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September 26, 2005
Wilson Obit
Clint C. Wilson, Sr. the longtime editorial cartoonist at the Los Angeles Sentinel died of kidney failure on Sunday, September 18, in Hawthorne, California. He was 90.
The Comics Reporter wrote: "Wilson was one of the traditional black press' most esteemed cartoonists, working in very strong, blunt style marked by a certain elegance in the way figures were depicted. He began his career as a sports cartoonist in San Antonio, and held that position at the Sentinel before becoming their editorial cartoonist. He was inducted into the Black Press Hall of Fame in 1990, and retired in 2002."
"Using a lean drawing style, often adding shading for atmosphere, he took up local and national issues including affirmative action, gang violence and police brutality," noted the Los Angeles Times.
"I deal with the problems in the black community," he said in a 1991 interview with the Times.
His son, Clint Wilson II, a journalism professor at Howard University who has written extensively on the history of the black press, told the Times: "His cartoons were humorous, but they struck at the heart of the matter from a black perspective."
A number of his cartoons are now archived at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Born in a log cabin in rural Texas and one of 16 children, Wilson was the son of a sharecropper. He planned his career at age 10 after seeing his first editorial cartoon in a local newspaper.
"I laughed and thought, 'I can do this,' " Wilson told The Times in 1991.
A high school teacher encouraged his artistic talents and bought Wilson his first watercolor set. After high school he enrolled in a correspondence course for artists but dropped out before completing the two-year program — tuition was $10 per month and he made only $20 a month at his job as a dishwasher in San Antonio.
He got his first full-time newspaper job in 1940 as a sports cartoonist for the San Antonio Register, a weekly newspaper for the black community, where he worked without pay.
"When my father started in the 1940s, there were very few black journalists at all," his son told the Times. "And they all worked in the black press."
To support himself, Wilson worked as a janitor and chauffeur. He moved to Los Angeles in 1946 after a brief time in Oakland, where he worked as a cartoonist for an Army newspaper. He later worked on his cartoons after hours at his job at a bank.
The Sentinel named a new sports editor, A.S. Young, in 1956, and Young offered Wilson a job as a sports cartoonist.
"They must have hired me because they got tired of being pestered," Wilson said. "I went back with cartoon after cartoon for 10 years."
Soon after he joined the staff, Wilson was named the paper's editorial cartoonist, where he remained until he retired in 2002.
During his long career at the Sentinel, the largest black weekly newspaper in the West, Wilson won numerous first place awards from the National Newspaper Publishers Assn., a federation of black community newspapers.
Some of his work can be viewed at the organization's website: www.blackpressusa.com/history/cartoons.asp.
On the Net
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/clint_c_wilson_1914_2005/