Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Black Power/White Power

Tomi Ungerer

From time to time circumstance fosters the

climate for a radical cartoonist to emerge from

the ranks—one who shocks the senses and at the

same time redefines the form. When Alsatian-

born Tomi Ungerer’s (b. 1930 ) work premiered in

the United States in the mid- 1950 s, it was a

shock to complacency, not because his ragged

line and farcical ideas showed a clear rejection of

the sentimental and romantic realism published

in most mainstream magazines and

advertisements, but because his satire exposed

folly that native-born cartoonists were afraid to

touch, or even see. Writing in Graphis, Manuel

Gasser said of Ungerer’s audacity: “one cannot

help noticing that he is a grown-up child.

Children have a habit of coming out with the

truth, even when it is least opportune.”

Truth underscores Ungerer’s 1967 poster

on race relations in America entitled Black

Power/White Power. First conceived in 1963 as

the cover of Monocle, a short-lived satiric journal published in New York,

this topsy-turvy image of a white man eating a black man’s leg as the black

man does the same to the white, was an acerbic, if unpopular, critique of

the dangers within the burgeoning civil rights movement. Like a child void

of propriety and manners, Ungerer naïvely, though harshly, looked at both

sides of the color line and found that white and black militants were threats

to a movement that most liberals of the day were unwilling to criticize. The

cartoon was a pox on both their houses. By the time Ungerer published the

cartoon as a poster (reportedly over a quarter of million were produced)

tension between militant and nonviolent segments of the movement had

become frighteningly evident.

Ungerer never felt restrained from making strong political

commentary even if it offended those purportedly on his own side. Self-

censorship was never an issue, and the absence of taboos in his work

resulted in drawings that eschewed the clichés and universal symbols that

neutralized most graphic commentaries. Being an outsider, an immigrant,

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