One of the peculiar features of undergraduate life is that we can draw knowledge from an ocean of personal experience without ever turning attention to the life experience of the adults who inhabit our community: the administrators, staff and faculty. I was guilty of the same thing during my undergraduate days, but I felt especially remiss when I read about the recent passing of Dr. John Hope Franklin.
The first time most undergraduates will learn of the life of Dr. Franklin is reading the notice of his death. This is something that should bother us all.
Yet I don't think it would have bothered him much. In fact, in my only personal interaction with Dr. Franklin, he confessed to having surprisingly little hope in the next generation.
I had the fortune of meeting him in the unlikeliest of places: in the Raleigh-Durham airport terminal, while we both waited for a flight to Chicago. This was shortly after I had graduated, and by then, I knew enough about him to introduce myself and insist on a seat next to him on the plane.
We made the necessary small talk, and then moved to discussions of family, then to studies, then to politics, then to history. He was, as has often been said, elegant and energetic. But he became his most animated while discussing current affairs. He was concerned with nearly every item in the headlines.
This was, admittedly, a moment in time when nouns like 'Katrina' and 'Fallujah' were close enough in recent memory to cause one to wonder about the course the country had chosen for itself. But he was especially troubled at the lethargic response of young people. Where was the outcry from this next generation about things that were going on around them? Had we forgotten everything that 20 and 30-year-olds had done to advance the cause of civil rights? He was sincere and somber, but there was enough urgency in his voice to suggest that these were more than rhetorical questions.
Granted, ours was not the man-the-barricades activism of the civil rights era, but this didn't diminish our contribution. At that moment thousands of privileged young people were standing in front of chalkboards in the nation's poorest schools. I argued that while the merits of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan were subject to debate, the courage and commitment of the young men and women in uniform was not.
I pointed out that volunteerism in general, and service on college campuses, was at an all-time high. Many if not most of my fellow undergraduates, I said, were looking to join a cause bigger than themselves. There was something here, something significant, and whether or not it made the front pages, I believed that it had the potential to be included in the pages of history.
He smiled, looked at me the way a parent looks at an overly exuberant child, and said, "Well, I hope for all our sakes you're right, but from what I see in the newspapers, I'm not convinced." The plane touched down, I shook his hand and promised to keep in touch.
I was grateful for our face-to-face encounter, yet I couldn't help but to walk away from our conversation somewhat stung.
If it had been anyone else, complaining about how things were better back in the old days, I might have paid less attention. But this was a disciplined and practiced mind, one that had spent a lifetime immersed in history-and not just any history! The history of African-Americans and civil rights, a movement that counted the young as the source of so much of its energy and leadership.
As I tried to make sense of his view, I started to realize that skepticism is part of the historian's burden. And he, more than any scholar of the time and perhaps anyone since, had a comprehensive knowledge of the tragedy of the African-American experience and understood how high a price had been paid. Having seen the patterns of the past and the ways that injustice can transform and strengthen itself, he could not, in all honesty, believe that a new generation could sweep away the hard truths of history once and for all.
But of course the greater burden was the personal one. Anyone born African-American during his age could be assured hundreds, if not thousands, of indignities, large and small, beginning from birth. The most public ones became a part of the narrative substance of his life, as when he was asked to retrieve a white woman's coat at a club at which he was a member, on the eve of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. These stories make us cringe, but I suspect it's the stories we don't know that would shake us to our core.
What is most stunning is that his response to these twin burdens-history's injustice and humanity's insults-was not resignation and indifference, but thought and service. And while the obituaries and remembrances will mark his achievements, I believe his greatest accomplishment is surely the lifetime of steady application and scholarly effort-the writing of true and clear sentences when one can barely summon the strength to live with either truth or clarity.
He is the best evidence I can think of to confirm Emerson's belief that the characteristic ingredient of heroism is its persistency. This may well be the most significant and enduring piece of the inheritance he leaves to the University, and the nation-the heroism of the scholar's lamp.
I think what Teddy Kennedy asked of supporters in his eulogy of his brother Bobby is worth repeating for those of us who mourn Franklin: He need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. Dr. Franklin was a scholar and a gentleman, in the oldest sense of those words. He began with very little, rose very far, and, along with his contemporaries, he helped bend the arc of history in the direction of justice.
And what to make of his negative forecast for today's young people? I see it now as a challenge: a member of a great generation throwing down the proverbial gauntlet to another because after all, we are the true heirs to his inheritance. What he was trying to tell me on the plane was that the blood of young civil rights workers beats strong within us still. And, from his new and noble vantage point, I believe Dr. Franklin will be the first to applaud if we prove his predictions wrong.
Jimmy Soni graduated in 2007.
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