Posted December 29, 2005 to Politics | Section Home | Print

John Hope Franklin’s Holds up a Mirror to America

By Marian Wright Edelman

“Living in a world restricted by laws defining race, as well as creating obstacles, disadvantages, and even superstitions regarding race, challenged my capacities for survival. For ninety years I have witnessed countless men and women likewise meet this challenge. Some bested it; some did not; many had to settle for any accommodation they could. I became a student and eventually a scholar. And it was armed with the tools of scholarship that I strove to dismantle those laws, level those obstacles and disadvantages, and replace superstitions with humane dignity. Along with much else, the habits of scholarship granted me something many of my similarly striving contemporaries did not have. I knew, or should say know, what we are up against.”

So begins Mirror to America, the extraordinary new autobiography by preeminent Black historian John Hope Franklin. Franklin has written many other books, including From Slavery to Freedom, the definitive resource on African-American history that has gone through eight printings and sold 3.5 million copies since it was first published in 1947. But in Mirror to America, Franklin shares more details about his own extraordinary personal history, and how he met the “challenge” of a world defined by race — and not only survived but thrived. The book follows him from his childhood in a poor small Black Oklahoma town to the height of his accomplishments as a Fisk and Harvard-educated scholar, world-renown historian and university professor, and the recipient of hundreds of honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian award.

Along the way, as Franklin shares his experiences witnessing our nation’s dramatic racial tensions and transformations in the 20th century, his autobiography becomes its own history of race in America — and includes many of this history’s ugly sides.

Franklin was born in Oklahoma in 1915, and when his father’s small law practice was destroyed during the Tulsa race riots of 1921, his family was separated for four years while his father struggled to rebuild a financial footing. That same year John Hope, his sister, and his mother were ejected from a train in the middle of the woods and forced to walk several miles to get home after his mother refused to walk through the train cars to the Black section with two small children while the train was in motion.

Franklin remembered that as the experience that taught him about race: “Just six years old, I was confused and scared. The uselessness of my mother’s reasonable refusal to endanger her children, the arbitrary injustice of the conductor’s behavior, the clear pointlessness of any objection on our part, and the acquiescence if not approval of the other passengers to our removal brought home to me at that young age the racial divide separating me from white America.”

Some later experiences were more terrifying. As a 19-year-old, while working on a research project about Black farmers in the Mississippi Delta the summer before his senior year at Fisk University, Franklin found himself surrounded and threatened by a lynch mob as he tried to buy ice cream one hot summer night. Many other experiences were just more ordinary racism: being refused service while out on a date as a graduate student, or turned down for a home loan even though he was an established university professor, or turned away from five motel rooms in a row while traveling with his wife and small baby. Even on the night before he was to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, as Franklin was hosting a dinner for friends at a private Washington, D.C. club, a White guest singled him out, gave him her coat check, and asked him to bring her coat.

Stories like these, which are common experiences for so many people of color, are all the more powerful woven throughout the larger story of Franklin’s uncommon and extraordinary life. But they help make Mirror to America a road map for just how Franklin was able to “level those obstacles and disadvantages” and achieve so much despite all the small slights and large barriers that always threatened to stand in his way. The lessons Franklin shares in this book — about self-confidence, dedication to excellence, commitment to hard work, dignity, and grace — are ones all our children need. As Franklin celebrates his 91st birthday this January, his readers are the ones who’ve received a gift.

Marian Wright Edelman is President and Founder of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose mission is to Leave No Child Behind and to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.