Passion

Celebrating Jackie Ormes !

“To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first publication of the comic strip Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, Google Doodle honored the life of its creator, Jackie Ormes — through a comic, of course!

The parallax-animated comic strip offers a glimpse into the story of Jackie Ormes, born Zelda Mavin Jackson, at various stages of her life, starting with her upbringing in Monongahela, PA. It was there that Ormes learned to draw and got her first start at professional cartooning through caricatures in the Monongahela High School yearbook.

After a few years of working at respected Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, in 1937 Jackie Ormes was given the chance to have her own comic strip published. This became Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem — the first nationally-published comic created by a Black woman — which balanced humor with the harsh realities faced by those moving north to escape racism.

One of Jackie Ormes’ later comics, Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger ran from 1945 to 1956, and inspired a run of Patty-Jo dolls, styled after the comic’s younger main character. These Patty-Jo dolls were groundbreaking in their own right, as the first Black dolls in America with high-quality clothes.”

View doodle here

The Cambridge academic Robin Bunce said: “There is a fundamental danger of erasing the very notion of a struggle at all. I’ve been researching this for four and a half years and there have been so many occasions when people have said to me: ‘There was no black struggle in Britain. You’re thinking of South Africa or America.’“

The narrative that feeds it is the one that Britain is the utopia of fair play. We have such a commitment to individual rights, we have such a commitment to common sense and decency that there is no systematic racism in Britain.”…

Ain’t no marching

(Queen speak the real )