The battle for civil rights in the United States has a long, complex, and fascinating history, deeply intertwined with struggles that spanned across race and class. Political cartoons played a significant role in this fight, serving as powerful tools to challenge prevailing injustices and advocate for equality.
Over the last two centuries, various groups fought to amend a Constitution whose Framers did not include their wives and daughters - let alone the enslaved people whose involuntary labor they depended upon - in their vision of citizenship. Clearly, ensuring that the protections promised in our Constitution extend to everyone is still an ongoing struggle.
Analyzing Political Cartoons
Early Challenges and Exclusion
During the Civil Rights Movement, political cartoons often highlighted the stark realities of racial discrimination and the fight for voting rights. However, this was not a fight exclusive to race, but also to gender and class as well.
In this image, an Irish man thumbs his nose at the white woman and Chinese man excluded from the polls, and a Black man looks on with a contented expression, portrayed by the artist as apparently satisfied with his easy access to voting - which fails to reflect the reality of the violence and repression that Black voters faced from the white power structure in the decades following the Civil War. The sign below the two men in the window makes the point clear, reading “POLLS: Women and Chinaman [sic] Not Admitted.
As immigration historian Robert Barde points out, the Act “was intended to end the arrival of Chinese laborers into the United States and to bar Chinese from naturalization,” and “[o]nly certain classes of Chinese were even allowed to enter the United States.” Despite such discriminatory policies, Chinese American women like Dr. government. Neither were citizens and neither could vote.
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The Role of Black Women
Black women played a crucial role in the fight for civil rights, and their contributions were often highlighted in political cartoons. These images sought to empower and uplift Black women, portraying them as essential figures in the struggle for equality.
Titled “Woman to the Rescue!”, it depicts a Black woman wielding a club representing the “Federal Constitution” and protecting her little children clinging to her skirts from the vultures of “Jim Crow Law” and “Segregation.” The “Grand-father Clause” lies defeated at her feet, a reference to the 1915 Guinn v. United States decision that struck down laws, common in the post-Reconstruction South, exempting whites from the literacy tests that frequently disenfranchised Black Americans. Historian of Black women’s suffrage Martha S. Jones argues that, for Black women, “ratification of the 19th Amendment was not a guarantee of the vote, but it was a clarifying moment . . .
Internal Disagreements and Satire
Political cartoons also reflected internal disagreements within the Black community regarding the best strategies for achieving equality. These cartoons often satirized different approaches and highlighted the complexities of the movement.
The figure of the Black man running from the confrontation appears to satirize the Black Americans who prioritized economic stability over civil rights. His speech reads, “I don’t believe in agitating and fighting. My policy is to pursue the line of least resistance. Tsh - with Citizenship Rights I want money I think the white folk will let me stay on my land as long as I stay in my place - (shades of WILMINGTON, N.C.). This character’s contradictory thinking reflects, in a caricatured fashion, some of the disagreements among Black activists at the time about the best methods to attain equality.
This divide was exemplified in the decades of debate between two of the most prominent Black leaders of the period, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. Founder of the Tuskegee Institute and advisor to multiple presidents, Washington focused on the need for Black Americans to attain economic security and thus prove their worthiness as citizens. Dubois, on the other hand, founded the NAACP partly due to his disagreements with this approach.
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The Broader Context of Suffrage
The fight for Black civil rights was often intertwined with other movements, including the women's suffrage movement. Political cartoons from this era reveal the complex dynamics and sometimes conflicting priorities of these struggles.
Throughout the nineteenth century, prominent Black women speakers and activists like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sojourner Truth had long refused to bow their heads to such rhetoric. Decades before this cartoon was published, Watkins Harper directly challenged the white women who narrowly focused on their own fight for suffrage. She was the only Black woman to speak on the platform alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. In the late 1860s, conflict over the Fifteenth Amendment, and what it meant for newly freed Black men to vote when white women could not, exposed the racist fault lines among white suffragists who preferred to put themselves first. But even before the Civil War, Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a woman?”, pushed back against the popular image of white women as delicate and angelic creatures and centered the long-ignored humanity of Black women. Watkins Harper’s critique of the rosy utopia often predicted by white suffrage advocates was clear-eyed and even humorous in tone: “I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies.
Imagery in support of suffrage also invoked white women’s traditional place as mothers, wives, and daughters. Class anxieties, as well as the endemic racism discussed above, were central to the national battle over suffrage. “Universal Suffrage” is depicted as “The Modern Cornelia,” a hard-drinking, lower-class woman who proudly shows off “Negro Suffrage” and “Female Suffrage” as her children.
Cartoons like these negatively linked suffrage for Black Americans with women’s suffrage, and used the supposed absurdity of Black people and women voting to make jokes or prophesy the certain downfall of the nation if such people were allowed to participate in politics. The labor movement was also integral to the fight for suffrage. White men frequently satirized the concept of women’s suffrage. Many men also simply believed that women were simply unfit to participate in democracy.
Anti-Suffrage Imagery
Anti-suffrage cartoons often employed demeaning stereotypes and fear-mongering tactics to undermine the movement. These images sought to portray suffragists as unattractive, neglectful of their families, or simply unfit for political participation.
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In “Mother’s Got the Habit Now,’ a confident woman strides out to vote, leaving her husband at home with the baby. Women’s value as objects of sexual attraction for men was often invoked as anti-suffrage artists depicted the presumed hideousness of the suffragists. Violence against suffragists was also frequently stoked in the popular postcards and cartoons of the day. One postcard from the early 1900s, titled “What I Would Do with the Suffragists,” caricatures the suffragist as unattractive and shows her bound to a chair and chained to a “56-lbs” weight, her face locked into a vise to prevent her from speaking. Despite the supposed ugliness of the suffragette, conventionally beautiful or fashionable women were hardly free from jokes at their expense.
Triumph and Continued Struggles
The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 marked a significant victory for the suffrage movement, but the fight for full equality continued. Contemporary artists continue to draw inspiration from this history, using their work to celebrate progress and acknowledge the ongoing challenges.
When the Nineteenth Amendment was finally ratified by the requisite number of states, the June 1919 cover of The Suffragist showed “Justice” tightly embracing “American Womanhood” in an image that throbs with the desperate relief that many activists felt in that moment. “At Last,” indeed - though only for some. Despite those impediments, the historic election of Kamala Harris as Vice President is a mark of how far the nation has come. Just 100 years after some women, most of whom were white, gained the right to vote, the United States has elected the first Black person, the first South Asian person, and the first woman ever to occupy its second-highest office. Two contemporary artists have responded by placing Ms.
In this viral illustration by the company Good Trubble and artist Bria Goeller, Harris casts the shadow of Ruby Bridges, the young Black girl who integrated the New Orleans school system. Ruby’s silhouette appears to be based on her depiction in Norman Rockwell’s 1964 painting “The Problem We All Live With.” By invoking Rockwell’s famous image of young Ruby’s bravery in the face of systemic racism and segregation, Goeller places Harris in context with the many women and girls who fought for civil rights before her. In “Kamala wins the vote,” published just after it became clear that Biden and Harris would win in Pennsylvania, Pulitzer-prize winning Philadelphia Inquirer editorial cartoonist Signe Wilkinson used a playful double meaning to celebrate Harris’ historic victory. In the cartoon, Harris is depicted in the white pantsuit and silk pussy-bow blouse she donned for her victory speech on November 7. Wilkinson herself is a notable “first” in her own right as the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning and one of only three women editorial cartoonists to be nationally syndicated. Her latest book, Herstory, collects 19 cartoons that explore women’s issues in honor of the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial. “These women didn’t draw for prizes,” she wrote.
