The 5 April 2020 edition of the NY Times included an obituary notice for Harriet Glickman. From the article:
“Ms. Glickman was a former schoolteacher in California when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, shocking the nation and heightening her concern about what she saw as toxic racism that permeated society. She began thinking of ways the mass media shaped the unconscious biases of America’s children, she later wrote, and “felt that something could be done through our comic strips.” She wrote to several cartoonists, including Mr. Schulz, urging them to add black characters to their strips. At the time “Peanuts,” which had been appearing since 1950, was syndicated in about 1,000 newspapers and reached tens of millions of readers, according to Benjamin L. Clark, the curator at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif.”
“On July 31, 1968, Franklin Armstrong appeared in “Peanuts” for the first time, returning a beach ball Charlie Brown had lost in the ocean and then helping him build a sand castle. Nothing aside from the color of his skin set him apart from the other children in the strip.”
This is an interesting example to reflect on in light of Social Role Valorization (SRV). More specifically, Wolfensberger identifies four categories of action implications related to SRV (SRV monograph, 2004, pp. 78-80). These actions include efforts primarily to enhance social images on the larger societal level.
See this online article which includes the first cartoon including Franklin Armstrong.