Friday Fun: Happy 50th Birthday, Franklin!

Truthfully, a belated “Happy Birthday!” because Franklin was actually “born” on July 31, 1968.   And what a “birth” it was!

Undoubtedly you are probably asking yourselves, “Who is this Franklin that he’s talking about?  Other than Benjamin, I don’t know any Franklins.”

But I bet dollars to donuts you do – even though Franklin was only a couple inches tall when he first came into the world fifty years ago.

As noted, the story of how Franklin came into being is one worth sharing!

During the Civil Rights struggles of the late 1960s, and only eleven days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Glickman, a retired schoolteacher and mother of three from the Los Angeles suburbs, sat down at her typewriter to craft a letter to Charles Schulz requesting the inclusion of a Negro character in his wildly popular and famous comic strip, “Peanuts”.

But Glickman’s sentiments were not created de novo.  Her upbringing was exemplary as she explained in an interview almost three years ago about what motivated her to draft her letter in the first place.

My parents… 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.

And so, during the years, we were very aware of the issues of racism and civil rights in this country. 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… the period before I wrote the letter was the major period of civil rights activities.  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 … and the beatings and the dogs and the hosings and the courage of so many people in that time. 

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. It was the accumulation of all the years of seeing the discrimination, the segregation, the hatred and all….

Glickman was amazed when she actually got a reply from Schulz.  While he told her he liked the idea, he was worried that it would appear to be patronizing.

Glickman wrote back asking if it would be alright if she shared his letter with several of her Negro friends and then have them share their thoughts about it with him.  He heartily approved, and her friends were very supportive of the idea in their correspondence to Schulz.

A short while later Schulz wrote to Glickman telling her to keep an eye out on his comic strip panels during the last week in July of 1968.  And so the character Franklin was “born” on July 31, 1968.

It was over recovered a beach ball, baseball and crooked sand castles that Franklin and Charlie Brown form a friendship – a first for syndicated comics!

While widely acclaimed, that didn’t mean Franklin’s introduction didn’t meet with some resistance – particularly from editors in the South.  They especially pleaded with Schulz to NOT show any panels with Franklin in the same school with the other characters, because they were dead-set against integration.

It wasn’t long before Schulz soon thereafter put Franklin in the same schoolroom … seated right in front of a little white girl, Peppermint Patty!

Schulz recalled a discussion with Larry Rutman, head of the company that distributed “Peanuts” (King Features Syndicate):

“I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said: ‘Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?’”

[Emphasis added]

In truth, it would be hard to argue against folks who have complained that Franklin is a little too one-dimensional and a little too perfect – always wise, fair and just.

And it’s true he does lack the eccentricities that all of Schulz’s other characters possess.  But at the same time, I think we can agree that Franklin has gently nudged readers toward the notion that, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin.

So “Happy 50^th Birthday!” Franklin!  And thanks for all you’ve done!

NOTE:

The “Peanuts” comic strip ran until Mr. Schulz’s death in 2000.  It was published in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and translated to 21 languages, and it has reached more than 300 million people around the world.

BONUS FEATURE:

Interview with Ms. Glickman at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in 2014 on how she wrote to Schulz:

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