'Mirror': A glimpse at a great man's life

By CARLIN ROMANO
PHILADELPIA INQUIRER
It's hard to explain why John Hope Franklin is such a great man -- you run out of space.
Where to begin? At 91, the dean of American historians -- that's American historians, not black historians -- boasts a mere 137 honorary degrees and 18 books, including the classic, "From Slavery to Freedom" (1947), with 3.5 million copies sold. Although many mistakenly see Franklin as the trailblazer of a subfield called African-American history, what he really accomplished was to teach us that there's only one American history.
It includes everyone who was there -- whites, blacks, American Indians, Spanish and more. We segregate history, like schools, at our peril.
Franklin blew away the idea that Southern slaves didn't really mind slavery. He buried the myth of Reconstruction as a mainly progressive period, helping confirm it as the seedbed of Jim Crow.
And somehow, along the way, he managed to advise Thurgood Marshall on Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, march in Montgomery in 1965, chair the national advisory board for President Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race in 1997, and nurture thousands of students. ("I've always felt," he has said, "that the most important thing I've ever done was to teach.")
A list of firsts
Here you begin to run into the space problem. This tall, genial professor emeritus at Duke, who still takes on speaking engagements as far afield as Hawaii and Texas, also arguably managed as many firsts as that other Franklin fellow, Benjamin.
He was the first black to be a full professor in, and chair of, a history department in a mainly white university; the first black president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association; the first black president of Phi Beta Kappa.
Franklin has, in short, the right to be proud. "Mirror to America," his chronological, measured, fiercely detailed autobiography, recounts much of that achievement with dispassionate solemnity. Its tone has disappointed some reviewers. They've complained about a lack of fire and emotional introspection, with some also targeting reportedly insufficient gratitude for his remarkable career.
Sorry -- count those as things to like. Franklin treats his own life as he treated Reconstruction, runaway slaves, Southern military schools and other subjects: a set of facts to be gathered, organized and explained. He doesn't slap sugarcoated endings on narratives that haven't earned them.
True to his professional standards, Franklin, who lives in Durham, N.C., conducted research in his 80s to tie down uncertain aspects of his life. He searched U.S. Census reports, revisited childhood homes, scrutinized FBI and other documents. The upshot corroborates a point made by his scholarship: A black man in America can achieve amazing things, but he's still a black man in America.
His childhood
"I grew up in a racial climate that was stifling to my senses," he writes, and the beginning of the book particularly bears him out. Born in 1915 in Rentiesville, Okla., an all-black "village," Franklin got his first taste of racism at age 6. He, his mother Mollie, and sister Anne flagged down a train to nearby Checotah because trains didn't stop in Rentiesville otherwise. The engineer aligned the "Whites Only" car in front of them, and they entered it.
The conductor soon directed Franklin's mother, a schoolteacher, to move to the car for blacks. She refused while the train was still moving. So the conductor stopped the train and made the Franklins get off, forcing them to walk back home.
Young John started crying. His mother, he recalls in the book, assured him that "there was not a white person on that train or anywhere else who was any better than I was." She urged him never to waste energy on crying, but to use the energy to prove his worth.
Franklin's subsequent life reads like a mission to fulfill his mother's charge.
Valedictorian of Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, he moved on to Fisk University in Nashville. There, a devoted white history professor, Theodore Currier, 32, became his mentor and enduring friend. When Franklin won admission to Harvard's graduate school, but no financial aid, Currier borrowed $500 from a local bank and put the cash in his young friend's hands.
Franklin would later dedicate a scholarship fund at Fisk to Currier. He also started dating Aurelia Whittington. They married in 1940 and she became his wife and editor for 58 years until her death in January 1999.
Parallels
Much of "Mirror" focuses on the author's academic breakthroughs and honors, his rise from teaching posts at small schools like St. Augustine's College to prestigious professorships at the University of Chicago and Duke. But it's always laced with a parallel tale of indignities.
While a Fisk undergraduate, Franklin found himself being shouted at by a ticket agent who insisted "no 'nigger' would tell him how to make change." At 19, he narrowly escaped lynching while interviewing sharecroppers. As a professor at Brooklyn College in the 1950s, he found obtaining a mortgage in a white neighborhood virtually impossible. In 1995, at age 80, he hosted a party for friends as a member of Washington's Cosmos Club -- and a white woman mistook him for the coat-check clerk.
Such experiences take a toll. Franklin's refusal to bless 21st-century America, to declare W.E.B. Du Bois' two Americas a solved problem, accounts for critical resistance to this book among those who like all-forgiving hot air from scholarly grandpas.
Yet the beauty of John Hope Franklin is that he has always responded to racism and falsehood with scholarship and truth, a flinty determination short of anger but far from deference.
He continues to believe that "little by little, chip by chip," it's possible "to change things." He told NPR last fall: "If Michelangelo can make David out of a piece of marble, we might be able to make civilized human beings out of this vast quantity of human existence. ... "
That his ecstasies haven't matched his agonies is not his fault, but his country's.
Knight Ridder