Aaron Vincent McGruder (born May 29, 1974) is an American writer, lecturer, producer, screenwriter and cartoonist best known for writing and drawing The Boondocks, a Universal Press Syndicate comic strip and its animated TV series adaptation for which he was the creator, executive producer, and head writerBorn in Chicago, McGruder and his family moved to Columbia, MD, when he was six. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Afro-American Studies, and a concentration in social and cultural analysis. As a journalistic artist, his comic strip, “The Boondocks,” made its debut in the campus newspaper, The Diamondback, in late 1996. The material was entertaining and also filled with social and political commentary, so much so that it was yanked from the public in the months following the 9/11 attack in New York City, Pennsylvania, and D.C.In 2002, McGruder was awarded the “Chairman’s Award” at the NAACP Image Awards. Additionally, USA Today has called McGruder “the most dangerous black man” and compared his voice (message) to that of Langston Hughes. McGruder is creative, driven, and astute. A frequent public speaker on political and cultural issues, McGruder gave a keynote speech at H2K2 (a hacker’s conference) in 2002, where he railed against the George Bush administration, corporate-controlled mass media, political corruption, financial scandal and U.S. foreign policy.He now lives in Los Angeles, where he is working on projects that include animating Boondocks. He is also the co-author of a graphic novel, Birth of a Nation, published in 2004.In August 2017, it was announced that McGruder, along with producer Will Packer, will develop a series for Amazon Video called Black America which will be based on an alternative history where emancipated black Americans receive three Southern states as reparations for slavery. The series’ announcement was reportedly seen as a response to HBO’s in-development alternative history series Confederate, whose plot entails a history where the Confederacy won the Civil War.
Written by Dianne Washington