John Hope Franklin is an institution. Literally.
He is a preeminent American historian, active participant in nearly a century of struggle for civil rights and namesake of the University's John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies.
His new book, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, hit stores Wednesday and chronicles the long and fruitful life of one of America's most renowned scholars and activists.
But how does an institution write its own biography? With lots of research, Franklin said.
"What are you doing in the library, John," he said a colleague asked him jokingly.
"I'm doing research on Franklin," he replied.
Autobiography is by nature a tricky genre, even more so at Franklin's age; to present with full confidence the hazily remembered events of a childhood 90 years past is not an easy undertaking.
Yet Franklin approached the task with the calm confidence of an authority in historical impartiality.
He began research into his own childhood as any experienced historian would: by examining primary sources, such as unpublished U.S. Census documents.
Within the vast accumulation of surprisingly personal data collected for the 1920 census, Franklin found enough documentation of his 5-year-old self-down to his weight and names of his closest playmates-to jog his memory.
If you go back into a house where you once lived, memories will come flooding back, Franklin said James B. Duke Professor of English Reynolds Price counseled him.
Franklin did just that; he went back to the house where he was born.
From the empty space rose memories of his first bedroom and riding his bike in the driveway. And using these everyday recollections, Franklin brings readers the story of one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. "I didn't ever consider myself to be writing about black history," Franklin said. "I was writing about U.S. history."
He was born in Oklahoma into the racially divided America of 1915. A graduate of Fisk College with a newly minted Ph.D. from Harvard University, Franklin set off to write a corrective history of the country that had, for centuries, neglected the voice of its black population.
His numerous publications-the most well known of which is perhaps From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans-molded him into one of the most well respected scholars in the nation.
Yet Franklin has not restricted himself to the writing of books. He was only 19 when he tried to hand President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a petition in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching of a young black man near Fisk's campus in 1933. This event was the beginning of Franklin's public role defending civil rights.
Since then, he has been one of the nation's greatest preachers of racial consciousness. Among his many accomplishments are his aid in Thurgood Marshall's preparations to argue Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom-the nation's highest civilian honor-in 1995.
Never at rest, Franklin has taught at 14 different colleges and universities over the course of his life, from a full professorship at Brooklyn College to chair of the history department at the University of Chicago.
Franklin never expected to find his niche at Duke. As he describes in the new book, he left his position at the University of Chicago in 1980 for Durham to work at the National Humanities Center, driven in part by the Windy City's "bitter winter weather."
But friends at Duke pleaded and courted, and Franklin accepted the James B. Duke professorship in the history department to finish the last three years of his teaching career.
Students have always been of great importance to Franklin; it is students he counts on to keep him up-to-date with "the contemporary scene" and students to whom he dedicated his latest book.
"I found the Duke students as smart as any I've ever taught," Franklin said.
Though they were perhaps too influenced by "a tradition that kept them committed to being cool. [They were] refreshing... and a challenge, too," he added.
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