Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin
By John Hope Franklin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 401 pages, $25
For more than six decades, John Hope Franklin has placed his firm and decisive imprint on the history of the American South, African-Americans and race in the U.S. The mentor of several generations of undergraduates and graduate students, he delivered countless lectures in prominent forums around the world and educated perhaps hundreds of thousands through his monographs and textbooks.
From humble origins in the Jim Crow South, he rose to the heights of academia, always taking his broader civic responsibilities seriously. His constant ambition was to "be so dedicated a scholar and teacher that the entire profession, indeed the wider world, would take notice." This was a goal he achieved many times over. In "Mirror to America," the nation's most-prominent African-American historian finally takes himself as his historical subject, reflecting on his personal, scholarly and political life over the past 90 years.
During his long and engaged life, Franklin was repeatedly reminded of the ubiquity of racism. "I grew up in a racial climate that was stifling to my senses and damaging to my emotional health and social well-being," he recalls. Born and raised in Oklahoma, Franklin lived in an entirely segregated world. When he was 6, he and his mother were thrown off a train for mistakenly sitting in seats reserved for whites. The public schools he attended in Tulsa were all black, as was the college he attended, Fisk University. As a 19-year-old research assistant for prominent black sociologist Charles S. Johnson, Franklin narrowly avoided being lynched for interviewing sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta.
Segregation did little to curb Franklin's intellectual ambitions. Nurtured by parents who insisted on his abilities and encouraged by teachers (particularly white Fisk historian Theodore Currier, who became his lifelong friend) to excel academically, Franklin pursued a doctorate in history at Harvard University in the 1930s. Excluded from the dormitories, he boarded with a local black family; when encouraged by professors to pursue distinctly black history topics, he initially demurred.
"A day, and often an hour, didn't go by without my feeling the color of my skin--in the reactions of white Cambridge, the behavior of my fellows students, the attitudes real and imagined struck by my professors." His 2 1/2 years there were "stifling," he recalls. Unlike his student colleagues with "affluence and influence," he had only his "determination and a corresponding work ethic to fall back on."
Franklin may have possessed a Harvard Ph.D., but he was still a black man in a segregated nation. During World War II, his application to serve as a historian in the War Department was ignored. His brother, a high school principal, was drafted, "consigned to the kitchen brigade," and suffered considerable abuse, an experience that left him deeply embittered and shattered.
Endorsing the slogan of "Double V"--the black call for a victory over fascism abroad and at home--Franklin avoided the military but also steered clear of protest politics, instead immersing himself in his scholarship and teaching. His and his brother's experiences led him to "one irrevocable conclusion, that the United States, however much it was devoted to protecting the freedoms and rights of Europeans, had no respect for me, little interest in my well-being, and not even a desire to utilize my professional services."
Not all was unrelieved oppression, however. As a professional scholar, Franklin navigated and often overcame the restrictions placed on him because of race. While one Southern white archivist observed that Franklin didn't " `look like a Harvard nigger,' " others proved more open and even generous, facilitating his access to valuable manuscript collections in otherwise segregated state archives, while white researchers sometimes greeted him cordially. At the invitation of his friend, Southern white liberal historian C. Vann Woodward, Franklin broke the Southern Historical Association's color line in 1948 by delivering a well-received scholarly paper.
His determination and work ethic served Franklin well, quickly bringing professional recognition. Even before receiving his doctorate in 1941, he launched a career in teaching and publishing that solidified early his reputation as a dedicated scholar. His first book, "The Free Negro in Carolina, 1790-1860," published in 1943, was followed in 1947 by "From Slavery to Freedom," a comprehensive overview of the black experience in America. Revised regularly and still in print after almost 60 years, it has been the most widely read text in African-American history by students and general readers.