I have a problem with the N word. I don’t use it anymore. Like everybody else, I used to use it. And I stopped using it years ago, when my oldest son told me that he didn’t use it. And I’d never thought about it before. But he got me to thinking about it. And it finally dawned on me not too long after that conversation. Something I read had to do with lynching. And then I really thought about it. What do you think was one of the last words a Black man, woman, or child heard ringing in their ears just before their lives were snuffed out by a lynching party? By some crazy white folks? It was that word.

One of Walt’s recent political cartoons, “Pipeline.” Or as he calls them, “CARRtoons”!

So to call somebody that you love that word … that’s not a term of endearment to me. It really isn’t. Several people I know say they stopped using it. Thinking about before you’re getting held off that bridge, or getting hung from that tree, those are the last words you hear, that you’ll be taking to your Maker, and it’s ringing in your ear, the N word. So that’s my take on it. I don’t use it.

It will occasionally get dropped among my buddies. And when the occasion presents itself, I’ll take the lead and say something about why I stopped, hoping that I’m leaving something on their mind to think about as they actually digest what I’ve just said. And then white folks will invariably say, “Well, they use it. Why can’t we use it?” You know, we shouldn’t be using it. They definitely can’t use it, but we shouldn’t be using it either. That’s not for me. My son was the first one to pull me up, and I’m glad he did. Glad he did.

I’ve been a cartoonist for over six decades. That’s another reason why I’m tired right now! I’m reading newspapers diligently, and I’m always trying to come up with ideas. What I do is I send two or more cartoons out every week because I want to get them out of my mind, out of my head, and onto paper. And then I give them the option. Except for this one paper in Wilmington, North Carolina, whose editorial is laid out for two cartoons. And every week, they’ve got two. But most papers only want one.

Every once in a while, the Pittsburgh Courier will want them a sports cartoon. Because the Courier has always been big in sports coverage. The Pittsburgh Courier will run the editorial cartoon on the editorial page, and they might, if they have space, run something they particularly like, usually on the sports page, particularly if it’s sports subject matter. And that is the paper who I’m close to now. I used to sell it as a kid in Philadelphia. And a lot of people don’t know that prior to the elaborate draft programs they have now in the NFL, with all the coverage on ESPN and all the major networks, every year from the ’40s up through perhaps the early ’60s the Pittsburgh Courier used to feature an all-American HBCU team at the end of the season. The outstanding all-Americans from Black colleges. As a matter of fact, my only claim to fame when it comes to football is that I played with a guy named Roosevelt Brown from Charlottesville, Virginia. He was inducted to the NFL Hall of Fame. He was a starting left tackle for the New York Giants about 12 or 13 seasons. I love to tell this story because, like I said, the draft was not as sophisticated as today, with all the TV coverage and hoopla. The franchises used to meet when they were going to draft and they would have film, tapes, scouting reports, telegrams, newspaper clippings, what have you. And on the table one day back in 1953 or ’54, there was a Pittsburgh Courier lying on the table. And Roosevelt Brown was all-CIAA. He’d been all-CIAA two years in a row, and 6′ 4″, 240 max. And they took a flyer on him and they drafted him. And as raw as he was, they realized once he got to camp that they had a jewel. And he was a star on that line through all their glory years, from that point until he retired. But it was in a Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. Yeah.

How did you deal with critics of your work throughout the years?

Actually, because of my subject matter and my audience, I haven’t read any real critics. I’m usually applauded or people appreciate the things that I’m displaying in my illustrations, my visual images and whatnot, and any themes and ideas that align with it. Though something happened recently. Somehow some white guy got my email address and I forgot what he said. But it was disparaging. Either he had run across some of my stuff, or it might have been after that article appeared where I was interviewed. I think it happened after that. And I’m just wondering how he got to see some of my cartoons, because the only way you see my cartoons now is in a Black newspaper. And they were all political. Whereas my cartoons with Ebony, Jet, and Black World were all gag cartoons, you know, just general gag cartoons.

But I didn’t start doing the editorial or political cartoons until ’93. But he must have seen something that I did somewhere. I’ve actually had one cartoon published in the Washington Post. A guy named Courtland Milloy was writing for the Washington Post for years. Every Wednesday, he has a column in the Washington Post. He did a really nice interview with me, and it appeared in the Washington Post. And shortly after that, I got a cartoon published in the Post, because their staff cartoonists had just recently retired. Today, they are still running different cartoonists, although there is one guy who appears there quite a bit.

They are probably going to keep it this way because a lot of papers have gotten rid of their staff cartoonists and they mine from a consortium of cartoonists because it’s cheaper to hire freelancers. And since this guy Toles retired, they have been taking freelance work coming in. And I haven’t sold anything since that one that appeared after my article appeared in the Post. But today, I sent out cartoons about HBCUs, you know, being threatened with bomb threats this week.

I borrowed something that my president, President Wilson at Morgan, said in an email he sent out to everybody. He just simply said, “Stay strong, and remain resilient.” So I had that on a sign and a comment with a kid saying, “Black Minds Matter.” And I had about eight or nine different colleges, you know, kids from Spelman, Howard, Morgan, and so on. And they were talking to people who were obviously extremists on the right: Ku Klux Klan, skinheads. And these kids were letting them know that we’re standing tall and we will not be moved. I just sent that in today.

So most of my audience is Black, and everybody has been in tune. I’ve been doing this for 29 years, the political cartooning. Now, Black papers only come out once a week, so I’ve only got 52 shots. And so, some time ago, even before he left office, I said, you know, I can’t spend a lot of time fooling with Trump when we got so many issues in the Black community to deal with. And so I’m trying not to get caught up in that, and focus on stuff that we need to talk about.

Sometimes, I have to put the brakes on myself with regard to how harsh I can be because of the audience, the viewership.

I’m also one of the founding members of the 100 Black Men of America, the Maryland chapter. I was one of the charter members for the Maryland chapter. And we try to reach out. And that’s what I liked about working in recreation. We couldn’t save everybody. But we saved a lot of kids through recreation. I mean, Baltimore’s recreation centers are a third of what they used to be. And I think that’s one of the biggest pitfalls in most cities: they don’t invest in our young people. They can find money for a new youth detention center, but they can’t find money for a recreation center?

One of my biggest complaints all over the country is we don’t invest in our youth. The cover of my book says it all. Just Us. I used the term “the storm continues.” That’s a term taken from Frederick Douglass. But Just Us is a play on the word justice. But also, Richard Pryor in one of his LPs years ago, when he got locked up and went to jail, he said, “That’s all that was in there behind bars. Just us.” Where’s the justice in that?

But right now I’m just trying to come up with how I can end this whole thing in a dignified manner, let these people know ahead of time if I have any leads who can take my place. But I’m still wedded to doing it as best I can for as long as I can. I get ahead of myself sometimes to the point where, something that was hot last week and I did a cartoon, something else came up … and you only got that one shot, because they only come up once a week. And I’ve had cartoons back up on me to the point where the relevancy of them has passed, because it happened two weeks ago.

Right now, I’m also wrestling with the idea of a second book, because I had over 1200 cartoons to select from when I did this two years ago. I’ve been talking about a second book, and I use a local printer, the printer who printed my father’s Nitelifer. I have a great relationship with Time Printers in Baltimore—it’s a family, the Maddox family. In fact, Alby, the CEO and president, he just retired and went with a publishing company in Baltimore. He said he wanted to try some new things.

The title will be Ain’t Jingling My Keys No More. Years ago, whenever I was leaving a strip mall or commercial mall in the evening, and I was going to the parking lot to my car, and a white woman happened to be near me going to her car, I could see that apprehension on her face. I would see that apprehension and clutching at the purse tightly and whatnot. And I used to just jingle my keys, just to put her at ease. I’m not worried about you or your pocketbook or whatever it is. But then, and I think this whole Karen thing had something to do with it, I realized that it’s not my responsibility to make you feel comfortable.

So I came up with a name that was catchy: Ain’t Jingling My Keys No More. And of course, I have an illustration of, you know, a Black guy with keys, and a white woman, both heading to their cars in the parking lot. I’ve got cartoons up the ying-yang. It consumes you. When I go to bed at night, I’m usually looking at the news and trying to think of something. Then, I read two newspapers every day. And when I wake up in the morning, I’m laying there for another half hour or 40 minutes trying to think of a cartoon idea or something I’m trying to tie together.

I’ve got these pads all over the place, and the other day, I just grabbed a bunch of them and sat down and just weeded them out. Got very critical of them. Some of them, I toss. I’m pretty certain that I’m going to stop some time this year. I’m going to stop. I always kid that doing political cartoons has kept me from going upside some white man’s head with an alley apple—a brick. I can always vent out my frustrations with racists and racism with visual images.

Did you ever experience any racially motivated violence?

My grandparents were from Eastern Shore Maryland, like I said, and that’s like, being in Jackson, Mississippi, or Montgomery, Alabama, back in the day. My Uncle Frank had done some work for a white man, and there was a dispute over his pay. And while he and the guy were arguing about the pay, the guy’s son showed up. And him being a Black man at Eastern Shore—now Uncle Frank wasn’t that big, but he didn’t take no guff. And the guy put his hands on him and pushed Uncle Frank or something, and he wound up beating both of them up. And of course, when my relatives found out, they had to hide him. Because they had heard about what happened and found out that white folks were looking for him. And that ferryboat that I mentioned, they couldn’t put him on a ferry to get into Baltimore. So they had to drive him through Delaware, up from the Eastern Shore, up through Delaware to come down to Maryland. And he moved to Baltimore permanently. They had to get him out of the Eastern Shore.

I’m not sure what type of work he was doing, but I’m sure it was some type of labor. I don’t know, farm work, might have been involved with the waterfront, you know, crabs and seafood, whatnot. I don’t know. It was in the ’20s …’28 or ’29. I was born in ’32. They just knew they had to get him out of that area. But that was a very volatile situation for him to be in. For a Black man to be beating up a white man, two of them, at that time.

What was it like when Baltimore was actually integrated?

It was slow. I remember … having lived in Philadelphia, I knew what a real amusement park looked like. There’s an amusement park called Woodside Park. Had all the major rides, roller coasters, you name it. It was integrated, of course. But there was an amusement park in Baltimore that, in the ’60s, CORE and some activists from Social Security—they had some activist groups—they picketed this amusement park. A friend of mine, Mason, he actually got hit in the head with a brick. He worked for Social Security, and I remember he had a patch over one eye. It had turned into a brawl this one particular day. And there were demonstrations because of the restaurants and hotels and the whole nine yards. But the reason I bring up the amusement park is, having been exposed to a real honest-to-God amusement park, like you would you see at Coney Island or somewhere else, when we were finally allowed into this amusement park, it was a dump! I mean, we couldn’t believe it. I kept on thinking about Mason getting hit in the head, what he and the others went through to get us permission to come to this amusement park. And it was a dump.

We had a dance, and we decided to have it at this amusement park. And we rented their ballroom, which was called the Dixie Ballroom. And I think that’s the first time I really got a chance to see the place. And it really just ticked me off that they wanted to keep us out of this raggedy, rundown place because we were Black. And it wasn’t even a first-rate amusement park. And eventually, a big flood came through here one time and the body of water that bordered the amusement park flooded. So they actually ended up tearing it down.

But the restaurants, you know, I remember you couldn’t go into the restaurants. I know there was a delicatessen called Nate’s, Jewish-owned, on the main drag in Baltimore. And that was a big deal when they started letting us go in. Then, the movie houses opened up downtown. But one of the biggest catastrophes as far as Baltimore is concerned with recreation.… So there’s the Apollo in Harlem, right? There’s the Howard Theatre in DC. Well, in Baltimore, it was the Royal Theatre. And they really dropped the ball and they let them tear down the Royal Theatre. Because the theater was a part of that Chitlin’ Circuit. Motortown Revue, and all the Black acts that used to come through the Howard Theatre in DC, the Regal in Chicago, the Apollo in New York, and Earl Theatre when I was in high school in Philadelphia. But they tore that place down, and they tried to placate the Black community by erecting a big statue of Billie Holiday. But that should have never happened.

There’s another old theater in Baltimore called Hippodrome, which was segregated, of course. It was for whites only for a long time. Well, guess what? They didn’t tear the Hippodrome down. But they tore down the Royal. That should have never happened in Baltimore.

Being a bachelor for a while, when I went to the movies, going to the Black movies, I knew I could get my dinner in there because they sold hot dogs. When things integrated, and my girlfriend at the time wanted to go to the Hippodrome, my only problem with going into this previously all-white theater was that I didn’t know whether they sold hot dogs or not! But when we went, it was a Black ticket-seller and Black ticket-takers, and they sold hot dogs.

But there wasn’t a lot of controversy about admissions to the restaurant and the movie houses once integration did come, back in the ’60s. But you still deal with those situations where racism is so deeply embedded that even things that have been halted on a large scale, in a more subtle way, you still see it.

That’s the way I’ve seen it since I’ve been in Baltimore. I didn’t go back to Philadelphia when I graduated from Morgan State. I was born and raised here—I only really had a straight five-year window in Philly from the 7th grade to the 12th grade. So, I stayed in Baltimore, and I’ve seen the growth and the change, and the resistance. The community I live in now is one of those planned communities in Columbia, Maryland. The whole mindset of the developer was inclusion. That’s what Columbia is all about, and I’ve been here since ’44. I’ve been here practically half my life. Here in Columbia, Maryland. It’s about an 18-minute drive to Baltimore. 15 minutes if you’re riding with my wife!

What are your thoughts on integration as a whole?

Well, actually, integration had its pluses and minuses. Now, when it came to business, once we could live anywhere, or go anywhere, stay in hotels anywhere, and all that, Black businesses took a hit. No question about that. I’m also an aficionado of tap dancing. My uncle was a tap dancer, and I tap. There was a tap dancer named Peg Leg Bates, and he had a resort up in New York, upstate New York, and you couldn’t get in there to save your life. I mean, the place stayed packed! Buses from all over the East Coast—from New York in particular. But once we discovered Atlantic City and other outlets where we could go, it went under.

And that’s happened to a lot of businesses in the Black community. Once integration happened, we abandoned a lot of places. And that did hurt. If separate but equal had really worked, there wouldn’t have been a need for integration really. When I was living in Baltimore, all up through high school, every textbook I ever saw came from the all-white schools. I didn’t notice it until I was in junior high school. We got hand-me-downs—everything was hand-me-downs. And so, it affected every aspect of Black life. Social, education, and even today, one of the biggest problems in most Black communities is healthcare access. And access to high-quality food. You know, you have food deserts. Black people when they go to supermarket, if they don’t have a car, they got to take a streetcar to go to a supermarket, because there are no big giant supermarkets in most Black areas.

The inequity and sentencing—harsh sentences get dealt out to Black defendants as opposed to white defendants, for the same crime. There’s no addressing reentry into society after you’ve served your time. And your penalties for having been to jail. I mean, you’ve served your time, paid your debt, and you may have gotten your associate degree while in college, or taken some college courses. You’ve seen the light, so to speak—you had to rehabilitate yourself. And when you get out, you may think, I’m gonna go to school, I’m gonna take some courses. But guess what? When they get out, they’re a convicted felon. They cannot get a student loan. And when you go to get that job, and you fill out those boxes on an application, you have to answer whether you have ever been convicted of a felony? You can lie and say no, get the job, and they find out. So you get fired. Or you can be honest and say yes. And that means you’re definitely not gonna get the job.

You can’t get housing, public housing. There are just so many things stacked against us. And with regard to police, this whole business about police reform, the left really mishandled that when they first started talking about it. Because early on, when they were talking about defunding the police, what should have appeared in the article was not necessarily defunding the police, but transferring those funds towards some responsibilities that police shouldn’t even be dealing with. And that got lost somewhere. For instance, the police shouldn’t be dealing with the homeless, they should not be dealing with mental health situations, and things like that. You should not send a gun to a domestic situation. It’s going to escalate it.

I mean, there are so many things, and we all got to take steps, including Black folks. I did a cartoon that had something to do with this guy. You know, he was making money, and he said he was tired of selling balloons, candles, and teddy bears. Because every time you turn around, we’re attending vigils, one after the other, each week, for people getting shot. Kids getting mistakenly killed, and what have you.

And then the police. Why can’t there be a committed effort to have a national database so that an officer can’t kill somebody in one town, and go get a job in another town? You can have an officer who’s been on the force for 19 years, and has got like 14 civil complaints about him overstepping the boundaries when engaging with the public, brutality and whatnot. And they assess the situation. And they make the determination that this guy is unfit to be on the force. And they rightfully fire him. Good. That’s good leadership. But the same cat shouldn’t be able to drive 26 miles down the road to the next township and get a job as a cop! He couldn’t do that if they had a national database.

Do you believe that Dr. King’s dream is actually possible in this country?

Well, you know, that’s why I’m ticked off so much right now. I’m so tired. And we done prayed on it, we’ve done every march. I guess it gets better over spans, but we keep going back to sleep. I mentioned something about trickle-down citizenship early on. It seems that it’s always going to be something catastrophic, Emmett Till or George Floyd, and then we have riots afterwards. And then you get a lot of hoopla and cries from leadership, and something is passed, another bill, and then we go back to sleep. That’s why I love that term “woke.” Because you got to be woke. They want you to go back to sleep.

And the thing that really ticks me off is … because I do editorial cartoons now, I have to watch Fox News. I’ve got to dial in once a while and see what those fools are saying on One America News and Newsmax, because they all vying for the same viewership. And I call it the race to the bottom, because they’re all lies, all conspiracies. And I’m at a point now where there’s anger whenever I hear something, or see something, or something is revealed to me. And I don’t like that idea of dealing with it. It’s because I’ve been dealing with it for so long. I’ve seen it for so long. And you can legislate all you want, but won’t do any good until you change some hearts. That’s what’s got to be changed. Some hearts.

And this whole business about critical race theory. My take on it, first of all, is it’s not being taught in school. It is not being taught. But what they also don’t want is for you to go too deep into history. Pure and simple. They’re afraid that white kids are going to feel guilty. I don’t want white kids to feel guilty. That’s not the goal, I don’t think. It’s actually to make you a critical thinker, and to make you critical of history. What they’re afraid of is that white kids will come to realize what their forefathers—their grandfathers, and great-grandfathers—were capable of. All the evil, heinous things that they did. That’s what they’re trying to shield from these white kids.

I don’t want these kids to feel guilty. I do want them to understand that they are the beneficiaries of white supremacy and white entitlement. This one guy that sits next to me in the gym is from Missouri. He’s Jewish. He said he didn’t know any Black people until he mentioned a guy named George Lyle or something [author’s note: Garry Lyle], who went to George Washington University, where he went. And I remember the guy’s name because he played safety for the Chicago Bears. He didn’t know any Black people. He sits next to me on a bike in the gym quite often. In fact, sometimes I get a little tired of talking at length to him about anything dealing with politics. But I told him, “You might not be aware of it, but you live in an all-white Jewish community, right? Well, that was orchestrated by the housing situation, you know, redlining of prospective Black buyers.” He was not going to be steered into your community by a realtor. That’s just what it is. Well, he nodded. I mean, he knew I was telling the truth. There was no chance that a Black family was going to be able to buy in that area. We were all shoved into one area.

Even now, when it comes to urban renewal, it actually is urban removal. And wherever there are landfills, you better believe that the first community nearest that landfill is a Black community. When they decide to cut a swath of land to build a freeway or something, it’s going to border a Black community. That’s another reason why we got to vote. Not only do you vote, but once your candidate is fortunate enough to win, you gotta hold their feet to the fire. Because without it, we will stay marginalized. We gotta step up and take charge and control.

And the sisters, I’ve got the utmost confidence in them. The sisters are on the front lines for the Black community every day. A lot of brothers out there today have to do better. What happened in Georgia, with Warnock’s win, wouldn’t have never happened without Black women. They grab it by the throat, and they’re committed. Nothing but respect for Black women. Love them to death, they’re solid.

But Black men scare me when it comes to politics. They really do. Your vote is important. Essential. That’s the word to use for it. If you can find a reason to do everything else in the world, you need to drag yourself to the registration, get to the polls, and vote. When it comes to Martin Luther King’s dream, I’m like Fannie Lou Hamer. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. And it’s beginning to weigh on me. I’ve been dealing with this now for a long time. I’m just exhausted, I guess, is the best way to put it.

But I’m going to stop the political cartoons. And I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I said I’m gonna get back to some other work. I have got several unfinished paintings and maybe I’ll find some other artistic outlets, like dealing with pastels.

I’m still doodling now sitting watching TV. Got pads around the house. On the nightstand, on the coffee table, I’ve got a pad everywhere that I can use to write down some ideas. I sent out three cartoons today. The one about historically Black colleges, I sent that to the Post. So maybe I’ll get a shot at getting that one published. I just did a podcast with Richard Prince, a podcast featuring cartoonists of color. It was very, very interesting and well done. And it’s the first time I’ve been able to sit down with other cartoonists since 2020. I put together a little symposium about Black cartoonists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. And I had Ray Billingsley there and other talented people. So I still enjoy it. But I think I’m going to slow down soon.