In 1969, the cartoonist Tom Floyd published a book of drawings about a situation he knew from the inside: being the only Black professional in a white office in the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The book was called Integration Is a Bitch!, subtitled as an assessment by a Black white-collar worker, and its single-panel cartoons are still startlingly familiar.
Floyd drew on his own experience, reportedly including years at the Chicago steelmaker Inland Steel. The cartoons are set in a fictional firm, "ABC Engineering", where the main character is a capable, quietly exhausted engineer. Nobody in them is openly hateful. Instead, the humour comes from small moments: the suspicious question, the clumsy compliment, the boss who wants a Black face in the company photo. Below are all 45 cartoons from the series as they circulate online, each with a short note on what it shows and why it still matters, followed by background on Floyd and the era.
In the book's introduction, Floyd described a need "to assess my total experience and perhaps the experiences of other Blacks". That is exactly what the drawings do.
Suspicion, stereotypes and being watched
A white co-worker waves a headline about a Black man shooting up a store and asks whether he knew the man. In the second panel he returns the favour with a story about a white bank robber. The joke is simple and sharp: no one expects a white colleague to answer for every white criminal.
At a show or film screening, the only Black man in the audience claps along while the white colleagues around him look at him sideways. The scene on stage is not the point; the point is that his reactions are being watched and judged in a way theirs are not.
On St. Patrick's Day a colleague wearing a shamrock asks why he is not wearing one too; during Black history week, the roles reverse when he turns up in a dashiki. Floyd shows how a majority custom is treated as everyone's, while a minority one becomes a costume.
A security guard is hauling the Black employee away from his own desk until a white colleague calls out that he works there. It is one of the most direct cartoons in the book: the assumption that a Black man in the office must be an intruder.
Two Black employees sit among dozens of white ones, yet a pair of white men in the foreground mutter that they are taking over. Floyd draws the numbers so the exaggeration is obvious at a glance.
A manager praises a design as brilliant, then immediately asks who helped him with it. The cartoon captures a familiar experience for many minority professionals: competence that is noticed, then credited to someone else.
A group of visitors is shown around the office, and the employee is introduced as the department's Negro, as if he were a feature of the building. It is tokenism in a single line: he is displayed rather than introduced by name or role.
A co-worker tells him, as a friendly anecdote, that the Black man who cut her grass did not steal anything. Floyd is pointing at a remark meant as kindness that reveals what the speaker expected in the first place.
Three panels about humour. A colleague asks whether he would be offended by a joke; the office laughs at a story about a colored guy; and when he tells a story about a hillbilly, the white men stop laughing. The sequence shows how a joke lands very differently depending on who is the target.
In the first panel a woman screams rape simply because she finds herself alone in a lift with a Black man carrying drawings. In the second, he covers his eyes while handing papers to a secretary bending over a filing cabinet in a short skirt. Together they show how carefully he had to manage even accidental situations, because suspicion would fall on him.
At a boxing match he cheers for Muhammad Ali while the white spectators around him stand silent and sour. Ali, who refused the Vietnam draft in 1967, was one of the most polarising figures in America at the time, and cheering for him was itself a statement.
Invisible at his desk, on display in public
A receptionist on the phone says all the men are out of the office, while the Black employee sits at his desk in plain view. The cartoon suggests he simply does not count.
At a business lunch, two colleagues wonder why the waiter has not come to their table, guessing it is because of their sport coats. In the second panel the waiters, who are Black, ignore the table after being called boys. Floyd turns a story about bad service into one about respect.
A manager storms out of his office to tell him that some Negroes beat up his son the night before. The employee is expected to carry responsibility for the actions of strangers who happen to share his skin colour.
A colleague brings him a bundle of his own children's old clothes, assuming his family must need them. Generosity built on a stereotype about poverty is still a stereotype.
A colleague assures him that race does not matter at ABC Engineering, as they walk past a confidential notice assigning number codes to each ethnic group. In the second panel the hiring office reports three new employees as two ones and a five. Floyd's fictional company is a stand-in for many real ones.
A boss explains, pointing at the ceiling, that he cannot give him a raise just because he is colored. The line flips a demand for fair pay into an accusation of asking for special treatment.
He arrives cheerfully to tell his boss he has solved the problem the boss could not, and the boss and a colleague look anything but pleased. Success can be its own threat in a workplace that expected less.
A woman shows him, slowly and patiently, how to talk into a telephone receiver. The cartoon is about condescension: a qualified engineer being treated as if office equipment were new to him.
Two arrivals at the office: a smiling employee waving hello to the fellows, and another striding in calling out good morning, whitey. The white staff look equally uneasy at both, a hint that no style of behaviour would fully satisfy them.
A manager gives him a desk by a street-front window with a view, where passers-by can see him. The window is less a perk than a showcase, proof to the public that the company is integrated.
At a lunch counter with several empty stools, a white customer tells him there are no seats. Lunch-counter sit-ins, such as the one in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, were among the best-known protests of the civil rights era, and Floyd shows the same exclusion carrying on in subtler form.
A Black instructor stands at a blackboard listing words never to be used when addressing a Black person, from slurs to boy, uncle and negro, while white staff sit in rows taking it in. It is a dry look at the awkward diversity briefings that followed new anti-discrimination laws.
Everyday remarks by the coffee machine
A colleague who has misplaced her coin purse turns straight to him to ask whether he has seen it. No one else in the room is asked.
A colleague asks what he means by calling someone average looking, adding that his own blond wife is average looking. The cartoon pokes at how beauty was measured against a white standard.
During an interview for the company radio station, a reporter asks his opinion of Negroes in the street, then hurries to correct himself to crime in the street. The slip shows how closely the two ideas were linked in the speaker's mind.
Three conversations by the coffee machine: a colleague who belonged to a gang in his youth insists that was different; another says some of his best friends are culturally deprived; a third suggests he should feel lucky compared with how Native Americans were treated. Each is a familiar way of deflecting the subject.
Conversation stops and colleagues hush each other as he walks into the room. The point is the silence itself, which tells him exactly what they were talking about.
A colleague with a bandaged head tells him that one of his soul brothers beat him up. Again he is treated as a spokesman for any Black person, anywhere.
Officials arrive at his desk with a briefcase marked with a government agency's initials, and a manager urges him to tell them how well the company treats him. He is expected to vouch for his employer in front of the very people checking on it.
Every desk around him has a for-sale sign, and a colleague says he does not know what happened, only that everyone moved when he arrived. It is a workplace version of white flight from integrating neighbourhoods.
As a real Black employee arrives, a manager carries away a Black mannequin, saying they will not need it anymore. The dummy had been there to make the office look integrated.
A manager brings a visitor in African dress to his desk and says the two of them probably know each other. The assumption that all Black people are connected is the whole joke.
A colleague argues that if Blacks were on top, they would treat whites just as badly. Floyd draws the employee's face as tired rather than angry; it is an argument he has clearly heard before.
Integration as public relations
Three panels about hiring under pressure. A boss, with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on his desk, orders someone to hire some Negroes quickly; a graduate in cap and gown walks through a door marked Welcome to Industry; and a manager drags in a reluctant recruit as the company's image maker.
A Black employee in a kitchen apron comes looking for help with a discrimination complaint and is sent to Mr. George Brown, the Black engineer at the next desk. Handling race problems becomes his unofficial second job.
Three panels on corporate image: an executive gestures proudly at a framed pledge of equal opportunity; a manager boasts that compared with other bigoted companies, theirs is outstanding; and a boss dressed in African clothing, with a Welcome Soul Brother sign on his desk, says they do everything to keep employees happy. Floyd mocks equality as decoration.
A press photographer takes pictures of the company's Black employee with smiling managers, to be sent to the Black newspapers. Integration is turned into public relations.
In the company lunch room, a colleague with a tray asks whether he may sit down, or whether the employee is one of those Black militants. Even sharing a table is framed as a political question.
At a colleague's home, the family dog sniffs at him, and the host laughs that he is the first colored fellow the dog has ever seen. The comment says as much about the host's world as about the dog's.
A young woman in a miniskirt walks through the office carrying files, and every man in the room watches her except him. Without a caption, the panel recalls the lift cartoon earlier: he cannot afford to be seen looking.
A colleague passing by tells him to fetch a cup of coffee, light on cream. He is an engineer at his own desk, but he is still treated like the help.
Asked, or perhaps accused, he says he got this job because he is colored, and asks why. The deadpan line turns the insinuation back on the person making it.
A woman handing out reports asks the room whether he gets one too. Being left out of routine information is a quiet but effective way of keeping someone outside the team.
At the company management dance, two white men watch a Black couple on the floor and remark that they all can dance. The book ends on a stereotype that sounds like a compliment, perhaps the most persistent kind.
Who was Tom Floyd?
Floyd was born and raised in Gary, Indiana, and is usually said to have been born in 1929. According to an article in The Nation on Chicago's Black comic artists, he freelanced for the Chicago Defender, one of the country's most important Black newspapers, while working for an industrial company, and he once pitched a strong, proud Black superhero to Stan Lee, who turned the idea down. Other accounts say he ran his own advertising firm in Gary, worked as a designer at Inland Steel, received an award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews for this book, and died in 2011; those details come from secondary sources and are best treated as reported rather than confirmed.
The book itself is a slim volume of about 116 pages. It was not a mainstream bestseller, and much of its modern audience comes from scans shared online decades later, which is how these cartoons reached a new generation of readers around 2018. Copies of Integration Is a Bitch! by Tom Floyd occasionally appear through used-book sellers.
Why the cartoons still matter
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, and companies across the United States began hiring Black graduates into offices that had been entirely white. Floyd's book records what the law could not change overnight: the habits, assumptions and jokes of the people at the next desk.
Many of his targets now have names. Tokenism is the boss who needs a Black employee for the photograph. Microaggressions are the small, often well-meant remarks, such as asking who helped with an idea, that add up over a working life. Being asked to speak for an entire race, or to handle every discrimination complaint, is now discussed as an invisible extra workload. Floyd was drawing all of this decades before those terms were common.
The cartoons also work because they never let the reader off the hook. Most of the white characters think they are being friendly. That is what makes the book useful for anyone today who wants to understand how exclusion can survive in a workplace that officially welcomes everyone: look at the moments that feel ordinary, and ask who is expected to smile through them.
Explore the related article: A Mother's Response to Racism About Her Daughter's Boyfriend.
Sources: Cartoons by Tom Floyd from Integration Is a Bitch! (1969); The Nation: The Radical World of Chicago’s Black Comic Artists; MetaFilter: Integration is a bitch.
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