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An image showing various Peanuts characters gathered around a Thanksgiving table tends to circulate online during the end-of-year holiday season, along with the accusation that it documents comic strip creator Charles M. Schulz was himself a racist for seating Franklin, the show's most visible black character, by himself on the opposite side of the table from all the other characters: This image is a screenshot taken from the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving television special, which first aired on the CBS network on 20 November 1973: While the question of whether this particular aspect of that special should be considered racist is a subjective issue, we can shed some light on how Franklin became a Peanuts character, an action for which Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz had to fight against opposition from the comic industry. Franklin Armstrong made his first appearance in the Peanuts comic strip of 31 July 1968. At the time, the United States was struggling with desegregation, and while the country had taken several steps to integrate the population, issues about having black and white people attend the same schools, use the same bathrooms, or appear in the same comic strips were still matters of substantial controversy: Schulz decided to add Franklin to the Peanuts gang after he began corresponding with Harriet Glickman, a retired schoolteacher from Los Angeles, who was concerned about race relations in America and wrote him in 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We spoke to Glickman, now 89 years old, by phone from her Los Angeles-area home, and she told us: Schulz was not the only one who responded to her entreaties, Glickman said. Allen Saunders, who along with Dale Connor created the long-running Mary Worth comic strip, responded with a very thoughtful letter that he and his team were considering including a black character in their strip but ultimately demurred over fears that they would be dropped by their syndicator. Glickman's original letter to Schulz read as follows: Schulz replied that he had previously held off on introducing a black character, not because he was worried about meeting resistance to the concept, but because he wanted to avoid seeming to be patronizing. Glickman told us that she wrote back [to Sculz] and asked him if it was okay with him to show his letter to some African American friends. It was. Schulz soon received a letter from one of Glickman's friends, Kenneth C. Kelly, dated 6 June 1968: Franklin made his debut less than two months later, but as a full-fledged (albeit sporadically appearing) friend of Charlie Brown's rather than as the suggested background character. This was no small thing for a nationally syndicated comic strip, especially at the peak of the United States' race-related civil unrest of 1968 and 1969. However, Schulz's decision to add a black character to Peanuts did meet with resistance from some quarters. The comic book artist said in a 1988 interview that his editors continually wanted to change the comics in which Franklin appeared: While some have applauded Schulz for including a black character in his comic strip, others have criticized him for how the character was handled. Nat Gertler, the author of The Peanuts Collection: Treasures from the World's Most Beloved Comic Strip, wrote that while Charles M. Schulz' inclusion of a black character was controversial, he was also overly cautious with how the character was used: Charles M. Schulz did not discuss Franklin's seating position in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but he did respond to another accusation of racism regarding a strip published in November 1974: Nat Gertler, author of the aforementioned book about Peanuts, another called The Snoopy Treasures: An Illustrated Celebration of the World Famous Beagle, and the AAUGH Blog, reached out to us after seeing this article, and wrote: According to Cesar Gallegos, the archivist for the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, the response to Franklin's introduction was, despite some editorial resistance, overwhelmingly positive from the reading audience.
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