Diversity in pop culture is an issue that is a hell of a lot more important than it sounds on paper. Why should it matter who appears in a story if it’s just escapist entertainment?
One reason is that entertainment tends to unintentionally carry subtext about normalcy in the societies entertainment portrays. What kind of people can be heroes or leaders? What kind of people are scummy or evil? Who can fall in love with whom? And what descriptive traits do we use to describe someone as “normal”?
We don’t mean to, but we tend to look to entertainment for these answers. Children especially, who tend to live in very controlled environments, look for role models and learn all kinds of things about our world through the entertainment they enjoy.
I talk about all this as background for the three Peanuts strips above. These strips were published in the summer of 1968, and introduced Franklin, the first black character to appear in Charles Schultz’s newspaper cartoon. The story behind Franklin’s inception didn’t happen naturally, and actually began just two weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated.
A schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman, moved by Dr. King’s life and the shock of his assassination, wrote a letter to Schultz, requesting he add more black characters to Peanuts.
Schultz was at first reluctant to fulfill Glickman’s request , not because of prejudice, but rather a fear of being patronizing and condescending. But he was eventually convinced by further letters from Glickman and some of her African American friends, and so Schultz created Franklin.
The inclusion of Franlkin brought controversy and uproar from readers and editors alike to Schultz door for inviting a black character to befriend Charlie Brown and attend a desegregated school with him. But Schultz stood by his word to Glickman, and Franklin became a regular character in Peanuts from then on out. He never became a major character anywhere near the status Charlie, Snoopy, or Lucy, but he was important as one of the few black characters in mid-century American comic strips to be portrayed as a child no different from the rest of the Peanuts cast.
I got most of the info in this post about the history of Franklin from this article that you can read by clicking here. I highly recommend that you read it so that you can read the complete correspondence that lead Schultz to create Franklin. It’s incredibly eloquent and has a lot of great insight into the importance of diversity in popular culture.
And if you want to hear me yak even more about how great Peanuts is, you can click here to check out a post I wrote back in the summer about the classic series.
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