Today's daily editorial cartoon is just a caricatured parody of an 8-page rant someone posted under one of my cartoons yesterday. Nothing special, just something typical from people who assume, for whatever reason, that my little Activist character is actually a drawing of me. Because of this, I tend to get these people who approach me thinking they will exert influence over whom they believe is just a precocious kid whose powers they can steer to support their own agendas, presumably while also grooming me for molestation or whatever. Once they find out I'm 50 yrs old, they mutter something semi-coherent and then slink back into the shadows of their Whitopia.

Since it is a 'slow news day' so to speak, I did want to use the space to explore an unrelated packet of thought meanings floating around in my head for a 14th episode of my Notes While Observing series. 

1.) In the memoirs of Dr. Thomas Sowell, he mentioned that during the civil rights movement he tracked the developments in real time since he lived through it as a politically conscious Black man from the South. He remembered not only the feeling of being released from the legally restricted life of jim crow, but--most interesting to me--he saw when the civil rights leadership stopped fighting for desegregation and it's laundry list of demands, and flipped over to fighting for the catch-all "integration." He said he remembered thinking at the time that it wasn't a good idea for the movement to abandon the goal of  economic independence in favor of this new social integration scheme of non-economic liberalism, and he maintained that criticism into the modern day.

2.) The Niagara Movement (1905) was a pro-Black organization founded by 29 Black community leaders, which included W.E.B. DuBois.  One of their primary formal goals was to reverse society's “denial of equal opportunities to us in economic life; in the rural districts of the South this amounts to peonage and virtual slavery; all over the South it tends to crush labor and small business enterprises…” expressed in the organization's  Declaration of Principles. Five years later, the Niagara Movement helped Black people acquire a combined 16 million acres of land, on their way towards achieving full Black Empowerment & Economic Inclusion as an independent people ready to interconnect with rival independent special interests so we may all help guide the country towards its long neglected ideals.

3.)  One of the many tentacles of the 'villains of the North,' the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was specifically founded to counter/sabotage the goals of the hard-chargin' Niagara Movement organization.  Interestingly, the NAACP's leadership deemed it vital to recruit W,E,B. DuBois as the face of the group and spared no resources to make this objective a reality. The work of the NAACP involved reprogramming Black people away from the enfranchised, land-owning, financially independent entrepreneur mindset by partnering with blood thirsty domestic terror groups and alluring the abused Black community to the factory towns of the North where they would feel that permanent employment at eh mercy of the crony capitalists would be infinitely preferred to the artificially constructed terrors they escaped from down South. Decades later, the NAACP was instrumental in sabotaging the dissemination of the 1972 Gary Convention's deliverable, the all-important Black Political Agenda, to prevent its critical use of holding the new Black politician class accountable to their community of birth.

4.) On social media over this pass year, I've encountered two 'baby boomer' white men who bitterly remembered being in the role of white allies ™  during the civil rights movement era. Both explained that there was a defining incident where Black leaders angrily "kicked out all the white people," expressed deep regret at the potential personal revenue lost, and at least one of them asked me to use my own influence to try to "get them back in." 

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MEDIUM: Scanned pen & ink cartoon drawing w/Adobe Photoshop color.

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