Turner, a cartoonist,drew racially diversecharacters in 1960s

Published 12:00 am Thursday, January 30, 2014

Morrie Turner, a cartoonist who broke the color barrier twice — as the first African-American comic strip artist whose work was widely syndicated in mainstream newspapers and as the creator of the first syndicated strip with a racially and ethnically mixed cast of characters — died on Saturday in Sacramento, Calif. He was 90.

The cause was complications of kidney disease, said David Bellard, a family spokesman.

Turner’s comic strip “Wee Pals,” featuring childhood playmates who were white, black, Asian, Hispanic and Jewish (joined in later years by a girl in a wheelchair and a deaf girl), was considered subversive in 1965, when a major syndicate first offered it to newspapers.

Only two or three of the hundreds of newspapers in the syndicate picked it up. By early 1968, there were five.

But of the many changes that occurred after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that April and the urban uprisings it started, some of the comic strips first appeared in the nation’s funny papers.

Thirty newspapers began subscribing to Turner’s comic strip in the first 30 days after the assassination; within a few months the number had swelled to 100. “Suddenly everybody was interested in me,” he said in 2010.

Later in 1968, black artist Brumsic Brandon Jr. created his comic strip “Luther,” about a 9-year-old boy growing up in the ghetto. It, too, found a wide audience in newspaper syndication.

“You can imagine how I felt,” Turner said, referring to his newfound popularity. “I mean, I’m benefiting from the assassination of Dr. King, one of my heroes. It was kind of a bittersweet experience.”

Morris Nolten Turner was born in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 11, 1923, the youngest of four children of James and Nora Spears Turner. His father, a Pullman porter, was often away on cross-country railroad trips, and Morris was raised mainly by his mother, a nurse.

She encouraged him to pursue his artistic talent and instilled in him a reverence for a pantheon of black historical figures, including “people most folks never heard of,” he said. Black women were notably among them, including Naomi Anderson, a suffragist; Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a freed slave who became a Union spy; and Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Turner served in the Army Air Corps during World War II as a staff clerk, journalist and illustrator on the newspaper of the 332nd Fighter Group, known as the Tuskegee Airmen. After the war, while working as a clerk for the Oakland police, Turner sold illustrations and cartoons to industrial publications and national magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Ebony and The Negro Digest.

Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts” and a Northern California resident, met Turner in the early 1960s and became a friend and mentor, said Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

“They were the same age, they both were in the war — they just clicked,” said Farago, who has curated shows of both men’s work.

In a conversation one day, Turner lamented the lack of black characters in newspaper comics, and Schulz suggested he try to do one. He also offered to share his contacts in the syndication business.

In the imaginary world Turner created, a diminutive African-American boy named Nipper, who wears a Confederate cap that always masks the top half of his face, led a small gaggle of friends, including Jerry, a freckle-faced Jewish boy; Diz, a black child permanently arrayed in dashiki and sunglasses; and Ralph, a white boy who parrots the racist beliefs he hears at home and accepts his friends’ reproofs more or less good-naturedly. Nipper had a dog named General Lee.

Turner told interviewers that while the strip broke racial barriers, he was rarely conscious of the racial identities of his characters. “I just tried to make them say things that kids say to each other,” he said.

His survivors include a son, Morrie Jr., and four grandchildren. His wife, Leatha, died in 1994.

Turner, who also wrote and illustrated a series of children’s books and appeared as an occasional guest on the television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” received the National Cartoonists Society’s lifetime achievement award in 2003.

Soon after his strip began appearing widely in newspapers, Turner received an angry letter from a reader about Nipper and his Confederate hat. “No self-respecting black person would wear such a hat,” the reader said, suggesting that Turner “get to know some black people.”

“I wrote back and told the person that I happen to know two black people — my mother and my father,” he said in the 2010 interview.

After a good chuckle, the interviewer followed up: “But what was the deal with the Confederate hat?”

Turner paused, considering the question, then replied, “Forgiveness.”