The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Notebook: Cartooning, like written commentaries, are meant to be very opinionated. They’d be dull and pointless otherwise. But opinion isn’t a shield from intellectual honesty. If anything, the cartoonist or the opinion writer bears an even greater responsibility to write honestly because he can’t hide behind the dishonest  and tendentious and spin-room quotes that fill ordinary he-said-she-said reporting. So the dishonesties can be quite a bit more powerful when also disguised as opinion. “Margolis & Cox is the editorial cartoon team of Matt Margolis and John Cox that launched in October 2019. FlaglerLive now gets them as part of its subscription to the Cagle Cartoons syndicate (which costs us $1,400 a year, if you care to help defray the cost). Matt writes the cartoons and John illustrates them,” their about page states. Margolis is a “conservative author” who has–why am I not surprised–appeared on the Onanist network and on Rush Limbaugh back in the day. One recent piece showed what I imagine they intended to be a crossdresser, flashing three children by opening his/her/their Pride flag, saying, “Happy Pride Month, kiddos!” Another showed Harvey Milk as a “predator,” another showed Cory Booker making the Nazi salute to hypocrisy. And so on. Their latest is the above, quoting that line conservatives have been cherry-picking, as they so often do, out of a Martin Luther King speech supposedly to condemn the demonstrations on the West Coast. The line is from a speech King delivered at Stanford University in April 1967 called “The Other America,” 356 days before he was assassinated (1968 was a leap year) and less than two years after the Watts riots. Clearly, Margolis and Cox know as much about the other America as I do about the other Saskatchewan, though I would have much preferred not knowing as much as I do about their America, which is my Flagler (is this really the Florida you wanted us to find, Jim Landon?) Aside from the nonsensical disconnect between the “No Kings” message on the donkey’s back and the alleged vandalism, King did say those words in the cartoon. But here’s the full context: ”

“So these conditions, existence of widespread poverty, slums, and of tragic conniptions in schools and other areas of life, all of these things have brought about a great deal of despair, and a great deal of desperation. A great deal of disappointment and even bitterness in the Negro communities. And today all of our cities confront huge problems. All of our cities are potentially powder kegs as a result of the continued existence of these conditions. Many in moments of anger, many in moments of deep bitterness engage in riots. Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way. But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”

Not easy to fit in a cartoon. But nor is intelligence. I’ll stick with Clay Jones.

—P.T.

 

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A man was on the plane with me some weeks ago and he came up to me and said, “The problem, Dr. King, that I see with what you all are doing is that every time I see you and other Negroes, you’re protesting and you aren’t doing anything for yourselves.” And he went on to tell me that he was very poor at one time, and he was able to make by doing something for himself. “Why don’t you teach your people,” he said, “to lift themselves by their own bootstraps?” And then he went on to say other groups faced disadvantages, the Irish, the Italian, and he went down the line. And I said to him that it does not help the Negro, it only deepens his frustration, upon feeling insensitive people to say to him that other ethnic groups who migrated or were immigrants to this country less than a hundred years or so ago, have gotten beyond him and he came here some 344 years ago. And I went on to remind him that the Negro came to this country involuntarily in chains, while others came voluntarily. I went on to remind him that no other racial group has been a slave on American soil. I went on to remind him that the other problem we have faced over the years is that this society placed a stigma on the color of the Negro, on the color of his skin because he was black. Doors were closed to him that were not closed to other groups. And I finally said to him that it’s a nice thing to say to people that you oughta lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he oughta lift himself by his own bootstraps. And the fact is that millions of Negroes, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless. They find themselves impoverished aliens in this affluent society. And there is a great deal that the society can and must do if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs.

–From Martin Luther King Jr’s  ‘The Other America,” April 4, 1967.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.