12 minute read
In the Classroom
Comic book pioneer and journalist Orrin C. Evans
By HERB BOYD
Special to the AmNews
Last week’s profile of trailblazing sci-fi writer Octavia Butler mentioned her passion for comic books and strips as a young person, and that brought to mind the creations of Orrin Cromwell Evans. If you don’t know much about the publication of Black comic books and strips in newspapers then you probably know little about Orrin.
He was born in 1902 in Steelton, Pennsylvania. His father, George Evans Sr., was fair enough to pass for white and his much darker skinned mother, Maude Wilson Evans, often had to pretend to be the family maid when strangers visited them. Clearly, this racial complexity left young Orrin with a challenging identity path to negotiate. Whether this had a consequence on his early exit from the classroom is left to conjecture.
There is a biographical gap between his dropping out of school in the eighth grade and his arrival at the highly-regarded Black newspaper The Philadelphia Tribune as a teenager. By the early 1930s, he was the only Black reporter on the staff of The Philadelphia Record where he covered race issues in the armed services during World War II. And in this capacity may have been among the first Black reporters on general assignment with a white publication. Despite racial taunting and death threats, Orrin was a fearless reporter and was often caught in the throes of white reaction, including an incident in which he was denied entry to a press conference on the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh.
His reportage was featured in other papers as well, most prominently in the Chicago Defender, The Philadelphia Independent, and The Crisis, the organ of the NAACP. The popularity of his stories convinced him that he could reach a larger audience with a comic book. That opportunity came when The Record was closed during an extended strike in 1947. With his partners the sports editor Bill Driscoll and Harry T. Saylor, the former editor of The Record, Orrin was a cofounder of All-Negro Comics, Inc. and he was the president.
In 1947, the company published the only known issue of All-Negro Comics, a 48-page standard-sized comic book with a typical glossy cover and newsprint interior. As to the run of that issue, no count has been published, though there was apparently other Black comic books in existence at that time, according to comic book historian Stanford Carpenter, who noted that “While there were a few heroic images of Blacks created by Blacks, such Jive Gray comic strip and All-Negro Comics, there images did not circulate outside of precivil rights segregated Black communities.” Orrin, as described by writer Tom Christopher, “Cocreated the features in the comic along with the artists, who included his brother, George J. Evans Jr., two other Philadelphia cartoonists, one of whom was John Terrell, and the other named Cooper, and a Baltimore artist who signed his work Cravat. The cartoonists probably wrote their own scripts, and there was further editorial input by Bill Driscoll.”
One of the lead features in the 1947 edition was “Ace Harlem,” an African American police detective who like other characters “Lion Man and Bubba,” was mainly created to inspire African Americans and fairly represent their cultural heritage. Orrin’s attempt to publish a second issue floundered when he was unable to purchase the required newsprint, which was rumored to be an obstacle devised by white publishers who began issuing their own Black-themed titles.
At some point he married Florence and they had one child, Hope.
From 1962 until his death in 1971 in Philadelphia, Orrin worked at the Chester Times and the Philadelphia Bulletin. He was the recipient of many tributes and awards—the Urban League of Pennsylvania, the NAACP, and a scholarship was created in his name. In 2011, he and his brother were posthumously given the ECBACC Pioneer Lifetime Achievement Award for the creation of All-Negro Comics. Three years later, Orrin was elected to the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame as president of All-Negro Comics.
Orrin C. Evans in 1947
ACTIVITIES
FIND OUT MORE
Researching the lives of Evans’ chroniclers such as Stanford Carpenter and Tom Christopher might prove rewarding.
DISCUSSION
And digging into the work of Christopher and Carpenter, mentioned above, may lead to more about Orrin’s early years and his struggle against discrimination.
PLACE IN CONTEXT
He came of age at the dawn of the 20th century and lived until the postBlack Power phase.
THIS WEEK IN BLACK HISTORY
Sept. 20, 1885: Pianist Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans. He died in 1941.
Sept. 20, 1958: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in Harlem by a deranged Black woman.
Sept. 21, 1909: Kwame Nkrumah was the first prime minister/ president of Ghana. He died in 1972.
conditions,” said Williams in a statement. “This legislation will provide the public with a sense of the financial cost of those failures and an accounting for legal actions NYCHA is involved in which extend beyond the scope of inhouse counsel. With NYCHA facing a funding crisis, it is essential to have transparency about these kinds of expenses in order to identify patterns and prevent avoidable damage or unnecessary waste.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams quickly announced that Russ was leaving office, and he’s splitting the roles of NYCHA’s chair and CEO. While the city searches for a new CEO, Adams tapped NYCHA Executive Vice President of Legal Affairs Lisa BovaHiatt to serve in the interim.
Solitary
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PSEG is essentially the same thing as solitary. She is proud of the supermajority on the council that will likely overrule Mayor Adams.
“Not only does solitary not make us any safer but it shows that it’s also widely recognized by human rights organizations to literally be torture,” said Cabán, “and something we should not be participating in.”
Victor Pate is from New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement, co-director of the #HALTSolitaryConfinement campaign, and a formerly incarcerated person. Pate insisted that the gap between the state law being passed and actual implementation in Rikers Island is wide. Some state prisons have alternatives to solitary, like residential rehabilitative units, where they can’t be separated from the population for no more than 15 days. He said that there’s still a lack of transformative and wraparound services in some cases for prisoners.
“Hell. In one word, it was hell,” said Pate about his experience being incarcerated at 18 for robbery and weapons possession. He said he has “profound” psychological collateral damage from hallucinations and isolation. He’s been out for 25 years and said he still has problems being in elevators or small spaces because of his time of approximately two years in solitary.
On the city side, Pate and others are working on the “veto-proof bill,” given that a majority of the city council members already support it and will override Mayor Adams if he vetoes it, to force the DOC to end solitary confinement in any form. Pate said the best way to protect corrections officers and inmates is to have mutual and humane treatment on both sides. He maintains that solitary just exacerbates behaviors and mental health issues from offenders.
Of course, correctional staff at COBA, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, heartily disagree with the ban.
COBA President Benny Boscio said that there is “no doubt” that not having serious consequences for violent crimes committed by incarcerated persons while in jail is causing the increase in violence. Boscio attributed a “99% increase in stabbings and slashings in Fiscal Year ’22” to the elimination of solitary or similar practices.
“Correction Officers have been handcuffed from separating violent offenders from nonviolent inmates, which has only emboldened violent inmates to continue to attack others with impunity,” said Boscio in a statement. “All of this comes at a time when the City Council is preparing to eliminate punitive segregation completely, which will literally throw gasoline on the fire, jeopardizing thousands of lives.”
In response to the Amsterdam News’ inquiry, the DOC stated that they have been “in compliance” with the HALT Act since April 2022 and have also ended the use of PSEG and Restrictive Housing Units (RHUs). The DOC said that they currently rely on Enhanced Supervision Housing (ESH) and other “less restrictive housing options” to safely house individuals who have committed violent acts, have been found in possession of a scalpel or other dangerous weapon, or who have a history of serious violence.
The DOC said ESH is a progressive level housing system that was originally created in 2015 for young incarcerated adults, 22 and older.
“The Department has been in compliance with the HALT Act since April 2022 and no longer administers punitive segregation. We rely on a restrictive housing model that will create a safer and more humane environment for our staff and other individuals in custody,” said a DOC spokesperson.
The DOC claims that a person in ESH is allowed a minimum of seven hours out of their cell. They did not specify if this was daily, weekly, or cumulative over a designated period. Outside of that the DOC said that their dedicated corrections officers rely on their training and lived experiences to engage with the population and keep people safe. They added that many of the staff come from the same communities as those in their custodial care.
The scheduled hearing on the solitary ban will be next week on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 11 a.m.
Opioid
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lead sponsor to pass a bill in the history of the city council. It will go into effect next January in 2023.
The bill, Intro 56-A, mandates the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) help prevent opioid overdoses in nightlife businesses. Opioids are defined by the state health department as prescription opioid pain relievers. This includes hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl and morphine as well as illegal opioids like heroin, fentanyl, and opium.
The businesses will keep opioid antagonists, Narcan (Naloxone medication), on site and free of charge for patrons in the event of an overdose emergency. This bill would also require DOHMH to offer free training to staff on how to administer the nasal spray or injection. Naloxone is usually administered by EMS or medical staff. In 2020 alone, EMS agencies had 8,485 “unique administrations” of naloxone, said the state report. Administrations in 2020 were also reported as being higher on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, highlighting the need for opioid antagonists to be available over weekends, said the state report.
The city and state’s main approach to battling the opioid epidemic is through policies centered around “harm reduction” or the implementation of public health programming to prevent death from opioid overdoses. Biz Berthy, formerly the Drug Users Union Organizer at VOCALNY, said that harm reduction at least makes drug use more safe and intervenes with overdoses.
“A common definition of harm reduction is just meeting people where they’re at,” said Berthy. “It’s a philosophy of public health and politics. I would say in New York City it started in the early ’90s through the efforts of ACT UP to establish the first needle exchange to address the spread of HIV/AIDs drug users.”
Berthy said that the scale of the overdose crisis is so massive, however, that adding opioid antagonists to businesses won’t necessarily reach the majority of the population that uses drugs.
She suggested that eventually citywide and statewide overdose prevention centers would be more effective in addressing the crisis under The Safer Consumption Services Act (SCS Act). Since opening in November 2021, the two overdose centers in East Harlem and Washington Heights operated by OnPoint NYC have intervened in hundreds of potential overdoses to avert injury or death. Berthy said the great thing about these centers is that they conduct extensive drug checks and will alert the community to “bad batches.”
Berthy noted that Mayor Eric Adams has expressed support for the overdose prevention centers, and the former DOHMH commissioner, Dr. David Choksi, recently published the first peer-reviewed data on the centers in the city.
“The opioid epidemic has already taken the lives of thousands of New Yorkers and the pandemic only exacerbated this crisis. Today, one of our city’s residents loses their life to an overdose every three hours, so it is essential we use every tool in our arsenal to tackle the overdose crisis,” said Adams on Aug. 6 in a statement.
“Countless families in our city have been torn apart by opioids but I’m proud that New York City is leading the way in overdose prevention and taking action to save lives—because a crisis does not wait, and neither can we. Overdose prevention centers keep neighborhoods and people struggling with substance use safe. Now is the time to expand access to OPCs and do so in an equitable way across New York City,” he stated.
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about culture and politics in New York City for The Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about culture and politics in New York City for The Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about culture and politics in New York City for The Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w
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book artist for Marvel as Spiderman was his favorite superhero at the time. He dropped out of high school to enroll in the The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, attending for three years before emigrating to the U.S.
Bateman’s primary focus is science fiction and fantasy art encompassing such a wide range of subject matter he considers it practically impossible to have artist block. He spends his late nights honing his skills, constantly learning, and working to become a better artist.
through two separate, competitive grant programs: a $7 million fund to acquire or expand existing gunshot detection technology, and a $10 million fund to acquire or expand existing Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology to combat a spike in vehicle thefts believed to be driving more serious, violent crime in New Jersey.
Both programs are aimed at providing law enforcement agencies with money to invest in technology-driven strategies to reduce violent crime, make communities safer, and save lives.
ARP grants are available to state, local, and Tribal governments across the country to support their response to and recovery from the COVID-19 public health emergency. Violent crime is recognized as a public health challenge exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through the $10 million ALPR program, a portion of the funding will be allocated to the New Jersey State Police (NJSP) to deploy units along major roadways that run throughout the state. Intelligence gathered will be shared by NJSP in real-time through the Regional Operations Intelligence Center and Real Time Crime Centers operated by the NJSP with relevant law enforcement partners as appropriate for investigative and operational need.
