Cutting off the letter is also bad form clickbait people, but I’ll get it placed in proper order as it goes
People I like can be divided into two groups: a) those who enjoy and get Charles M. Schulz’s wonderful Peanuts comic strip; b) those fools who don’t. All of human life is in the artist and writer’s 17,897 comic strips.
In 1968 Schulz noticed the Civil Rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and read a letter from Los Angeles schoolteacher Harriet Glickman. She had a question for Schulz: would he include a black child in the Peanuts gang?
To which Schultz responded with the letter above, in what reads like an incredibly respectful and progressive manner.
He isn’t black and doesn’t want to offend the black community by doing them wrong in his portrayal, that would even work today as a reason.
I appreciate your taking the time to answer my letter about Negro children in Peanuts.
You present an interesting dilemma. I would like your permission to use your letter to show some Negro friends. Their responses as parents may prove useful to you in your thinking on this subject.
True to her word, Mrs Glickman showed the letter to others. Kenneth C. Kelly, one of Mrs. Glickman’s ‘Negro friends’, saw the missive and wrote to the artist:
With regards to your correspondence with Mrs. Glickman on the subject of including Negro kids in the fabric of Peanuts, I’d like to express an opinion as a Negro father of two young boys. You mention a fear of being patronizing. Though I doubt that any Negro would view your efforts that way, I’d like to suggest that an accusation of being patronizing would be a small price to pay for the positive results that would accrue!
We have a situation in America in which racial enmity is constantly portrayed. The inclusion of a Negro supernumerary in some of the group scenes in Peanuts would do two important things. Firstly, it would ease my problem of having my kids seeing themselves pictured in the overall American scene. Secondly, it would suggest racial amity in a casual day-to-day sense.
I deliberately suggest a supernumerary role for a Negro character. The inclusion of a Negro in your occasional group scenes would quietly and unobtrusively set the stage for a principal character at a later date, should the basis for such a principal develop.
We have too long used Negro supernumeraries in such unhappy situations as a movie prison scene, while excluding Negro supernumeraries in quiet and normal scenes of people just living, loving, worrying, entering a hotel, the lobby of an office building, a downtown New York City street scene. There are insidious negative effects in these practices of the movie industry, TV industry, magazine publishing, and syndicated cartoons.
Schulz sent Mrs. Glickman a personal note:
Franklin was in the gang.
Opening bit till it gets to the letters is mine, most of the rest comes from this article
https://flashbak.com/why-charles-m-schulz-gave-peanuts-a-black-character-1968-47081/
