Drawing cartoons on dicey political topics without being ugly just comes naturally, says Daniel, who was born in Richmond, Virginia. But he’s uncomfortable attributing it to piety, as some others do.
“Faith is my foundation, but I never went into drawing a cartoon saying, ‘how’s that going to balance with my belief in Jesus?’ and all that,” he says. “That’s just built in and I never really thought about it.”
The Baptist News has a wonderful, career-spanning profile of Charlie Daniel.
After a lot of rejections – Daniel keeps a huge binder full of those letters – he landed a job at the Knoxville Journal in 1958. He found his niche there and developed a fan following with his drawings about sports and politics.
When that paper closed, he was hired on at the News-Sentinel where he worked more than 25 years until his retirement [in 2019].
“Sometimes I wish I was still working,” he says. “These are historic times.”