Drawing on history

Pioneering black editorial cartoonist also worked in state

Henry Jackson Lewis created this self-portrait, circa 1889.
Henry Jackson Lewis created this self-portrait, circa 1889.

This story begins with a box. In a museum. In Chicago.

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The Political Pharisees is the title of this illustration by Henry Jackson Lewis, which was published in 1889 in The Freeman. Jackson worked in Arkansas in the 1880s.

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This undated illustration was created by the man regarded as the first black editorial cartoonist — Henry Jackson Lewis.

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Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/DuSable Museum of African American History

This unpublished illustration by Henry Jackson Lewis helped create an “obsession” to learn about the artist, according to Chicago sculptor Garland Taylor. A grant from the Arkansas Black History Commission has helped Taylor’s research on Lewis, who lived and worked in Pine Bluff after the Civil War, and is regarded as America’s first black editorial cartoonist.

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This editorial illustration by Henry Jackson Lewis is titled Frederick Gets the Plum.

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Political Horoscope was created by illustrator Henry Jackson Lewis in 1889. It was published by The Freeman, a black newspaper in Indianapolis.

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In The Great Southern Exodus, illustrator Henry Jackson Lewis presents a visual narrative about the suffering of blacks in the South. It was published in 1889 in The Freeman.

Inside that box were 47 illustrations by Henry Jackson Lewis, who lived in Arkansas after the Civil War and who is said to be America's first black political cartoonist, overcoming a horrible childhood injury and the prejudices of his time.

Garland Taylor opened that box.

Taylor is 44. He's a sculptor who lives in Chicago with his wife, Michelle, and son Malcolm. In 2011, he was working as museum specialist at the DuSable Museum of African American History when he opened the box.

"This is what I was looking at," he said back in November. It was an illustration titled Our Women.

He asked himself: "Why do I not know this work of art, and this artist, Lewis?"

Our Women shows a black woman, smartly dressed. In one hand is a bouquet. In the other, a quill pen. The model was Lewis' wife, Livinia. It shows, Taylor said, Lewis' mastery of visual narratives and metaphors.

"I wanted to know who this guy really was," Taylor said, "and that's how I got to obsessing over Lewis. That's what my son says."

Taylor's obsession led him to "exhaust every click on the Internet," and to the work of Marvin Jeter, a retired archaeologist in Arkansas.

Jeter's interest in Lewis dates from 1980, when he was working at the Arkansas Archeological Survey's research station at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He went to a conference at the Smithsonian Institution on the Smithsonian's "Mound Survey" of 1881-94 of the prehistoric Indian mounds of the eastern United States.

In the survey's archives on the mounds of Arkansas there were drawings made by Lewis.

Lewis had been hired by the main field archaeologist for Arkansas, Edward Palmer. Whatever talents Palmer had as an archaeologist, his skill as an illustrator was minimal. It's possible, Jeter said, that Palmer and Lewis connected in Memphis. In any event, the team surveyed and illustrated mounds in Arkansas, western Tennessee, western Mississippi, and eastern Louisiana.

"He was a self-made man," Jeter said of Lewis. "A man of tremendous talent held down for so many years. Lewis is an astounding example of a self-made man persevering over the decades of these handicaps."

ARKANSAS RESEARCH

Taylor spent several days trudging around Arkansas in mid-November. He came for two reasons. First, to pitch a

grant proposal to the Black History Commission of Arkansas. Second, to find out what more he could about the life and work of Henry Jackson Lewis.

The pitch was made Nov. 13.

Afterward, he said, "I headed to the Butler Center to do some research. If I didn't get the grant, I get on a train back to Chicago. I was eating catfish and gumbo when I got a phone call."

The grant came through.

"It was awesome."

The grant, $3,500, effectively paid for Taylor's time in Arkansas, where he drew some lines on the map of Lewis' life. "I came here to dig in and find some of his original works."

And he did, after a fashion. What Taylor found, looking at microfilm at the Central Arkansas Library System's Main Library in downtown Little Rock, were 11 pieces of art Lewis had published in the Arkansas Daily Gazette in the summer of 1887.

They were street scenes of Pine Bluff, and architectural renderings of what was being built there. "People were building new houses and it was making the news," Taylor said.

"Pine Bluff," he said, "was considered to be the Negro paradise at the time. That's how black newspapers referred to it."

Lewis' work also appeared in national publications such as Frank Leslie's Illustrated News and Harper's Weekly. In the latter, in 1879, Lewis contributed a courtroom scene from Pine Bluff of the trial of a horse thief. The jury showed an equal number of black and white jurors.

"I think the seeds of his political cartooning are sown here."

HISTORICAL ARTWORK

Jeter, the retired archaeologist who now lives in Maumelle, is the author of the entry on Lewis in The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. He has also written extensively about Lewis in academic journals, and has worked on what he calls a "big book" on the artist.

What's known of Lewis is that he was born into slavery in Mississippi in either 1837 or 1838. He was blinded in his left eye and his left hand was maimed when he fell into a fire. (Two self-portraits by Lewis show him in right profile.)

Jeter believes Lewis was mustered into the Union Army in Illinois, and served in a unit that operated in Arkansas. After the war, he lived in Pine Bluff and worked as a laborer. By 1879, his drawings were in Harper's Weekly. His hometown newspaper, The Pine Bluff Commercial, said Lewis had a brilliant future.

In November 1882, Palmer of the Smithsonian mound survey hired Lewis, and the latter drew mounds, maps and related scenes into 1883. A century or so later, Jeter discovered Lewis' artwork, after which Jeter wrote and edited a variety of academic pieces on the artist.

"His archaeological contributions are unbelievable without him really being credited for them," Jeter said. At least 31 of Lewis' archaeological drawings are at the Smithsonian. Prominent among the drawings are the Tillar complex in Drew County, the Troyville mounds near Jonesboro, La., and Emerald Mound near Natchez, Miss.

"He and Palmer recorded things about sites that have greatly changed since they were here more than a hundred years ago," Jeter said. "Dozens -- hundreds -- of sites are gone, and we wouldn't have known of their existence if they hadn't recorded it."

Lewis, Jeter said, "is almost completely unknown," but shouldn't be.

"Part of it is documenting archaeological sites," he said. "But the most important thing is he's the first African-American editorial cartoonist, something he did for only a few years, and was hard-hitting for only a few months."

Lewis is known in historic circles in Arkansas. The Arkansas History Commission has some of his illustrations. In 1991, the Old State House Museum had an exhibit of 30 of Lewis' artworks.

In the mid-1880s, the Lewis family moved to Little Rock. In January 1889, Lewis, Livinia and their seven children moved to Indianapolis for work at The Freeman, a newly published "national illustrated colored newspaper."

BLACK PRESS

Mark Cervenka knows of Lewis, having collaborated with Jeter on an academic journal piece and on a 2005 exhibit at the University of Houston-Downtown titled "Drawing the Line: The Emergence of Editorial Cartoons by African-American Artists in The Freeman and the Richmond Planet."

Cervenka is confident of Lewis' place as the first.

"I know this in two ways," he said. "The first way is that I did a lot of research in the literature out there on the black press, and at the Library of Congress and the Virginia State Library in Richmond. He's the first one who comes up.

"The other way is pretty convincing. The Freeman prided itself on being the first black illustrated newspaper in the country."

The black press in general was against stiff odds in the late 19th century, Cervenka said. Black newspapers, he said, "they came and they went."

"The fact, too, is that this was after Reconstruction. You had a lot of legislation that was making it more difficult for African-Americans to get a good education and move forward. The economics of putting together a newspaper at this day and time were also trying. For those whose readership was not the highest-paid in the city, this was a tough order."

Edward Elder Cooper was owner and editor of The Freeman. Cervenka said Cooper illustrated his newspaper to increase its circulation, which around 1900 was about 17,000. That circulation was nationwide, Cervenka said, and the highest of any black newspaper.

What was significant, Cervenka said, was that blacks could write about and depict blacks.

"Lewis is the first to bring this to life," he said. "It created a feeling within this community that they have a voice, that they can come together and have thoughts about equality and progress. And when there's a wrong done they can say there's a wrong done."

Jeter concurred.

"That was their aspiration," he said. "They hadn't given up on the American dream. Lewis and Cooper both were expressing that they had a dream, one which was slipping away because of Jim Crow laws."

Taylor expanded.

"It was the first time African-Americans had complete control of their images in the media."

POLITICAL CHANGE

Lewis lived and worked in Indianapolis for only 27 months before his death from pneumonia in April 1891. Taylor has documented about 175 of his editorial and political cartoons, caricatures and illustrations in The Freeman.

A frequent target of Lewis was President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican. One, titled The National Executive Asleep, shows Harrison dozing in a chair. Two black men blare trumpets into his ears. Another, titled The Political Pharisees, has a note below it: "They were willing to lick the Negro's boots a few months ago, but now that they are in office they have no need for him until the next election."

Such sentiments, Taylor said, illustrate what's known as the "Black bolt," when blacks began to move away from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.

Lewis lived in a time of great change, Taylor said.

"He sees slavery. He sees freedom. He sees Reconstruction and deconstruction. He sees the Gilded Age. He's on the cusp of and documented each one of these periods."

Taylor said a significant part of that documenting, of that artwork, was done in Arkansas, where Lewis lived 22 years in comparison to his two years in Indianapolis.

Perhaps there is another box. In Arkansas.

"There has to be more," Taylor said. "In someone's attic, or many attics, are Lewis' portraits of Arkansas' finest."

Style on 01/18/2015

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