African-American Cartoonist Morrie Turner Dies At 90

Morrie Turner, the African-American cartoonist, who drew the Wee Pals comic strip, died last month at age 90. The Los Angeles Times obituary writer (January 29, 2014) wrote that Turner started Wee Pals in 1965, "soon populating the strip with clever kids spanning a rainbow of races and ethnicities."But the writer neglected to mention that Turner contributed one-panel cartoons to the "Humor in Hue" page in Negro Digest magazine (renamed Black World) in the 1960s and 1970s. Negro Digest was published by the Chicago based Johnson Publishing Company that also published Ebony and Jet magazines. Turner's "Humor in Hue" cartoons always had an anti-racism theme.

For me the most memorable cartoon that he drew was one consisting of ten-panels called "The Invisible Black: A Study in White Color-Blindness" (Black World, June 1970). It depicts a white male and female, who in their travels in different venues, are totally oblivious to the black men and women they encounter performing various job titles: flight attendant, bus driver, firefighter, et cetera. That is, until they happen upon a intoxicated black man with a liquor bottle in his hand, sprawled out in front of an apartment building. "Look, Henry," announces the woman, with obvious disgust, "isn't that typical of them!!!"