Franklin, inked into existence a little more than half a century ago, is a good kid in a difficult position, created to serve as a token figure. In April of 1968, Schulz received a letter urging him to diversify the strip. This is Franklin’s creation story: A nice white lady from Sherman Oaks—an “active citizen” from a “totally Peanuts-oriented family”—thought it important to promote social change by including Black kids among the characters. The writer, Harriet Glickman, had been moved to act by the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a clause which feels to me somehow hideous to type; this particular juxtaposition of hard news and funny pages feels uniquely obscene (or maybe just especially American).
Peanuts introduced Franklin on July 31, 1968, as an amiable child on a seashore. He rescues Charlie Brown’s beach ball from the ebb current, then helps the hero shore up a shoddy sand castle, while also establishing his own credentials as a boy from a “good” home. As we all know, adults in the world of Peanuts are little more than weak bleats of muted horn, but the strip makes a point of explaining that Franklin’s father is absent only because he is serving in Vietnam.
In the parlance of the times, in the calculus of images, Franklin was a respectable Negro, a mild-mannered vision of a model minority. One official text—The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Comic Strip—describes the character as an outlier in “the neurotic world of Peanuts”—that realm where Charlie Brown is seized by insecurity and frozen with indecision, where Lucy thrives as a shameless sadist, where the gods of transitional objects cursed Linus to shoulder his baby-blue burden forever. Franklin, by contrast, is “calm” and “relatively well-balanced ” and “gets good grades.” He is canonically bland and perfectly innocuous, and he has nonetheless, or maybe therefore, often been marginalized. Thirty-odd years ago on Saturday Night Live, Chris Rock worked up a steamed analysis of the character’s isolation in a Weekend Update editorial: “They don’t invite him to the parties, no. But Snoopy’s dancing his ass off, right?”
Peanuts committed a notorious social faux pas in 1973, when finessing the dinner-party seating plan for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, a special in which Peppermint Patty pressures Chuck into hosting a meal. The relevant scene relegated Franklin to eat alone in a second-rate chair on the far side of the table. Last autumn, 50 years after the special’s release, a corner of pop-cultural discourse celebrated a special golden-anniversary edition of ritually regarding the segregation-ish arrangement with amused disgust.