He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz

So it wasn't as if, one day, I said, oh things are bad and Martin Luther King was shot and I should do something.

and the beatings and the dogs and the hosings and the courage of so many people in that time. Every day I would see, or read, about black children trying to get into school and seeing crowds of white people standing around spitting at them or yelling at them. the period before I wrote the letter was the major period of civil rights activities.

And remember, when I was young, black people had to sit at the back of the bus, black people couldn't sit in the same seats in the restaurants that you could sit.

were very concerned about others, and the values that they instilled in us about caring for and appreciating everyone of all colors and backgrounds - this is what we knew when we were growing up, that you cared about other people.Īnd so, during the years, we were very aware of the issues of racism and civil rights in this country. We spoke to Glickman, now 89 years old, by phone from her Los Angeles-area home, and she told us: 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. Schulz had to fight against opposition from the comic industry.įranklin 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: 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. This image is a screenshot taken from the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving television special, which first aired on the CBS network on 20 November 1973: 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: 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.

He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz