Politics Drawn in Black and White

Abstract

There was an explosion of Black American newspapers in the United States in the period after the Civil War. These newspapers faced significant challenges of widespread illiteracy in the Black population and a hostile rhetorical environment. This analysis examines the ways in which the editorial cartooning of Henry J. Lewis allowed the Indianapolis Freeman to face these obstacles. The use of illustration allowed the Freeman to address Black demands for equality while avoiding dominant White attacks. Specifically, our analysis finds that Lewis argued for three forms of equality in his drawings: biological equality among the races, social equality through Victorian values, and political equality by adopting the norms of White political voice. These strategies, when taken together, help to connect Reconstruction-era Black rhetoric to Black rhetoric of the twentieth centuries. Implications for Black citizenship and the role of the Black press in grounding civil rights debates are offered.

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Notes on contributors

Windy Y. Lawrence

WINDY LAWRENCE, left, is an associate professor of communication studies and the director and founder of the University of Houston-Downtown Center for Public Deliberation. A version of this paper was named top paper of the Rhetoric and Public Address division at the regional Communication Association Annual Meeting.

Benjamin Bates

BENJAMIN R. BATES, center, is the Barbara Geralds Schoonover Professor of Health Communication in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University, where he also serves as the associate director for graduate studies. With Rukhsana Ahmed, he is co-editor of two books. He currently edits the journal Communication Quarterly.

Mark Cervenka

MARK CERVENKA, right, is an associate professor of art and director of the O'Kane Gallery at the University of Houston-Downtown. He and colleague Windy Lawrence co-produced the exhibition “Drawing the Line: The Emergence of Editorial Cartoons by African American Artists in the Indianapolis Freeman and the Richmond Planet” in 2005. The authors thank the curators of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago for access to their archives of the Indianapolis Freeman and the Henry J. Lewis papers.