Points To Ponder

06/10/2026

Eleven days after they killed Dr. King, a teacher sat down to force a Black child into America's most famous comic strip. Harriet Glickman wrote Charles Schulz in 1968 and asked him to put a Black kid in Peanuts, where in eighteen years not one had ever appeared.

He almost said no, afraid that a white man drawing a Black child would look like pity. A hundred million readers, eighteen years, and the whole thing turned on one letter.

Eleven days after Dr. King was killed in Memphis, a schoolteacher in California sat down at her typewriter and wrote a letter to a cartoonist. She did not expect him to write back.

Her name was Harriet Glickman. She was forty-one, a mother of three living in the San Fernando Valley, and that spring she felt as powerless as everyone around her.

The country was coming apart. Cities were burning, the television was wall to wall with funerals, and a teacher in suburban Los Angeles kept asking herself what one ordinary person could possibly do.

She was not an activist.

She was a mother with a typewriter and a feeling she could not shake.

The man she wrote to was Charles Schulz. His comic strip, Peanuts, ran in around a thousand newspapers and reached close to a hundred million readers every week.

Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy.

Eighteen years of that strip, going back to 1950, and not one of those children was Black.

Glickman had spent her life around children. As a teacher, she had watched something up close that stayed with her.

Black children and white children never saw themselves sitting side by side, not in school in the funny pages, not anywhere a child went looking for his own face.

So she said it plainly on the page. She wrote that since Dr. King's death she had been asking what she could do about the "vast sea of misunderstanding, hate, fear and violence" that had swallowed the country.

She had actually sent the same idea to several cartoonists. Schulz was the one who wrote back.

That was the first surprise.

His reply was honest in a way that probably stung. He told her he had thought about putting a Black child in the strip, and that the idea frightened him.

Not because of his readers.

He was afraid of getting it wrong.

He worried it would come off like a white man patting Black families on the head, talking down to them. "I don't know what the solution is," he wrote, and left it right there.

A lot of people would have folded at that. A polite no from a famous man is an easy place to stop.

But Glickman wrote again, and Schulz answered again, and this time he sounded even more certain it was a mistake. He was sure that whatever he drew would come off as a white man being clumsy about something this raw.

Still she did not let it drop.

She wrote back and asked his permission to do one small thing.

She had no interest in speaking for Black people. So she asked if she could show his letter to some Black friends of hers, parents, and let them answer him in their own words.

Schulz said yes.

One of those friends was a man named Kenneth Kelly. He was a Black father of two young boys, and he was an engineer.

Not just any engineer.

Kelly worked on the Surveyor program, the unmanned American craft that was setting down on the surface of the moon.

Sit with that picture for a second. A Black man helping land a spacecraft on the moon took the time to write a cartoonist about whether a Black child could sit in a comic strip.

Kelly was patient with him. He told Schulz that no Black parent he knew would call the gesture condescending, and that even if a few did, it would be "a small price to pay" for what it would give their children.

What it would give them was not complicated. It was the simple sight of themselves, somewhere inside the ordinary American picture they were shut out of every single day.

Kelly even told him how to do it. Do not make the boy a hero, he suggested, and do not turn him into a lesson.

Just a regular kid, one of the gang, nothing special, simply there.

Years later, Kelly would spend himself fighting housing discrimination in his city. That summer, he changed a comic strip instead.

Another friend and parent, Monica Gunning, wrote to Schulz as well. The letters kept landing on his desk in Northern California, polite and unhurried and impossible to wave off.

All of this was happening while the year kept getting worse. In June, Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, Glickman's own city, a few weeks after Kelly mailed his letter.

The country was taking blow after blow.

And in the middle of it, that quiet argument about a comic strip kept moving forward, one letter at a time.

Then, one day that summer, Schulz sent Glickman a short note. He told her to check her newspaper the week of July twenty-ninth, because he had drawn something he thought would please her.

On July 31, 1968, Charlie Brown is standing on a beach, and he has lost his ball in the water. A boy he has never met before wades in and carries it back to him.

The boy's name is Franklin. The two of them get to talking and build a sandcastle together, two children on a beach on a summer afternoon.

No speech. No halo.

No lecture about brotherhood, just a Black child being kind to Charlie Brown, printed in a thousand papers from coast to coast.

The strip would later show that Franklin's father was a soldier serving in Vietnam. He was never written as a symbol.

He was somebody's son.

When Franklin appeared, mail poured into Schulz's office from all over the country. Most of it said the same simple thing, which was thank you.

It should have ended there, small and sweet. It did not.

When Schulz later drew Franklin in school, he sat him at a desk right in front of Peppermint Patty. A Black child and a white child, learning in the same room.

For one Southern newspaper editor, that was the line. He wrote to Schulz to say he did not mind a Black character, but please do not show the children in school together.

The man could accept Franklin existing in the strip.

He could not accept that child sharing a desk with a white girl.

This was 1968. Black children were walking into newly integrated schools behind federal marshals, and a grown man was objecting to a cartoon doing the very same thing.

Schulz had a decision to make, and he made it without any noise. Years later, asked what he had done about that complaint over the classroom, he gave a short answer.

It was five words. "I didn't even answer him."

He just kept drawing the two of them at the same desk.

Far off in Philadelphia, a six-year-old Black boy watched Franklin appear with no idea of the fight behind him. His name was Robb Armstrong.

That year had already taken something from him. His older brother had died thirty days before Franklin first turned up on that beach.

Thirty days.

A boy loses his brother, and a month later a new face shows up in the comics page he reads on the living room floor.

So here was a child who already knew the shape of a hole in a family. And then, right inside that grief, a Black kid walked into his favorite comic strip.

Robb looked at Franklin and thought one thing. "That's like me."

He had already told his mother, at three years old, that he was going to be a cartoonist.

Now he had proof there was room for him.

A Black boy could belong on the funny pages, because one already did.

That child grew up to become exactly what he had promised. Robb Armstrong created JumpStart, one of the most widely syndicated Black comic strips in the country.

And here is where the story closes a circle no one could have planned. Franklin, through all those decades, never had a last name.

In the 1990s, Charles Schulz picked up the phone and called Robb Armstrong. A special was in the works, every character needed a full name, and Schulz had just realized Franklin did not have one.

So he asked the grown man, the one who had once been that grieving six-year-old, whether he could borrow his name. Robb said yes right away.

That is why the first Black character in Peanuts is named Franklin Armstrong.

Armstrong called it the highest respect a person could be shown.

About the man who reached a lonely kid through a comic strip, he said it simply, "He inspired a kid."

Harriet Glickman lived to be ninety-three. She died in March of 2020, in the same Sherman Oaks house where she had typed that letter more than fifty years earlier.

The letter outlived her. It rests now in the Charles M. Schulz Museum, the real page, her real words, dated eleven days after Dr. King was killed.

You can stand in front of it today, behind glass, and read the date typed across the top. April 15, 1968, mailed by a woman who was certain no one was listening.

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Note: This post is shared for historical, educational, and commentary purposes. I do not claim ownership of any copyrighted images, comic artwork, characters, or archival photographs used. All rights belong to their respective owners.

06/07/2026

They killed a Black man for trying to secure a basic right most Americans take for granted.

Not for committing a crime.

Not for carrying a weapon.

Not for threatening anyone.

For demanding the right to vote.

His name was Jimmie Lee Jackson.

And if you've heard of Selma... if you've heard of Bloody Sunday... if you've heard of the Voting Rights Act...

You should know his name too.

In February 1965, Black citizens across Alabama were fighting against a system designed to keep them powerless.

Voter registration meant intimidation.

Violence.

Arrests.

And sometimes death.

Jimmie Lee Jackson was only 26 years old when he joined a peaceful voting rights demonstration in Marion, Alabama.

What happened next changed American history.

As state troopers and police attacked demonstrators, Jackson tried to protect his mother and grandfather from the violence.

He wasn't attacking anyone.

He was shielding his family.

That's when a state trooper shot him.

For days, he fought for his life.

Then, on February 26, 1965, he died.

The bullet that killed Jimmie Lee Jackson did more than take a life.

It ignited a movement.

Civil rights leaders knew the country needed to see what was happening in Alabama.

Just days later, activists launched the historic march from Selma to Montgomery.

The first attempt became known as Bloody Sunday, when marchers were brutally beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The images shocked the nation.

Months later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law.

Think about that.

One young Black man was murdered for defending his family and demanding a constitutional right.

But the movement his death inspired helped millions of Americans gain access to the ballot box.

History remembers the marches.

History remembers the speeches.

But before Selma captured the world's attention, there was a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson whose blood was already on Alabama soil.

His death helped force a nation to confront its conscience.

And sixty years later, his question still echoes through history:

How many people had to die just so others could vote?

06/07/2026

And what was wrong? There was no bullying, drugs, or restrictions on restroom use apparent in this video. Was entrepreneurship specifically prohibited by that school’s student behavior and expectations policy? Hmm!🤔

06/07/2026

06/07/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1BZmdcW3d3/?mibextid=wwXIfr

He was one of America's most famous scholars.

Then he was arrested on the front porch of his own home.

July 16, 2009.

Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was 58 years old.

A professor.

An author.

A historian whose work helped shape public understanding of African American history and culture.

As a professor at Harvard University, Gates had spent decades studying race, identity, and the Black experience in America.

Then one encounter brought those issues directly to his own doorstep.

After returning from a trip to China, Gates arrived at his home and discovered that the front door was jammed.

With the assistance of his driver, he attempted to force it open.

A neighbor noticed two men trying to enter the house and called 911, believing a burglary might be taking place.

Police were dispatched to investigate.

By the time officers arrived, Gates was already inside.

He identified himself.

He provided identification showing that he lived at the residence.

But the situation quickly escalated.

An argument broke out between Gates and Cambridge police officer James Crowley.

The exact details of the exchange became a matter of intense public debate.

What happened next was undeniable.

Gates was arrested on the front porch of his own home.

The charge was disorderly conduct.

News of the arrest spread across the country within hours.

Many Americans were stunned.

How could a homeowner be arrested after proving he lived there?

Others argued that the officer was responding to a reported break-in and attempting to perform his duties.

The incident quickly became a national flashpoint.

Not because of a single arrest.

But because millions of people saw their own experiences reflected in it.

Questions about race.

Policing.

Authority.

And belonging suddenly dominated national headlines.

Days later, prosecutors dropped the charge against Gates.

But the conversation did not end.

The controversy eventually reached the White House.

President Barack Obama commented on the incident, describing it as an opportunity for a broader discussion about race and law enforcement in America.

In an effort to reduce tensions, Obama later invited Gates and Officer Crowley to the White House.

The meeting became known as the "Beer Summit."

The image of the three men sitting together in the Rose Garden became one of the most memorable political photographs of that year.

For many Americans, the story was never simply about an arrest.

It was about assumptions.

Identity.

And the question of how people are treated when others doubt they belong.

A Harvard professor.

A front porch.

And an encounter that sparked a nationwide conversation still debated today.

Do you think incidents like this are remembered because of what happened, or because of the larger issues they reveal?

06/05/2026

The University of Texas wanted Bubba Smith and would not give him a scholarship because he was Black. Their own coach, Darrell Royal, admitted the boy was good enough but could not promise he would ever be let on the field.

So Bubba went north to Michigan State and came out the first player taken in the whole NFL draft. His own state lost him for good.

The head coach said it out loud, to the boy's own face, over the telephone.

He just would not give him a scholarship. Not because Bubba could not play, but because Bubba was Black.

Bubba grew up dreaming about one school, the way a lot of boys down there did. So he picked up the phone and called Darrell Royal, the most powerful football coach in the whole state, and asked him straight out.

Coach, can I come to the University of Texas.

That was the entire question, and it was a fair one. Bubba was already one of the best players Texas had ever grown, and Royal knew it.

"Uh, Bubba, I could probably get you a scholarship," the coach told him, "but I don't know when the football program is gonna integrate."

So there it was. A grown man who wanted him badly, telling a teenager he might find him a seat but could not promise he would ever be let on the field.

Charles Aaron Smith was born in Orange, Texas, in 1945, and raised up the road in Beaumont, where football was the family trade.

His father, Willie Ray Smith Sr., won two hundred and thirty five games coaching three different high schools in town. Bubba came up playing for his own daddy at Charlton-Pollard.

By the time he finished high school he was one of the finest players the state had ever produced. He stood six feet seven inches, weighed around two hundred and sixty five pounds, and moved fast in a way that made no sense for a body that big.

Offensive linemen would look across the line at him and go quiet. Coaches all over the country wanted his name on a letter of intent.

His own state's flagship university wanted him too, and still it was not allowed to say yes.

So Bubba went north. He landed at Michigan State, with a coach named Duffy Daugherty who was quietly building something that mattered.

Daugherty was taking the great Black players the South refused to recruit and bringing them up to East Lansing. People later called it his underground railroad.

George Webster came up from South Carolina. Gene Washington came out of Texas, same as Bubba.

The players the Southern schools would not touch were winning back-to-back national titles in Spartan green.

Their quarterback, Jimmy Raye, was one of the only Black men starting at the position anywhere in the country. Daugherty did not seem to care where a player came from or what he looked like, only whether he could play.

In East Lansing the crowd found three words for what number ninety five did to people, and they chanted it every time he lined up: Kill, Bubba, Kill.

He made All-American twice and was named the country's lineman of the year in 1966. He became the engine of a Spartan defense that opponents simply could not solve, double-teamed and triple-teamed and still in the backfield.

Then on November 19, 1966, it all came to a head. Top-ranked Notre Dame met second-ranked Michigan State in a packed Spartan Stadium, in the game the writers were already calling the Game of the Century.

Both teams came in undefeated, playing for the right to be called the best in the country. The noise coming down off the upper deck was something the people there never forgot, a roar they later compared to wind and thunder in one storm.

Notre Dame had a young star at quarterback named Terry Hanratty. He did not last the first quarter.

He kept the ball on a run early. Linebacker George Webster wrapped him up, Bubba came down on top of the pile, and Hanratty's shoulder gave out under all that weight.

He walked off and did not come back, and Notre Dame had to play the rest of the day with a backup named Coley O'Brien.

The game crawled toward the end knotted at ten to ten. Holding the ball late with a real chance to win it, the Irish chose to sit on the thing and run out the clock.

Bubba could not stand it.

He stood across the line and hollered at them, loud enough for that whole stadium to hear.

"Come on, sissies, throw the ball," he yelled at them.

They would not throw it. It ended ten to ten, two giants that would not fall, and the next week the magazines roasted the Irish for settling while grown men argued about that finish for the next fifty years.

Five months later came the loudest answer a phone call from Beaumont could ever get. It was the 1967 draft, and the very first pick of the entire thing was about to be called.

Not the second, not the tenth, but the first player taken in all of professional football, and his name was Bubba Smith.

Four of his Spartan teammates went in the top eight that same afternoon. But the whole league pointed at one man before all of them and said, him.

The Southwest Conference that Texas belonged to did not integrate until 1967, four years after Bubba had already gone north. The university's own football program held out even longer than that.

The school that told him to wait had waited him right out of its own history.

He gave nine hard seasons to the league, made two Pro Bowls, and earned an All-Pro year. In 1972 he ran full speed into a steel pole the league used to mark its yard lines, wrecked his knee, and lost the whole season to it.

His teams in those years almost never lost. Across his time there they won better than fifty games and dropped barely more than a dozen.

He went to two Super Bowls with Baltimore and won one of them. He had the ring from Super Bowl Five, the night the Colts finally got past Dallas, and he said he would never put it on.

It was not about that game, but about the Super Bowl two years before it, against the New York Jets, the one that never once sat right with him.

The Colts were the heavy favorite and they lost. Bubba came to believe the whole thing had been steered, to help force the upstart league and the old one into a merger worth a fortune.

"The game just seemed odd to me," he wrote years later. "Everything was out of place."

He never proved a word of it, and almost nobody believed him. He put the suspicion in his 1983 book and carried it the rest of his life.

After football he found a whole second life on a screen. The most feared man in the college game turned into Moses Hightower in the Police Academy movies, a giant so soft-spoken that audiences could not help loving him.

He did the Miller Lite commercials alongside Dick Butkus and kept America laughing for a solid decade.

The same body that used to make quarterbacks flinch was now making little kids grin. He had figured out how to be funny about his own size.

But that body had been keeping a tab the entire time. Football was collecting on it one collision at a time, and the bill came due inside his own head.

On August 3, 2011, his caretaker found him at home in the Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles. He was sixty six years old.

The coroner listed heart disease, high blood pressure, and weight-loss pills in his system. His heart, they found, weighed more than twice what a man's heart is supposed to.

Five years after that, the rest of it came out.

Researchers who study the brains of former players found that Bubba had Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It is the disease that comes for judgment, for planning, for the plain daily machinery of being a person.

It is paid off slowly, one hit at a time, by men doing the very thing the crowd was screaming for. Kill, Bubba, Kill, the stands had told him for twenty years, and somewhere in all of it the order settled into his skull and never left.

Every time a great Black player ran out for a Southern school in the years that followed, somewhere underneath was the thing Bubba proved in 1966, that nobody could keep winning while turning men like him away. Michigan State raised his number ninety five to the rafters in 2006, the College Football Hall of Fame had already taken him in 1988, and Sports Illustrated put him on its all-century college team.

The University of Texas, the school that could not tell him when, finally gave its answer with a roster instead of a sentence in 1970, far too late for the one boy who had most wanted to hear it.

He had asked them something simple from a phone in Beaumont when he was still a kid. Coach, can I come to the University of Texas.

By the time anybody in Austin could bring themselves to say yes, his number was already hanging in another state's rafters, and the whole league had chosen him first.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter.
If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.