Early Warner Bros. cartoons showed African Americans as savages, often serving white people. (This cartoon is not Warner Bros, but resembles many early WB cartoons from the 1920s-1940s.)
If you were a young kid in the 1980s, you probably spent much of your earliest years watching the WB cartoons of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig. If you think back hard amidst the laughter, once in awhile appeared a strange 'toon or two with really odd, savage-like dark skinned characters that suffered much embarrassment at the hands of the cartoon heroes. We were too young to realize it then, but this was the racist legacy of cartooning from the middle of the 20th century.