Wednesday, January 25, 2023
A statue for Franklin
A High School in Santa Rosa, California has erected a statue of Franklin, the first Black character in the Peanuts comic strip. It's not an accident it ended up there-- Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, lived much of his life in the town.
Franklin was introduced in 1968, 18 years after Schultz began the strip and just a few months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Shultz reportedly received threats for integrating his comic strip, but stood his ground. When Franklin first appeared, literally the first thing he told Charlie Brown was that his dad was in the Army, fighting in Vietnam(!). Franklin was never a major player in the cast, and Schultz was criticized for a scene in which Franklin is at Thanksgiving dinner, but sitting by himself in a lawn chair. I'm not quite sure what to make of the statue!
I grew up reading Peanuts in the Detroit Free Press, but I'm not sure I really caught everything that was going on...
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I've noticed that too, IPLG-- sometimes there was no attempt at all to be funny. It was just a character study.
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