Integration Is a... Bitch!

Integration is a Bitch! provides some answers to this rather poignant question. We’d like to hear (or, in this case, read) your thoughts on why integration is (or isn’t) a bitch. Click on the “Leave a comment” link below to post your response…

The first time I drew an editorial cartoon, I was in church. The minister was preaching, and the deacon sitting next to him had fallen asleep. So I sketched him… That was the first day I exercised the talent that would someday lead to the book…

So, in the late ’60s, I was a Visual Aid Designer at the steel mill. I drew illustrations of the machinery in the mill that they would use in training programs, manuals, and such…

I was inspired by my father to study Industrial Design while attending the University of Illinois. He was very artistic, but worked most of his life at the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. Most of the Black people I knew in those days worked in those tedious mills… I remember one time my aunt was staying with my wife and me. She didn’t believe I was going to work because I had a shirt and tie on. She had a husband who worked in the mill, as a blue-collar worker, with his bare-hands. The notion of a Black white-collar worker eluded her.

Later on, I tried to form a group called the “Black White-Collar Workers of America.” I believed we had a story to tell, a message to convey… As one would imagine, the Unions felt we were starting another Union—and everyone knows nobody messes with the Unions…

Every morning, one of my co-workers would come in the office with a negative article about Blacks. They called us Negroes back then. He would show me an article and say “Here’s a Negro who robbed an old lady”.

Later, other people started bringing negative articles in just like the first guy.

After awhile I would come home and I would start arguments with my wife. She would ask me “What’s wrong with you?” So, finally I told her that they had been bombarding me with all of these negative articles at work.

My wife said, “You can solve that problem.”

“How?” I asked.

“You can cut out negative articles about them!”

And so that’s what I did. Boy, did they hate my guts for it! But, really, I now began to see the whole things as quite amusing, and got quite a laugh out of it… My attitude changed because I was no longer a victim (thanks to my wife’s counsel), and had decided to strike back!

A thought: People don’t know anything about each other. We’ve been separated so long…

A lot of people ask me where the idea for the book Integration is a Bitch came from. Quite frankly, the book was not born so much of an idea, as it was of a need—the need to find a way to keep my sanity in the midst of the daily aggravations I faced as the only Black white-collar employee at the steel mill I worked at after graduating from college. (Ah, college… My experiences at college should form the content of another entry, another time…) Anyway, the book came to being as a result of necessity. Sketching the characters and writing the book really helped me to keep my sanity in those days.

I made a decision to document the crazy things that happened to me at the steel mill, using an art form that I was very familiar with. Part of me also felt that this might help other people embarking into industry. So I started drawing. Whenever someone said something ridiculous (or, in many cases, outright outrageous) to me, I would draw a sketch. I remember a secretary once said to me, “Tom, can I use your knife?” Believe it or not, she assumed I carried a knife!

So, it is the accumulation of my experiences as the only Black person in a White-dominated white-collar work environment, represented in the cartoon art form, which we now have as the book, Integration is a Bitch.

During the tumultuous 1960s … I … as a Black white-collar worker, willingly and conscientiously took an active part in America’s leading social preoccupation … an experiment called “integration” … Today, I am compelled to assess my total experience and perhaps the experiences of other Blacks by saying … integration was a bitch in the 1960s … and … it still is a bitch today!