The Comics Journal #308

#308

WINTER–SPRING 2022

$16.99

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING & ACTIVISM “ THE LITTLE SNAPPING FINGERS IN YOUR EAR”

PIA GUERR A

INTERVIEWED BY GARY GROTH

and CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ON VOTER SUPPRESSION, THE FIRST BLACK PANTHER PARTY AND COMICS • THROUGH THE MEGASCOPE • ALEX GRAHAM

interview • Pia Guerra

DUAL CITIZENSHIP

GARY GROTH: I think you were born in New Jersey.

PIA GUERRA: Yes. But you’re a Canadian citizen, so how did you pull that off?

My parents met each other in New York. My mom is from Finland; my father is from Chile. I was born in New Jersey. We were living there until I was about 5 years old, and then my dad’s parents immigrated to Toronto after the September 1973 coup in Chile where [Augusto] Pinochet’s junta ousted the [Salvador] Allende government. My grandfather was an engineer — he said he was an advisor to President Allende. When the coup happened, soldiers were sent to arrest him. He was at work at the time, onsite of a major tunnel project through the Andes. He tied himself to the bottom of a train car and rode it to Argentina, where he claimed asylum. He made it to an embassy and contacted his brother-in-law in Manhattan who was working in the PR department The grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and sister, Vicky, who compose the Guerra side of the family. This photo, courtesy of Pia Guerra, was most likely taken on New Year’s Eve 1976–77.

at the UN (the same relative who got my dad a job in the building’s HR department) and asked him to get in touch with any government that could help get his wife and daughter out of Chile. He then found out they were taken to the stadium for questioning. After several meetings and calls, my aunt and grandmother were released from the stadium and were able to get out of the country.

Despite having most of my grandfather’s family members already living in New York and New Jersey, the U.S. government refused to grant him and his family refugee status (because gee, the U.S.- backed the coup), but Canada stepped up and let them come to Toronto. They landed there, got settled and sometime later Dad decided to move there to be closer to them. We left for Finland in ’76, spent about a year with mom’s family until we got the immigration papers set up and then moved to Toronto. And I’ve been living here most of my life. When I got to 21 or 22 I wanted to vote and so I was like, “Oh, let me go vote!” Being civic-minded; you learn all about it in school.

And they’re like, “Oh no, you’re a landed immigrant. You can’t vote.”

“What do you mean?”

Just, “You can’t vote.”

I needed to become a citizen, and so I went through that process. It took a couple of years, and when I was 24 I became a Canadian citizen.

So, you’re a dual citizen?

Yes. There’s a loophole where, unless you commit some kind of weird seven deadly sins of the U.S. law, you can keep your citizenship, and the Canadian government doesn’t make you foreswear your former citizenship. You can be a dual citizen by accident. It’s nice.

Aren’t you lucky. And, I guess, you were especially happy in 2016.

I’ve been trying to vote as regularly as possible. I lived in Seattle for three years in the mid-’90s, so I had residency there and so I vote in all the Seattle

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elections when I can. This last one I missed, and I feel terrible about it.

So, your first port of call was Finland from New Jersey. And you lived there for a year. You would have been about 5.

About 6.

You discovered Asterix and Tintin in Finland.

Yeah. I used to watch a lot of Barbapapa and Vision On. Those were my favorites when I was a kid. My grandparents had this series of really nice leatherbound books, and every now and then they had these cartoons. They were black and white chickens, and they would get into trouble. And I remember just loving these two chickens. It’s just something Finnish. [Laughs.] I was very visual from very early on.

My mom and I would tell stories together with cartoons, but I didn’t learn to read until I was 7. I was just figuring out the story based on the drawings.

Right, visually. Were the comics you discovered in Finland the first comics you were aware of?

I’m sure there were probably some living in Jersey, because, again, I was a very visual person. My mom never formally learned English, so there wasn’t a lot of reading stories at home, but there was a lot of telling stories and there was a lot of watching cartoons, a lot of watching movies, a lot of talking. I had books, but I can’t remember what they were. I remember when I started learning how to read it was really hard because there were some big phonics that I wasn’t grasping, and so I had to get a little extra tutoring. And once I did, I was reading every chance I got. I was a voracious reader after that.

Pia Guerra and her mother, Leena, on the boardwalk at Asbury Park, circa 1973. Photo courtesy of Guerra.

There was Toronto, there was North York, a couple of places there. There was Sutton in Ontario, then Port Dover. That was a span of about four or five years.

Why did you move so often?

You had a peripatetic life early on. I want to trace all of your moves. You moved from Finland to Toronto, I believe.

Some of it was that my dad was just not the most stable person. At one point he got into some kind of business deal with the wrong guy. He handled it and we had a family stalker for few years. And back then they didn’t have stalking laws, so it was just running from one city to another — this guy showing up and terrorizing our lives. So finally, we just ditched the country completely and went to Spain and lived there for a few months.

Well, on and off, because we moved a bunch of times for various reasons that are kind of longwinded.

How old were you when you went to Spain? Twelve years old?

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feature • Through the Megascope

for the next few years. And the four give a sense of the vision and intentions of the line.

After the Rain is an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “On the Road,” written by Jennings and drawn by David Brame. Jennings’ name will make some think the book is of a piece with the Octavia Butler adaptations, which Jennings drew, but his presence is where the similarities end.

Brame has a different artistic style from Jennings, and his aesthetic here is different from what I’ve seen Brame do in comics like Is’nana the Were-Spider. This story, about a Chicago cop visiting her grandmother and great-aunt in Nigeria, is more of an overt horror tale than Okorafor’s longer works.

It is also easy to see what attracted Jennings and others to the project, as it’s a very visual and atmospheric story. Not only do Jennings and Brame tell the story with the page designs, panel borders, lettering and the gutters themselves: their craft builds atmosphere, tension and uneasiness as the narrative goes along in a way that’s beautiful to see.

Across the Tracks is something completely different. Its subtitle reads “Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre.”

The nonfiction comic, which also includes a short introduction by writer Alverne Ball and an afterword essay, is a short graphic novel timed to the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. For those unfamiliar, it’s an introduction to the history. While these events may be better known today than they have ever been this was an effort to destroy a community and suppress what happened.

Relatively few pages of the book cover the May 31–June 1, 1921 events. If they hold an outsize weight for readers, it is because, so few learned about the massacre. I knew that there was an attack on Black citizens by white citizens. It was one of a handful of large-scale attacks, which, along with lynching, enforced “order” in the apartheid South in the century following the Civil War. To read Across the Tracks is to be reminded that the Tulsa Massacre is a crime against humanity more akin to Kristallnacht. The book documents how bombs were dropped from airplanes onto the Greenwood neighborhood (which will remind some of the 1986

Greenwood, as pictured in Across the Tracks (2021). Alverne Ball wrote, and Stacey Robinson drew, this work of graphic nonfiction.

bombing of the Black MOVE community, where the city of Philadelphia destroyed a city block), how ambulances and fire trucks were prevented from entering the districts. Telegraph and telephone lines were cut. Afterward, the city refused to help or allow other cities to help and insurance companies refused to pay out to Black people whose homes and businesses were destroyed.

It is meant as an introduction to these events, and it should be placed in every library and school in the United States (including the towns and states trying to ban the teaching of such events). What

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feature • Black Voter Suppression

research department, discovered a provision in Alabama state law that allowed the formation of independent political parties.

This new party was the first all-Black political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). Each registered political party needed a symbol for the official ballot. These symbols aided low-literacy voters to differentiate between candidates at the voting booth. The Republicans had an elephant. The Democrats had a rooster. The LCFO chose a black panther, thereby becoming known as the first Black Panther party. In a 1966 speech, reprinted in SNCC’s “The Black Panther Party” pamphlet, John Hulett explains the symbolism behind the panther: I would like to let the people here tonight know why we chose this black panther as our emblem.

Many people have been asking this question for a long time. Our political group is open to whoever wants to come in, who would like to work with us. But we aren’t begging anyone to come in. It’s open, you come at your own free will and accord.

But this black panther is a vicious animal as you know. He never bothers anything but when you start pushing him, he moves backwards, backwards, backwards, into his corner, and then he comes out to destroy everything that’s before him.

Courtland Cox and Jennifer Lawson were both civil rights activists before finding themselves working in the LCFO headquarters, known as the Freedom House. Cox matriculated at Howard University and quickly got involved in their Nonviolent Action Group, attending demonstrations, sit-ins and freedom rides. Lawson had been expelled when she walked out of her high school to participate in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade on March 2, 1964, but she continued taking direct action as a student at Tuskegee University.

When faced with the lack of voter education and motivation, Cox and Lawson came up with a solution — comics. They collaborated on two such

projects. The first was for the new Black Panther Party to explain voting, voting rights and elected positions. The Lowndes County Candidate comics were created and distributed separately as minicomics. They paired a photo of the Black Panther candidate with a minicomic explaining the duties of that elected position and how that position affects daily life for Black Lowndes citizens. Us Colored People, Cox and Lawson’s second collaboration, tells the story of Mr. Blackman, a man who tires of not having Black representation in his local government and bravely pushes past opposition from peers and the white sheriff to register to vote. By the end of this comic, Mr. Blackman has become incredibly civically engaged and elected as the Lowndes County Sheriff.

The following interview with Courtland Cox and Jennifer Lawson gives more insight into their process of creating these innovative comics, providing a firsthand account of using comics to motivate change. It also affords a glimpse of their activism post-Lowndes.

CONCEIVING THE LOWNDES COUNTRY FREEDOM ORGANIZATION COMICS

JENNIE S. LAW: Where did the idea of the comic books come from? Who drew those comics?

JENNIFER LAWSON: I drew the comics. And Courtland [Cox] is here to attest [laughs] that I drew the comics.

Did you have any prior experience with comics?

You mapped out your pages with thumbnail layouts. How did you know to do that?

LAWSON: I had no prior experience with comics. I have no formal art training at all. As a child, I just drew for the fun of it. It was a hobby; it was a pastime. And my teachers — in the elementary schools and the high school — they would sometimes ask if I would do drawings and things to decorate their

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classrooms. Which I did: turkeys-for-Thanksgiving kind of activities.

When we started working together in SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], then I just felt that if there was something that I could do, then I was more than willing to try to do it. And we, Courtland and I, talked about: “How do we talk with people about the whole question of the insecurity of the people in the county? ‘I’m not so sure I can be the sheriff. I don’t know what the sheriff’s job is.’”

And that’s where we thought that we could [circulate] the information — the job descriptions, really, of those positions: coroner, sheriff, board of From an early draft of Cox’s and Lawson’s Us Colored People, circa 1966.

education member — and we could then translate that into something that would be really almost fun and comfortable for people. We were comics fans, and some of our other SNCC members, like Judy Richardson [documentary filmmaker, Eyes on the Prize] was a big comics lover.

What kind of comics did you like to read?

COURTLAND COX: I tended to favor the superhero comic books. In my youth, that type of comic books were limited to Superman, Batman and others in the genre. I also liked the Archie comics.

LAWSON: I read everything, from all of the silliest Archies. And when I was in places where there were daily newspapers that I could read‚ I also read all of those things and was a devoted follower of Judge Parker, and all of the traditional — Mary Worth, all of those comic strips. So, I had, then, a sense of the patterns of panels, bubbles for comics thoughts. So that was something I was very comfortable with. But I had no professional experience. And so that’s why they start with, really, stick figures, and begin to progress a bit as we move along.

That’s an interesting progression. Because there’s movement in them, even the stick figures. You actually have gestures. The limbs are moving — you were really getting across a lot.

What was the reason for making the comics?

LAWSON: I think we were a very good team because Courtland would have these ideas. Courtland has been one of the critical idea people of SNCC. Really brilliant strategist. We’d talk about how we could begin to translate to people the fact that it wasn’t sufficient just to think about, then, electing someone as the sheriff. What did the vote mean? These were people who were risking their lives to obtain the right to vote. But it was that whole notion of the right to vote, support democracy, seemed abstract.

And we wanted to make sure that people understood that this is really about how you translate power in your own lives. And how do you do that?

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