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Herblock Looks at 1969: Fifty Years Ago in Editorial Cartoons
As Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994) became the thirty-seventh president of the United States in 1969, Herblock focused not only on issues relating to his presidency but those covered by other journalists, including Soviet political repression in Eastern Europe, military spending at the height of the Vietnam War, the tobacco industry, and congressional salaries. In addition, Block joined the nation in celebrating NASA's successful Apollo 11 lunar mission.
An advocate for equality and civil rights, Herblock crafted strong cartoons on issues affecting African Americans in the United States, pointing out that Jim Crow laws continued to affect the quality of education despite the passage of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka fifteen years previously. He despaired at the willingness of the Nixon administration and Congress to dismantle the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He called out J. Edgar Hoover for wiretapping African American leaders. And Herblock lampooned African American students who called for separate faculty and dormitories by suggesting what he viewed as a radical extreme.
These ten cartoons -- with new drawings introduced into the exhibition every six months -- have been selected from the Library's extensive Herbert L. Block Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division. |