J.P. Alley (1885–1934) was an editorial cartoonist whose work attacking the Ku Klux Klan brought his employer, the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper, the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
[1] He was best known for his Hambone's Meditations, a syndicated comic strip featuring a racist, Jim Crow caricature of an African American man.
Born James Pinckney Alley near Benton, Arkansas, in 1885, he worked as a pottery maker after his graduation from public school in 1903.
It developed into its own comic strip, Hambone's Meditations, which eventually began appearing on the front page of the Commercial Appeal.
[5] The presence of Hambone on the newspaper's front page was noted unfavorably by journalist Garry Wills while covering the Martin Luther King assassination.