Black People Can’t Swim

The political positions of the birds—one of whom Schulz would christen “Woodstock” two years later—are literally cryptic.  (Snoopy later embraced of identity politics via a nifty collapse of signifier into signified, but let’s not lit-crit these panels quite yet.)  For Schulz, the campaigns of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace were less important than baseball:

This dead-pan surrealism here is Peanuts at its artistic best, but at a time when America was at war and a segregationist was a viable Presidential candidate, dead-pan surrealism wasn’t the order of the day.  So Schulz sent Charlie Brown to the beach:

This strip’s a fairly typical example of Charlie Brown’s half-hearted exasperation with an unfair world.  The next?

Not only does the world cease its relentless, playful torment of Charlie Brown, but the boy who tamps it down is black and can swim.  Because on 31 July 1968, Schulz introduced the world to Franklin.  May not seem like much, but it’s as explicitly political as Peanuts ever ventures.  Until, that is, 1 August 1968:

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