The Vernon E. Grant Collection contains original art, sketchbooks, roughs, letters, clippings and photocopies of comic strips.

This collection is primarily the research materials documenting the life of pioneering Black cartoonist Jackie Ormes amassed by collector and biographer Nancy Goldstein, who heavily annotated these gathered materials. Ormes was the first Black woman cartoonist with a nationally-distributed comic strip in the United States.

The collection includes Jackie Ormes’ personal files and family photos, correspondence between Goldstein and others about Ormes, a 287-page FBI file on Ormes, rare eight-page color comic sections from the Pittsburgh Courier that include Ormes’ adventure strip Torchy in Heartbeats, as well as strips by other cartoonists centered around Black life and characters. Of major significance in the collection is an original Patty-Jo doll produced by the Terri Lee Company in the late 1940s, based on Jackie Ormes’ single panel cartoon Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger which ran from 1945-1956.