Harrington, Oliver

HARRINGTON, OLIVER (1912-1995). The career of cartoonist and painter Oliver “Ollie” Harrington spanned the popular Black press of the Great Depression to leftwing newspapers of the Reagan era. He contributed frequently to the Communist Party’s Daily World and People’s World.

Harrington grew up in a small Black community in the South Bronx, moving to Harlem during the Great Depression. His Dark Laughter (later Bootsie) comic first appeared in the Amsterdam News in 1935 and was eventually syndicated throughout the Black press. Dark Laughter was the most widely-read African American comic during the 1930s and 1940s. It featured a portly Black Harlem “everyman,” Bootsie, a forerunner to Langston Hughes’s character Semple. As in Hughes’s stories, the comic combined humor, recognizable Harlem landscapes and events, and sharp social criticism. In fact, Hughes introduced a 1958 collection of Bootsie cartoons by calling Harrington “Negro America’s favorite cartoonist.” Harrington also produced comics and drawings in a wide range of genres, including illustrations, editorial comics, the Black adventure strip Jive Gray, a brief run of a serialized graphic adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, and many paintings.

At some point in the 1930s or early 1940s, Harrington joined the Communist Party, becoming a member of the Party’s Arts Club in New York. There he found a network of Black Left visual artists in Harlem, including Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, Gwendolyn Bennett, Jacob Lawrence, and Georgette Seabrooke Powell. Harrington served as the editorial cartoonist to People’s Voice, joining a staff in 1942 that included such Communists and leftists as the editor-in-chief Doxey Wilkerson, managing editor Marvel Cooke, and columnists Ann Petry and Fredi Washington, while still producing Bootsie for the Pittsburgh Courier. He served as Art Director of the monthly 1950s newspaper Freedom at the invitation of his old friend and mentor, Paul Robeson. Harrington enrolled in the Fine Arts program at Yale University, but was unable to graduate because of the United States entry into World War II. He served as a news photographer in the war, insisting later that while he wanted to fight against the Nazis, he did not want to participate in the segregated US military.

The intensification of the Cold War prompted Harrington to flee the United States in 1951, first settling in Paris, where he became part of circle expatriate Black artists and activists, including Richard Wright, who became a close friend. Pursued by US authorities, Harrington applied for and received political asylum in the German Democratic Republic in 1961, remaining in Berlin for the last four decades of his life.

In 1968, the Communist Party revived its daily tabloid, the Daily People’s World, under the editorship of the Black Communist journalist John Pittman. Pittman hired Harrington as an editorial cartoonist for the new daily. Pittman’s move provided Harrington with a much-needed income since his Bootsie strip had been dropped by the Chicago Defender in the early 1960s under pressure, Harrington suspected, of the US government. Harrington’s work for the People’s Daily World allowed him to develop certain aspects that had been understated in his cartoons or the popular Black press. He felt free to issue indictments of US racism and imperialism, including the government’s support of South African apartheid and other forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism. In that sense, Harrington’s later days as a contributor to the Communist press in the United States were more liberating than constraining.

Harrington, Oliver W. Bootsie and Others: A Selection of Cartoons by Ollie Harrington. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958.

Harrington, Oliver W. Why I Left America and Other Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver W. Harrington, ed. M. Thomas Inge. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.