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One of the societal changes that came about in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement in America in the 1960s was the introduction of Black characters into popular entertainments where they had previously made only token appearances, usually in subservient and racially stereotyped roles. It was in 1963 that a Black actor first won an Academy Award for a leading role (Sidney Poitier garnered those honors for his performance in Lilies of the Field, it wasn't until 1965 that a prime-time network television drama finally featured a Black actor in a lead role (when comedian Bill Cosby was tapped to co-star with Robert Culp in the espionage series I Spy,) and 1965 was also the year that a Black hero was first featured in an American comic book (the unfortunately short-lived Western series, Lobo). Another area of social change in the entertainment arena was newspaper cartoons and comic strips, a field that included a number of long-running entries set in seemingly all-white suburbias. Charles Schulz's Peanuts, which debuted in 1950, had by the 1960s become by far the most popular and influential comic strip of its day, and it was in 1968 that Schulz added a Black character named Franklin to the ranks of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the Peanuts gang. Franklin was a little-used, undistinguished character, though, prompting Chris Rock to joke (incorrectly) in 1992 that Franklin hadn't spoken a single line in 25 years. Nonetheless, Schulz later discussed in an interview the resistance he'd encountered in using the Franklin character even in a limited role: It was in this climate that Hank Ketcham, the cartoonist whose Dennis the Menace feature had debuted in newspapers in 1951 (and proved popular enough to spawn a live-action television series in 1959), decided to introduce a Black character of his own in 1970, the fleetingly seen Jackson: Unlike Franklin, whose race was largely irrelevant to the way Schulz used him in the Peanuts strip, Jackson debuted in a panel that Ketcham specifically intended as a commentary on racial attitudes. Ketcham often employed the technique of spoofing the foibles of adults by having Dennis embarrassingly repeat things he'd heard his parents say but hadn't understood (such as referring to his mother's friend, whom she'd said had a dye job, as the lady with dead hair), and in other circumstances one might find Ketcham put that technique to endearingly good use here to illustrate the concept that prejudice is something that is learned rather than innate: Dennis is innocently color blind and fails to recognize why he's supposed to have race trouble with Jackson, because he knows the word race only as something that denotes a speed contest and doesn't understand its use as an anthropological term. Hence his perception of race trouble is nothing more than being perturbed that Jackson runs faster than he does. Unfortunately, Ketcham completely undercut his message by visually portraying Jackson as if the character had just stepped out of a 19th century minstrel show or the pages of Little Black Sambo. As Ketcham wrote in his autobiography The Merchant of Dennis, the panel (predictably to everyone but the cartoonist, it seemed) offended many readers and prompted outbursts of violence in several American cities: Some newspapers, such as the Cleveland Press, ran editorial apologies to their subscribers in place of the Dennis the Menace cartoon the following day: Ketcham tried one more time with Jackson, in a setting that again touched on the theme of Dennis' untainted innocence blinding him to what he's supposed to see as obviously different about his new friend. Sadly, Ketcham depicted the Jackson character in a manner many readers found scarcely less offensive than his previous effort: Lamentably, Ketcham never seemed to quite grasp what all the fuss was about, remaining unaware even in his final days why a miniature Stepin Fetchit character had been so poorly received in the racially conscious early 1970s:
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