The Museum Of UnCut Funk is always looking for new and creative ways to celebrate Black History Month. We hope you’ll enjoy our endeavor to find new aspects of our history to highlight.
Fred Ellis was an editorial cartoonist. He is best remembered as one of the leading radical artists of the 1920s and 1930s as an artist for various publications of the Communist Party. In 1919 Fred Ellis became familiar with a new weekly magazine published by the Chicago Federation of Labor called The New Majority. He began his career as a cartoonist, submitting his first political art to The New Majority.
Prominent communist labor leader William Z. Foster was the circulation manager of The New Majority at this time, and it was through him that Ellis made contact with the Workers Party of America, which he joined in 1924. Ellis drew extensively for the Communist movement from 1923 onward, contributing material to The Daily Worker, The Liberator, The Labor Herald, and other publications. The Museum Of UnCut Funk became interested in Fred’s work when we researched his political drawings of the Black experience that were featured in serval publications.
Fred Ellis died in 1965. His papers are held by Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. The material includes more than 250 original cartoons, a sketchbook with more than 200 sketches, letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and other material.
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- The Iron Curtain…circa September 22nd, 1957.
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- The Jim Crow Decision…circa December 1st, 1951.
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- The cartoon here involves that in the 1940′s, insurance company Met. Life had built low-cost apartment buildings for returning veterans, but excluded black veterans from the apartments. When in 1951 some of the white soldiers protested this, Met. Life had them evicted…circa December 1st, 1951.
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- Stop the Genocide, referencing the high rate of race-based lynchings and executions happening in the U.S….circa November 21st, 1951.
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- The case of Willie McGee, convicted of raping a white woman, and executed on May 8th, 1951…circa February 28th, 1951.
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- The NBC radio & television network’s banning of singer/writer/activist Paul Robeson — who had been scheduled to appear on former First Lady’s The Eleanor Roosevelt Show…circa March 3rd, 1950
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- Cartoon, depicting a gun toting plantation owner on horse back, saying “Wal’, I Still Got You” from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927… circa July 13th, 1927
