I was raised in what is now the "jungle" of New York, the lower Bronx, and, indeed, at that time it was a very pleasant place. We played like all oth… - Ollie Harrington

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I was raised in what is now the "jungle" of New York, the lower Bronx, and, indeed, at that time it was a very pleasant place. We played like all other kids. Where I lived was a very small enclave, a ghetto, but there were a number of ghettos. Most of the people there were immigrants; first generation Americans from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and there were a few French people. In a way, in a peculiar way, it was an integrated community composed of several separated ghettos. That was about the norm in those days. The idea of integration hadn't really gotten started, so I think that for anyone living today it would be a period that would be really difficult to understand...it was...in spite of some of the racism which I began to learn in school, a rather pleasant life.

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About Ollie Harrington

Oliver Wendell Harrington (February 14, 1912 – November 2, 1995) was an American cartoonist and an outspoken advocate for civil rights who was opposed to racism and in the United States.

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Birth Name: Oliver Wendell Harrington
Alternative Names: Oliver Harrington Oliver W. Harrington Oliver W. "Ollie" Harrington
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Additional quotes by Ollie Harrington

I wasn't really interested in doing cartoons at that time, but I had one teacher, Miss McCoy, who used to call me and the other Black pupil in the school to the front of the room and present us to the class. She'd say. "These two, being Black, belong in a waste basket." Well, there was no way of defending oneself against that. So, I began to build up a kind of rage against her. There was no way that I could have gotten back at her because if I had, it would have been much more serious than it turned out. In the end, it turned out rather beneficial to me because I began doing cartoons of Miss McCoy in my notebooks.

In 1945 everyone thought that peace really meant peace. Everyone, that is, who didn't live in a ghetto, where peace means burial parlor. Newspapers were amazingly vague about the wave of lynchings sweeping the South. Reporters and police authorities seemed mystified by the number of burned, black corpses hanging in some of the choicest wooded areas, many of them castrated. The supposition was that they were put there by "anonymous persons." Even more mystifying was the fact that they were usually veterans.

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