Hambone's Meditations


Hambone's Meditations was a comic strip produced from 1916 to 1968, and syndicated initially by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate and later by the Bell Syndicate. Produced by two generations of the Alley family, the one-panel cartoon originated with the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper The Commercial Appeal, where it ran on the front page. The title character was a stereotypical African-American man with wide eyes and exaggerated large lips. He dispensed folk wisdom in caricatured dialect.

Publication history

Hambone's Meditations was created by James Pinckney Alley, the first editorial cartoonist of The Commercial Appeal. The character of Hambone was inspired by Alley's encounter with a philosophical former slave, Tom Hunley of Greenwood, Mississippi. Hunley told a Works Progress Administration interviewer how he met J. P. Alley:
The strip and character were popular enough that Hambone's image was used on a variety of products, including sweets and cigars, in the 1920s and 1930s.
When the elder Alley died April 16, 1934, his wife Nona and sons Cal Alley and James P. Alley, Jr. took over the strip.
Four Hambone's Meditations strip collections were published, in 1917, 1919, 1934, and 1972.

Story and characters

Hambone's Meditations was inspired by cartoonist Kin Hubbard's Abe Martin of Brown County, a hillbilly antihero prone to wisecracks jokes and the utterance of popular sayings. The thrust of Hambone's Meditations was essentially similar, transposed onto a Southern rural African-American stereotype. Hambone was depicted as disheveled in appearance, with wide eyes and exaggerated large lips.
The introduction to the 1919 strip collection, published by Jahl & Co., typifies the majority white readership's relationship to Hambone's Meditations:

Controversy and cancellation of the strip

Historian Michael Honey described the humiliation felt by African Americans due to by Hambone's Meditations:
Pressure from D'Army Bailey and civil rights groups — including marchers in the Memphis sanitation strike chanting "Hambone just go!" — brought the long-running cartoon series to an end in 1968.

In popular culture

released an album in 2012 titled Hambone's Meditations. It was nominated for the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album.