06/15/2026
Eleven days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a schoolteacher in California sat down at her typewriter and decided to write a letter that would quietly change one of America’s most beloved comic strips.
Her name was Harriet Glickman.
In 1968, she was 41 years old, a mother of three living in the San Fernando Valley, watching a country unravel in real time. Cities burned. News broadcasts carried funerals. And like many people who were not in the center of the civil rights movement, she was left with a persistent question: what could an ordinary person possibly do?
She wasn’t an activist in any formal sense. Just a teacher, a mother, and someone who could not ignore what she was seeing.
The man she wrote to was Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, a comic strip published in roughly a thousand newspapers and read by nearly a hundred million people each week. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy—household names across America since 1950.
But in eighteen years of Peanuts, not a single Black child had ever appeared.
Glickman had spent years around children and had noticed something simple but painful: Black and white children rarely saw themselves together in the stories and images that shaped everyday life. Not in classrooms. Not in media. Not in the funny pages.
So she wrote directly. Since Dr. King’s death, she said, she had been thinking about the “vast sea of misunderstanding, hate, fear and violence” spreading across the country, and wondered whether even a comic strip might help narrow it.
She sent similar letters to several cartoonists. Schulz was the one who replied.
That alone was unexpected.
His response was honest, but uneasy. He admitted he had considered introducing a Black child into Peanuts, but the idea frightened him—not because of audience backlash, but because he feared doing it wrong. As a white cartoonist, he worried it would come across as condescending or artificial.
“I don’t know what the solution is,” he essentially told her.
For many people, that would have ended the conversation. But Glickman wrote again. And Schulz responded again, still hesitant, still unsure.
Then she made a different request. If he was uncomfortable acting alone, could she share his letter with Black friends and parents to hear their perspective directly?
Schulz agreed.
One of those people was Kenneth Kelly, a Black engineer working on NASA’s Surveyor program—the unmanned spacecraft that helped prepare for the Moon landing. In the middle of the space race, he took time to answer a letter about a comic strip.
Kelly’s response was calm and clear. He said most Black parents would not see a Black character in Peanuts as patronizing. Even if a few did, he argued, the benefit to children seeing themselves included in ordinary American life would outweigh that concern.
His advice was simple: don’t make the character a symbol or a lesson. Just make him a kid. One of the group. Nothing more.
Another parent, Monica Gunning, echoed the same message. The responses kept coming, steady and consistent.
Meanwhile, the country continued to fracture. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. The sense of instability deepened.
But in the middle of that year, something small and persistent kept moving forward: a private correspondence about a single comic strip character.
Eventually, Schulz wrote back to Glickman with a brief message. Check the newspaper at the end of July, he told her—he had decided to try.
On July 31, 1968, a Peanuts strip appeared showing Charlie Brown on a beach, retrieving a lost ball with help from a new boy he had never met. The boy’s name was Franklin.
They talked. They built a sandcastle. No speeches. No symbolism. Just two children sharing a moment.
Franklin was not introduced as a statement. He simply existed.
Letters poured into Schulz’s office afterward, many expressing gratitude for the quiet inclusion.
But the decision did not go unchallenged. When Franklin later appeared in a school setting alongside Peppermint Patty, a Southern newspaper editor objected—not to Franklin’s existence, but to integration being shown so plainly.
Schulz’s response was brief and final. When asked about it later, he summed it up in five words:
“I didn’t even answer him.”
Franklin stayed in the classroom.
Years later, a young Black boy in Philadelphia named Robb Armstrong read that strip while grieving his older brother, who had died just weeks earlier. In Franklin, he saw something he rarely saw anywhere else: a Black child simply existing in the same everyday world as everyone else.
“That’s like me,” he thought.
Armstrong would grow up to become a cartoonist himself, creating the syndicated strip JumpStart. Decades later, Schulz called him to ask a small but meaningful question: Franklin needed a last name for a special project. Could he use Armstrong’s?
Robb agreed immediately.
That is how Franklin became Franklin Armstrong.
Armstrong later said it was one of the highest honors he had ever received.
Harriet Glickman lived to be 93. She died in March 2020 in the same home where she had typed her letter more than half a century earlier.
That letter is now preserved in the Charles M. Schulz Museum. Dated April 15, 1968—eleven days after Dr. King’s death—it remains a quiet reminder that a single, uncertain voice can still reach across fear, hesitation, and grief… and change what millions of people see every week.
Credits goes to respective author.