Vintage Black Heroes – The Chisholm Kid

The Chisholm Kid was the first Black Cowboy to be featured in a comic strip.

Chisholm Kid #53

The Chisholm Kid was also one of the first Black heroes to appear in a comic strip.

The Chisholm Kid was a new comic strip created for the Pittsburgh Courier’s new color comic section that premiered on August 19, 1950.  The color comic section was produced by the Smith-Mann Syndicate and only appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the biggest Black newspapers in the country at that time.

The Chisholm Kid was part of a quartet of Vintage Black Heroes, along with Guy Fortune, Mark Hunt and Neil Knight, that appeared in the color comic section.

As with many of the other comic strips, The Chisholm Kid outlasted the color section, which ended in 1954, and was demoted to daily-style black and white format. The Kid rode into the sunset on August 11, 1956.

The strip was by Carl Pfeufer. His credits include the Flash Gordon clone Don Dixon, done for the Brooklyn Eagle-based Watkins Syndicate, and Bantam Prince for the New York Herald-Tribune Syndicate.

The Chisholm Kid Story:

• Lone Fighter For Justice For All
• Then known as Rod Stone, he was an outrider with a wagon train on the Chisholm Trail
• In a mountain pass, he led the wagons in a race for open ground, running a gauntlet of hostile comanches

The Chisholm Kid pays homage to the 5,000 to 9,000 Black Cowboys who drove cattle along the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas after the Civil War.

The Chisholm Kid was similar to comic contemporaries Hopalong Casidy and The Lone Ranger.

The Museum Of UnCut Funk sends out a special thank you to Allan Holtz at the Stripper’s Guide for allowing us to repost information from his articles on the Smith-Mann Syndicate.

Source: Allan Holtz; Copyright  Allan Holtz 2013 The Strippers Guide http://strippersguide.blogspot.com