The Road to Success

Born into slavery and blind in one eye, Henry Jackson Lewis nevertheless became a pioneering African American editorial cartoonist. In an age when most white cartoonists produced reductive and racially stereotyped caricatures of black subjects, Lewis’s illustrations depicted the vast variety and nuance of African American life at the end of the nineteenth century. He created much of the work on view here during his time at the Indianapolis Freeman, the first African American illustrated newspaper.