Early Positive Portrayals of African Americans in Graphic Novels

Jackie Robinson and Comic Book Baseball Heroes, 1949-1952

by Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

“And now…. Jackie Robinson’s life in a comics magazine!!!” 

The Atlanta Daily World, a leading national African American newspaper, excitedly informed readers of its September 23, 1949, issue about a new Jackie Robinson comic book. “So great is the aura of stardom surrounding this greatest of Negro athletes,” the World explained, “that a special magazine bearing his name is being released.”  Published by Fawcett Publications, the 32-page comic book titled, Jackie Robinson: Baseball Hero, related the life story of the Brooklyn Dodgers star.

Fawcett, best known for creating the character Captain Marvel in the 1930s, published popular comic books for a national audience and teamed on the project with Robinson, the first acknowledged African American to play major league baseball in the twentieth century. Jackie Robinson: Baseball Hero proved to be a hit, and Fawcett followed up with five more titles about Robinson over the next three years and also collaborated with other early African American major leaguers like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe on comic books about their lives.

These Fawcett publications, recently acquired by the Joyce Sports Research Collection, are among the earliest American comic books to feature positive, non-stereotypical, and non-demeaning portrayals of African American characters. They were also some of the earliest comic books from a mainstream publisher targeted to a national audience that featured African Americans as main characters.

Jackie Robinson: Baseball Hero told Robinson’s biography from his youth in Pasadena to his career as a multi-sport athlete at UCLA to his early years in organized baseball—first at Triple A Montreal and then with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In its opening pages, the comic book proclaimed that “Jackie has overcome all handicaps to become a symbol of the fighting spirit of the American boy!”

The comic book did not shy away from depicting the troubles Robinson faced in breaking major league baseball’s color line. The book illustrated, for example, the threats he received from the Klu Klux Klan, the opposition to integration from some major league owners, and the harassment he experienced on the field from other teams.

The book graphically detailed Robinson’s many successes on the ballfield, but it also highlighted Robinson’s awareness of his importance as a role model, particularly for African American children.

In one scene, for example, after he was scouted by the Dodgers, Robinson witnessed a group of African American boys playing in an alley and thought  to himself, “If I ever play in the Majors, I’ll give kids like this some hope of making good.” The book also illustrated his work coaching children at a gym in Harlem. 

Jackie Robinson: Baseball Hero was such as success that Robinson—who was seeking ways to capitalize on his fame and to earn money outside of baseball—collaborated with Fawcett on a recurring series of five more editions through 1952. The subsequent issues continued to tell stories about Robinson’s baseball and athletic career and also featured fictional vignettes that showed Robinson mentoring children and rescuing them from a life of crime or disreputable behavior.

Jackie Robinson #4, for example, included a seven-page story titled, “Jackie Robinson and the Human Cat,” in which Robinson worked to redeem a star white teenage baseball player who had turned to criminal activities. The story’s tagline read, “Jackie has always claimed that youthful errors do not necessarily mean a boy has criminal tendencies. Yet he found his creed put to the acid test when he sought to reclaim Mickey Ryan from society’s scrap heap!”

In addition to the Jackie Robinson series, Fawcett also took advantage of major league baseball’s fading color line by publishing similar single issue comic books in 1950 about other African American stars: Larry Doby: Baseball Hero (Cleveland Indians), Roy Campanella: Baseball Hero (Brooklyn Dodgers), and Don Newcombe: Baseball Hero (Brooklyn Dodgers).

The Lary Doby, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe comic books broadly followed the same model as the earlier Jackie Robinson: Baseball Hero issue, telling the inspirational stories of the players’ rise to the major league. The graphics illustrated their early years as athletes, the difficulties they faced due to their race, and their successful ascent to the big leagues. 

The comics also tended to emphasize the good community work the players did, and the books continued to hold up these accomplished athletes as role models for children. The Fawcett “Baseball Hero” comic books provided all young readers—both Black and white—with otherwise hard to find positive and largely realistic portrayals of talented African American men.

Larry Doby: Baseball Hero, for example ended with a scene highlighting this message. The final page of the comic recounted Doby’s triumphant return to his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, after his first season in the major leagues. Although he was greeted by the Mayor, Doby was most excited to return to his alma mater of Eastside High School. 

The comic’s final panel pictured Doby counseling and providing advice to the Black and white members of the Eastside High School basketball team. The eight players all listened intently to the major league star, and the final caption read: “Larry Doby… is loved by all, not only for his prowess on the field of play, but for his character and warm human understanding!”

For further reading:

“Jackie Robinson’s Life in Comics on Newstands Today [sic],” Atlanta Daily World 23 September 1949, p. 3.

Tom Hawthorn, “Jackie Robinson: Comic Book Superhero,” in Not An Easy Tale to Tell: Jackie Robinson on the Page, Stage, and Screen ed. Ralph Carhart (Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 2022).

Brian Cremins, “‘This Business of White and Black’: Captain Marvel’s Steamboat, the Youthbuilders, and Fawcett’s Roy Campanella, Baseball Hero,” in Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics ed. Qiana Whitted (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023).

Keough-Naughton Library Research Award — Visiting Scholars of Irish Studies

We congratulate the following scholars who won this award in 2023, and we hope they will enjoy, as well as benefit from, their time in the Hesburgh Libraries.

The Keough-Naughton Library Research Award in Irish Studies, a grant designed to assist scholars who travel to use the Irish collections at the Hesburgh Libraries, was inaugurated in 2018. The annual competitive award is sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies and ND International.

Dr. Seán Doherty, a lecturer at the School of Theology, Philosophy and Music, Dublin City University, is a composer and musicologist.

Seán Doherty

His project is ‘Patterns in 1001 Gems: The O’Neill Collection of Traditional Irish Music.’

Seán expects to visit in the fall and will work closely with the O’Neill Collection, the personal library of Francis O’Neill, the Chicago Chief of Police whose published collections of Irish traditional dance music have played a large role in the music of Ireland. 


Dr. Anne Jamison,  Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia.

Anne Jamison

Anne is a feminist literary critic with a research focus on nineteenth-century Ireland and also on Australian women’s literature. She has published widely on Somerville and Ross as well as on other Irish women writers. 

Her project is ‘Irish Women’s Fairy Tale and Fantasy Writing for Children, 1800-1935.’

She expects to visit this summer, and to make great use of the Irish literature collections throughout the Hesburgh Library, focusing on works by Winifred Letts, Rosa Mulholland and Frances Browne in our Rare Books and Special Collections.


Annabel Barry is at the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a PhD candidate.

Annabel Barry

Her project is ‘The Romantic Ordinary’, and in her visit she studied materials from the nineteenth century and earlier, including the Holzapfel Collection of James Clarence Mangan.

Past recipients of the Award are listed on the Keough-Naughton Institute’s website, and this website also provides information on the award itself.

A Woman’s Reporting on the Bonus Army in Depression-Era Washington

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator

Rare Books and Special Collections recently acquired a small archive that documents the Bonus Army—a Depression-era protest by World War veterans and their families. Lonore Kent (1907-1993), a journalist living in Washington DC at that time, created and assembled these sources.

In 1924, Congress had rewarded World War soldiers for their service with certificates of investment that would be payable by the government in 1945. By 1932, however, many veterans, like millions of Americans, were desperate after nearly three years of the nation’s disastrous economic depression. Former soldiers began to demand that President Herbert Hoover pay out the promised veteran bonus immediately, given the national (and global) crisis. The men’s plea caught the attention of people who thought the federal government should be doing more to address the economic depression and people’s real need. By the spring of 1932 legislation began moving through the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee.

Some veterans, in a determined effort to put the case directly to their Congressional representatives, embarked for Washington. In early May, 300 former soldiers left Portland, Oregon, bound for the capital. Quickly dubbed the Bonus Army, they were joined by a trickle and then a river of veterans and their families nationwide. By June 40,000 Bonus Army marchers were in Washington; some huddled in makeshift shelter amid construction sites downtown, but the largest concentration of marchers settled on a muddy stretch of the Anacostia River, in an encampment of thousands of men, women, and children.

On June 15, 1932, the House passed enabling legislation, but the Senate blocked the bill two days later. This spared Hoover the embarrassment of vetoing it, which he had promised to do, citing budgetary constraints. Most Bonus Army members stayed put, hoping for some form of government relief. By the end of July, as Hoover looked to his re-election prospects in November, the President ordered city officials to disperse the Bonus Army. When some squatters resisted, Hoover called in US Army General Douglas MacArthur to restore order. MacArthur exceeded his instructions, however, using armed troops, tanks, and cavalry to drive Bonus Army families out of their shacks and tents, and burning the Anacostia River encampment to the ground.

Lonore Kent’s collection offers a perspective on MacArthur’s violent overreach on the night of July 28 and the charred remains the next day. In a letter to her parents, Kent described how she used her press pass to get onto the Anacostia Bridge between Maryland and Washington, where a line of soldiers—bayonets drawn—fired tear gas at the evicted and homeless Bonus Army to keep them from crossing the bridge and entering the city. Beyond the soldiers, Kent saw the Bonus Army camp in flames.

Kent drew a map of where she was that night—in relation to the soldiers, the encampment, and what she saw. (She identifies the river as the Potomac, probably short for the “Eastern Branch of the Potomac,” commonly-used for the Anacostia River.) The next day she returned to the burned-out site and documented some of the destruction. Kent reflected on the Bonus Army, noting, “Probably the granting of the bonus is unsound economically, but you can’t expect people to be impressed with such arguments when they are starving.”

Hoover’s mistreatment of the Bonus Army and general mishandling of veterans’ requests for economic assistance fatally soured the nation on his administration. The brutal ousting of the Bonus Army came to symbolize Hoover’s callous indifference to Americans’ suffering and his inability to govern amidst a national economic disaster. In the fall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt decisively defeated Hoover and implemented federal-level economic and social reforms to address the magnitude of the Great Depression. The Bonus Army, although defeated in 1932, re-formed and continued to press for an early payout, which Congress granted in 1936.

RBSC welcomes researchers to use this collection (MSN/MN 10053) and others on American history topics. For further reading see Stephen R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era. New York: NYU Press, 2009.


A happy Memorial Day to you and yours
from all of us in Notre Dame’s Special Collections!

2016 post: Memorial Day: Stories of War by a Civil War Veteran
2017 post: “Memorial Day” poem by Joyce Kilmer
2018 post: “Decoration Day” poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
2019 post: Myths and Memorials
2020 post: Narratives about the Corby Statues—at Gettysburg and on Campus
2021 post: An Early Civil War Caricature of Jefferson Davis
2022 post: Representing Decoration Day in a 19th Century Political Magazine


Rare Books and Special Collections is closed today (May 29th) for Memorial Day and will be closed on July 4th for Independence Day. Otherwise, RBSC will be open regular hours this summer — 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday.

During June and July the blog will shift to our summer posting schedule, with posts every other Monday rather than every week. We will resume weekly publication on August 7th.

Congratulations to the 2023 Graduates!

Best wishes to the 2023 graduates of the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College, from all of us in Rare Books and Special Collections.

We would particularly like to congratulate the following students who worked in Special Collections during their time on campus:

Sarah Berland (ND ’23), Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience and Behavior, with an Irish Language and Literature Minor.

Kathryn Heyser (ND ’23), Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering and Bachelor of Arts in History.

Both images: MSE/EM 110-1B, Diploma, University of Padua, 1690

An early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

The Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired a very rare sole edition of an early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings, Giovanni Pili Da Fano’s Iesus Maria Opera vtilissima uulgare co[n]tra le pernitiosissime heresie Lutherane p[er] li simplici (Bologna, 1532).

“At the end of the 1520’s and especially in the course of the 1530s, the Italian market offered a wide range of anonymous books in the vernacular that were merely translations, often partial, of Lutheran texts disguised behind seemingly innocent titles… To the complete absence of reaction by controversialists … there had been one significant exception… Giovanni of Fano offered the uneducated reader a Luther skilled in controversy, a violently anti-Roman, systematic theologian and subverter of tradition, presenting, together with a ‘clearer notice’ of the fundamentals of Catholic doctrine, a fully detailed picture of Lutheran errors.”

Giorgio Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition:
Ambrogio Catarino Politi and
the Origins of the Counter-Reformation

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)

The first chapter of the work treats the handling of all kinds of heretics. Fano subsequently introduces his lay reader to the usual anti-Lutheran responses found in Latin treatises of the time: on the unity of the Church; St. Peter and the Apostolic Succession; on faith, Confession, the Eucharist, indulgences, Purgatory, idolatry, prayer, and finally on the celibacy of the clergy.

We have located only one other North American institutional holding of this title.

Summer Exhibition Spotlights 1940s Periodicals

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator

Rare Books and Special Collections recently acquired limited runs of two American periodicals from the 1940s, New York’s View and The Texas Spectator. Each captures part of the zeitgeist of the 1940s, war-time to peace-time.

View, a quarterly magazine published in New York City, covered the avant-garde and surrealist art scene from 1940 through 1947. The publication drew American artists—like Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder—and also featured European artists, many of whom were wartime refugees. These included Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Marc Chagall, and writer André Breton.

As shaped by the editorial hands of artist and writer Charles Henri Ford and author and film critic Parker Tyler, View unabashedly popularized surrealism in the US while also challenging the European movement’s sexual conventionalism.

The Texas Spectator newspaper, published weekly in Austin, maintained a progressive, sardonic eye on Texas politics between 1945 and 1948. The paper featured reporting by liberal journalist and novelist Hart Stilwell, and western writer J. Frank Dobie.

The newspaper’s motto—from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline—conveyed its raison d’etre: “Fear no more the frown o’ the great . . . Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke.” It championed civil rights, education, and labor, and scrutinized the state’s powerful oil and gas companies and their political surrogates.

At first glance View and The Texas Spectator’s differences seem obvious. The former promoted a cultural movement propelled by elements of surprise and spontaneity, while the former engaged in a David vs. Goliath struggle over political power. Yet they share an optimism about the possibility of social and political change for a better future.

The Henry Grattan Pamphlet Collection

by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, Irish Studies Librarian

The Henry Grattan Pamphlet Collection, purchased by the Hesburgh Libraries some twenty years ago, deserves to be highlighted in a blogpost.

Henry Grattan (1746-1820), was a prominent Irish politician, closely associated with the Irish parliament so that from 1782 until the Act of Union of 1800, it was known as ‘Grattan’s Parliament.’ 

The collection of books and pamphlets, bound together in nine volumes, comprise part of his personal library. These nine volumes became separated from the rest of the Grattan Library which was sold at auction in 1888. These volumes were discovered some hundred years later in a country house in Ireland.

The thematically-arranged volumes are handsomely bound with a title on each spine and a list of contents inside, hand-written in ink by Henry Grattan and another person.  Many of the publications also have marginal pencil marks and some have annotations.

The volumes are as follows:

1. Ireland. Free Trade & Independence
2. Ireland.
3. Ireland. 1798
4. Ireland. Catholics
5. Ireland. Catholics
6. Ireland. Catholics
7. Ireland. Union
8. Ireland. Union
9. Ireland. Union

The fourth volume shown here has the usual listing of contents written on the inside cover, and this volume also has Henry Grattan’s name inscribed in ink.

Pencilled annotations were cut when the pamphlet was trimmed for binding.

Grattan’s careful reading of some of the publications may be inferred from pencil marks in the margins. In this example, the penciled annotations appear to have been cut when the pamphlet was trimmed for binding.

While the individual pamphlets are rare in libraries, digitized copies of various editions are available. Therefore, it is the provenance and the selection and grouping together of these publications that makes them so interesting, as part of the working library of an Irish politician.

To see a complete list of the pamphlets and books in these nine volumes, type the following in the ND Catalog: Henry Grattan Pamphlet Collection.

Upcoming Events: May and through the summer

Currently there are no events scheduled to be hosted this summer in Rare Books and Special Collections.

The exhibit Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts  will run through the summer and close in late July.

The current spotlight exhibits are Language and Materiality in Late Medieval England (February – early May 2023) and Hagadah shel Pesaḥ le-zekher ha-Shoʼah – Pessach Haggadah in memory of the Holocaust (April – May 2023).

Rare Books and Special Collections is open
regular hours during the summer —
9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday.

RBSC will be closed Monday, May 29th, for Memorial Day and Tuesday, July 4th, for Independence Day.

Special Collections in the Classroom: Notre Dame Students’ Online Exhibition Hidden Depths

by Rachel Bohlmann, Curator of North Americana and American History Librarian and Erika Hosselkus, Curator of Latin Americana and Strategic Implementation Project Manager

This week Special Collections highlights an online exhibition created by Notre Dame students in their fall 2022 class, Stories of Power and Diversity: Inside Museums, Archives and Collecting. The exhibition, Hidden Depths: Resurfacing the Overlooked and Underrepresented, brings together materials from  the University of Notre Dame’s campus repositories–Rare Books and Special Collections, the Snite Museum of Art, and University Archives–selected and interpreted by the students.

Screen shot of the homepage of the digital exhibition "Hidden Depths", showing the header banner at top (a collage of detail images of the items explored in the digital exhibit) and below that the first few tiles of the exhibit showcases.

The items displayed here vary in format, time period, medium, style, and content–abstract painting, sculpture, installation art, photographs, and collections of historic documents–and are created by people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Their selection reflects the themes of the class, which were to explore the history of collecting in Europe and North America and some of the field’s major questions, including, what has been left out? Where are there gaps and silences in collections and archives?

Eight students applied a curatorial gaze to these materials, to examine how they do and do not intersect with themes of diversity. While these curators recognize the diverse identities of the creators of these objects, the showcases comprising this exhibition point viewers to hidden depths. They ask that we consider how identities are nuanced through regional conditions, educational background, economic forces, and personal trauma. And just as importantly, the curators of the show consider how identity and diversity are not always directly linked in one’s art or expression. They also demand that consumers of these pieces of art and historical sources work to apprehend the complexities behind their creation. By extension, they suggest that we take a careful second look in other contexts, beyond the online gallery or the museum.

This exhibition offers interpretation, but it also asks questions, and challenges viewers even as it invites them to connect with holdings in the University of Notre Dame’s campus repositories. Information about the student curators and their experiences in this course can be found in the personal statements at the end of each showcase.

Hidden Depths showcases ways in which students engaged with special collections materials over a semester-long project. The result is a display that uncovers, refocuses and takes an imperative second look.

A 16th Century Theological Work with an Interesting Provenance

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has just acquired a copy of an important and rare early modern title in Catholic theology with an interesting provenance. Jean Garet (d. 1571) wrote a number of works aimed mainly at exposing the doctrinal errors of Protestantism and illustrating the truth of Catholic teachings; his works were highly esteemed during his lifetime and he was read widely throughout the seventeenth century. This work, De sanctorum invocatione liber (S. Manilius, 1570), deals with the efficacy of the intercession of the saints.

This copy is of particular interest as it was owned by the English Benedictine Priory of St. Edmund King and Martyr in Paris during the seventeenth century and is recorded in their library catalogue of 1702. Benedictine monasticism in England effectively ended when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries between 1536 and 1540; however, it lived on through the various colleges and religious houses which were established on the continent. St. Edmund’s priory was founded in 1615 when monks from the English Benedictine priory in Lorraine arrived in Paris to establish a house of studies; in 1619, the community joined the revived English Benedictine Congregation which was formally established that year.

After a number of moves, the community settled in the Rue Saint Jacques (1632) where the monks were to remain until the French Revolution. Their library grew in size and importance from that date, given that the monastery was a house of studies. The first complete catalogue of the library is that of Dom Benet Weldon (1674-1713); it was finished in 1702.  The catalogue is important for bibliographical research today because the library of St. Edmund’s priory was dispersed during the French Revolution; this work is recorded in Weldon’s catalogue with shelfmark 7 E 7. The entry is written in Weldon’s hand, indicating that it was present in the library in 1702 and was not a later addition.

Only 117 books—out of a total of approximately 5,800—from the library at St. Edmund’s priory have been traced, and until now all of the identified copies are in institutional libraries in Europe or the United Kingdom. Thus, this is the first book from St. Edmund’s (and the first copy of the work itself) to be held by a North American institution.