Holding Her Own: The Exceptional Life of Jackie Ormes

This picture-book biography chronicles Jackie Ormes, the first Black woman cartoonist to be nationally syndicated. In the 1930s, she sought reporting work at a Black Pittsburgh newspaper while hoping to illustrate. Her comics included Torchy Brown’s move from Mississippi to New York during the Great Migration and Patty-Jo, a Black girl whose strips addressed racism and social justice. The book also follows Ormes’s political scrutiny and her creation of a Patty-Jo doll.