Comics and Black America
Add race to the story of comics, and things get very interesting indeed.
July 30, 2021
More by Clifford Thompson
Peanuts and the Absurd Art of Growing Up
Who is winning the old nature-versus-nature debate? Which of these influencers has the upper hand? Are we mostly preprogrammed, acting out what has been inside us since Day One, or do we go in the direction life blows us?
Connecting Flights
As I write this essay, I am listening to Bird’s records. I love the inventiveness, the breakneck pace, and the flights of fancy of his melodies. I admire his daring and ingenuity, just as I do the Wright brothers’ daring and ingenuity: over a century after they occurred, it is thrilling to read accounts of their first successful powered flights.
Thank You, Lt. Uhura, for Your Starship Service
Nichelle Nichols, aka "Star Trek"'s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, represented a miracle. In a decade that saw Black people beaten, jailed, and killed for wanting to vote, when laws effectively recognizing husbands as their wives’ bosses were still on the books in some states, what reason was there to think a Black woman would show up on TV as the equal of her White male colleagues? And yet there she was. There she is, always.
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In Small-Town Indiana, LAM Runs a Lost and Found for the Forgotten Among Us
If you have ever cared for an addict, you know the desperate feeling of no easy solutions. Science has no inoculation or cure, so treatment is a combination of lengthy and often expensive behavioral and pharmacologic therapies that still depend on “the individual’s desire to change,” as LAM puts it.
The Curious Second Act of Chuck Colson
The “hatchet man” for President Nixon, and a chief architect of both Nixon’s “dirty tricks” and the team of “Plumbers” who schemed to smear, libel, drug, and, in at least one case, even assassinate the president’s vast list of “enemies,” lived not just to endure the stain of a criminal conviction and seven months in federal prison, but seemingly transcend it. Watergate historians, however, are not so kind.
The Speed Machine and the Rebirth of a Champion
British Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton’s move to Scuderia Ferrari signals a second act, a new opportunity to emerge victorious not only on the track but also to continue pushing the limits of what is possible beyond it.