What the Talmadge paper printed.

The white man at the left has lost his job. His boss, drawn as a Black racial caricature, is ordering him out. Across the office, a white woman takes dictation from another Black official. The desk identifies the agency: F.E.P.C.¹

The cartoon appeared in The Statesman, Eugene Talmadge’s weekly newspaper. A copy survives in the Stetson Kennedy papers at Georgia State University. The archive places it in the 1940s. The surviving item does not supply an exact publication date.¹

Content note: the historical cartoon below contains racist caricatures.

What fair employment became

The policy behind those initials had a date. On June 25, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 after A. Philip Randolph and other Black leaders pressed for action against discrimination in defense employment and threatened a march on Washington.²

The order declared that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” It also established a Committee on Fair Employment Practice to receive and investigate complaints.²

In the cartoon, fair employment has become an office where Black people give orders and white people have to take them. The Black figures are drawn with exaggerated features and made to speak in mocking dialect. One has the power to dismiss a white worker. Another has a white secretary. The picture supplies the argument before the reader reaches the speech bubbles.¹

The official at the desk wants a transfer back to Washington. His explanation, in the cartoon’s words, is that “Eugene Talmadge don’t admire me none.” Talmadge does not have to appear in the drawing. His name identifies the politician who would oppose the arrangement.¹

The people who read it

The newspaper had a political job to do. In a 1987 interview with historian Hal Henderson, Herman Talmadge explained that it had kept his father’s views, and later his own, before the public. A large circulation was not necessary. A hundred copies going into Tift County, he suggested, could provide the nucleus of a campaign.³

He described those readers as “the sergeants and the corporals and the first lieutenants.” The paper reached people who could carry its politics further than their own subscriptions.³

The copy in Kennedy’s papers preserves that message. A typed label on the archival copy calls The Statesman a “hate sheet.” The cartoon itself shows how the paper could put racial hierarchy into an ordinary scene at work.¹

In September 1936, TIME had reported the paper’s masthead: “Editor: The People; Associate Editor: Eugene Talmadge.”⁴

The cartoon gave those readers a workplace in which white people had to answer to Black people. That was what they were being invited to find intolerable.