JACKIE ORMES

Jackie Ormes was born Zelda Mavin Jackson on August 1, 1911, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to parents William Winfield Jackson and Mary Brown Jackson. Her father William, the owner of a printing company and movie theater proprietor, was killed in an automobile accident in 1917. Her dad's death resulted in the then six-year-old Jackie and her older sister Dolores being placed in their aunt and uncle's care for a brief time. Eventually, Jackie's mother remarried, and the family relocated to the nearby city of Monongahela. Ormes described the suburb in a 1985 interview for the Chicago Reader as "spread out and simple. Nothing momentous ever happens here." She graduated from high school in Monongahela in 1930.

 

Ormes drew and wrote throughout high school. She was an art editor for the 1929–1930 Monongahela High School Yearbook, where her earliest talent as a cartoonist could be seen in her school's student's and teachers' lively caricatures. During this period, she wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier editor, a weekly African-American newspaper published on Saturdays. The then-editor, Robert Vann, wrote back. This correspondence led to her first writing assignment—covering a boxing match. Her coverage of subsequent matches led to her becoming an avid fan of the sport.

 

Ormes started in journalism as a proofreader for the Pittsburgh Courier. She also worked as an editor and freelance writer, writing on police beats, court cases, and human-interest topics. While she enjoyed "a great career running around town, looking into everything the law would allow, and writing about it," what she wanted to do was draw.

 

Jackie pitched Patty-jo' n' Ginger to the Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier in 1937, which had fourteen editions published around the country and made Ormes not only the first African-American female syndicated cartoonist but the first African-American syndicated cartoonist.

 

Over 30 years, Ormes produced four separate comic strips. "Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem," "Candy," "Torchy Brown heartbeats," and "Patty-Jo' n' Ginger." During the segregated years of the 1900s through 1960's America, the Black Press offered comic strips that featured African American heroes & heroines in a wide variety of life situations. The gritty 'inner-city' stories, poor 'ghetto' life, or today's one-dimensional comic relief did not confine Jackie's characters.

 

Ormes' strips depicted black in a very different fashion, which was not the norm of her day. Typically, Black people were portrayed as servants or exaggerated caricatures of the "Buckwheat" or "Steppin Fetchit" variety. Ormes' female characters were independent and strong. Ormes said, "I have never liked dreamy little women who can't hold their own."

 

In the United States, few women's opportunities in general, and even fewer for African American women, existed during the mid-century. Jackie Ormes blazed a trail as a famous cartoonist with the prominent black newspapers of the day.

 

Ormes's cartoon characters delighted readers of newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender. They spawned other products, including an elegant black doll with a stylish wardrobe and "Torchy Togs" paper dolls in the funny papers. In the late 1940s, Ormes transformed cartoon character Patty-Jo into a doll that is now a collector's item.

 

Ormes was a member of Chicago's black elite, with a social circle that included the leading political figures and entertainers of the day such as Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan. 

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Her politics, which fell decidedly to the left and were apparent to even a casual reader of her cartoons and comic strips, eventually led to her investigation by the FBI during the McCarthy era.

 

Jackie Ormes married accountant Earl Ormes in 1931. The couple initially moved to Salem, Ohio, so that Earl could be close to his family. But Ormes was not happy there, and they eventually moved to Chicago. The pair had one child, Jaqueline, who died of a brain tumor at three. Ormes remained married to Earl until he died in 1976.

 

Jackie retired from cartooning in 1956, although she continued to create art, including murals, still lifes, and portraits until rheumatoid arthritis made this impossible. Jackie was heavily involved in local advocacy through the Chicago Urban League and the South Side Community Art Center and was a founding board member for the DuSable Museum of African American History.

 

Ormes was a passionate doll collector, with 150 antique and modern dolls in her collection.  

 

Jackie Ormes died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Chicago on December 26, 1985. The National Association of Black Journalists posthumously inducted Jackie into their Hall of Fame in 2014, and the Will Eisner Comic Industry Eisner Award Hall of Fame did the same in 2018.