SOURCE: Flick, Arend. “Stowaway on a Slave Ship to Africa.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 June 1990): 1, 7.

In the following review of The Middle Passage, Flick compliments Johnson for skillfully combining beautiful language with a philosophical examination of the nature of racism.

Charles Johnson's first book, Black Humor, was published 20 years ago in Chicago, and that collection of drawings—political cartoons, really—startles now, when viewed through the lens of history, his and ours. The art is skillful, the captions trenchant. The theme is race relations, but the tone not what we might have expected from a young black college student living near one of the most racially polarized of American cities, in one of its worst times: Bobby Seale bound and gagged at the Chicago 8 trial; Fred Hampton dead in a police raid on his southside apartment.

Johnson remembers these cartoons as inspired by the black separatist philosophy...