The Peanuts Thanksgiving special has stirred up discourse in recent years. One scene in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving depicts a Black character, Franklin, sitting alone on one side of the table while all the other Peanuts characters are placed around the other sides. Furthermore, animators drew Franklin sitting in a lawn chair, while the rest of the Peanuts gang received more proper chairs. Some critics see the separation of Franklin as either intentional or subconscious racism on the part of the animators.
In 2020, Jean Schulz told Yahoo Entertainment that her husband, the late Charles Schulz, only wrote the script for this special, and did not participate in the animation process. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving premiered in 1973 – nearly a decade after A Charlie Brown Christmas and many of the other notable holiday specials that have now become classics.
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Jean said that she could not speak to the creative decisions being made by animators since her husband had stepped back from the work by then. However, she guessed that decisions like the seating arrangement traced back to director Bill Melendez, who had worked with Schulz for years. She assured fans that the scene wasn’t malicious, but acknowledged that there may have been some subconscious racism behind the seating arrangement.
“The scene would not have had nothing to do with [Charles], because it was purely the animators and the directors working on it,” Jean said. “The director parcels out the scenes to the animators, and the animators who drew that scene aren’t alive anymore or we don’t know how to find them. The [controversy] first popped up a couple of years ago. I’ve probably watched the special a dozen times, and I hadn’t noticed it. But I wouldn’t notice it: It’s to be noticed now.”
Jean previously addressed this same controversy in 2019 when it came up around Thanksgiving. At the time, she wrote on her blog: “While it can’t be known now which animator drew that particular scene, you can be sure there was no ulterior motive.”
“I fall back on Peppermint Patty’s apology to Charlie Brown explaining she meant no harm when she criticized his poor Thanksgiving offering,” she went on, “which goes something like: ‘There are enough problems in the world already without these misunderstandings.’ To suggest the show had any other messages than the importance of family, sharing and gratitude is to look for an issue where there is none.”
Still, some critics of the special say that the unconscious bias in the scene is worth addressing just as much as intentional discrimination would be. UCLA sociology professor Darnell Hunt previously told Yahoo that if nothing else, “it really does speak to the need for more inclusive creators and storytellers behind the scenes who produce these images.”
Schulz’s friends and colleagues have tended to be more preoccupied with defending Schulz himself throughout these debates. The Schulz Museum organized a panel discussion with Black cartoonists in November 2020 to tackle the issue, where artist Robb Armstrong said: “I know people are like, ‘that’s racist!’ First of all, Charles Schulz named that dude after me — he is not racist. He is a wonderful human being who decided to put Jesus on a CBS Christmas special. He wanted Franklin to be that, but he knew he didn’t have it in him. Franklin is still an underdeveloped character… but the guy knew his limits.”
