In The Thurber Album he relates that his great-grandfather changed churches when his church took issue with him sitting down and eating with his black employees. Thurber reports that he said that if a man was good enough to work for him he was good enough to eat with him.
Thurber also relates that Billy Ireland’s cartoons ridiculed the Klan and so helped shut down the local “Klavern” as it had become a joke. He also relates stories about reporters and local reporters that show the Klan to be contemptable, dangerous, fools. The way he relates the events related to the Klan shows admiration for those who would expose their activities to light and pride that the Klan was pushed out of his part of Ohio.
He does have a chapter with brief portraits of two black men and a more detailed portrait of another, Frank James. All were from a neighborhood near his family house, if I read correctly. The portraits do not seem distorted by racism, either in the form of hate or fear. His portrait of Frank James in particular related both admirable and less than admirable traits. Thurber does not rely on stereotypes to define these men. Although for George Craft the quotes were heavily in dialect, the ones from Frank James reflected about the same level of dialect he showed in quotes of his college professors. The most racist thing he said that he had always assumed that Frank James was employed to take care of the boiler room at the school of the blind, but that his obituary related that he had been an instructor in his later years there.