So, in the late ’60s, I was a Visual Aid Designer at the steel mill. I drew illustrations of the machinery in the mill that they would use in training programs, manuals, and such…

I was inspired by my father to study Industrial Design while attending the University of Illinois. He was very artistic, but worked most of his life at the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. Most of the Black people I knew in those days worked in those tedious mills… I remember one time my aunt was staying with my wife and me. She didn’t believe I was going to work because I had a shirt and tie on. She had a husband who worked in the mill, as a blue-collar worker, with his bare-hands. The notion of a Black white-collar worker eluded her.

Later on, I tried to form a group called the “Black White-Collar Workers of America.” I believed we had a story to tell, a message to convey… As one would imagine, the Unions felt we were starting another Union—and everyone knows nobody messes with the Unions…

Every morning, one of my co-workers would come in the office with a negative article about Blacks. They called us Negroes back then. He would show me an article and say “Here’s a Negro who robbed an old lady”.

Later, other people started bringing negative articles in just like the first guy.

After awhile I would come home and I would start arguments with my wife. She would ask me “What’s wrong with you?” So, finally I told her that they had been bombarding me with all of these negative articles at work.

My wife said, “You can solve that problem.”

“How?” I asked.

“You can cut out negative articles about them!”

And so that’s what I did. Boy, did they hate my guts for it! But, really, I now began to see the whole things as quite amusing, and got quite a laugh out of it… My attitude changed because I was no longer a victim (thanks to my wife’s counsel), and had decided to strike back!

A thought: People don’t know anything about each other. We’ve been separated so long…

I made a decision to document the crazy things that happened to me at the steel mill, using an art form that I was very familiar with. Part of me also felt that this might help other people embarking into industry. So I started drawing. Whenever someone said something ridiculous (or, in many cases, outright outrageous) to me, I would draw a sketch. I remember a secretary once said to me, “Tom, can I use your knife?” Believe it or not, she assumed I carried a knife!

So, it is the accumulation of my experiences as the only Black person in a White-dominated white-collar work environment, represented in the cartoon art form, which we now have as the book, Integration is a Bitch.