The John Hope I came to know

Several things stand out for me as emblematic about John Hope Franklin that have not yet received the attention I think appropriate if we are to take the measure of the man:

The first has to do with his effortless elegance and studied Olympian stance, which was combined with a wry sense of humor, a cultivated self-awareness and a recognition of the utility of surprise in any public performance. In particular, I recall one specific public and formal event that I remember as if it were yesterday. The occasion was the inauguration of his official portrait in the Gothic Reading Room in Perkins and hundreds were in attendance, including all of the administrators, the artist, his colleagues and friends and reporters. And a lot was said about him by the many who spoke, aware of the historic significance of the event and the man. When his turn came to speak in this room with very high ceilings and crowded walls, he spoke very deliberately about looking up at the many portraits on the wall and realizing that this event was a historic one for Duke University; with the audience sure they knew what was to come next, there was a pause and Franklin continued: This will be the first portrait of Duke faculty member to grace these walls!

The second has to do with Franklin's special link to Brazil, a connection that I was quickly made aware of in my first interactions with him. There was, of course, the funny story he told about arriving in Brazil for the first time when riots and disturbances were at their height in the U.S. and he was interviewed, as he disembarked, by a cluster of Brazilian journalists eager to find out how he felt about being in a place where he was in a society without racism and safe from racial violence. And, he says, "I am thinking to myself," (he would never have been badly bred enough to do so publicly) "How come you're all white and the only blacks I see here are pushing mops and picking up the trash?" With the enormous changes that have come with a far more democratic Brazil, he would have the chance to make this point publicly a decade after the publication of "From Slavery to Freedom" in Portuguese in 1989.

When I ran into him in the lounge or on a plane back from Washington after he received the Medal of Freedom, Franklin would strike up a casual conversation and the subject was often the latest developments in and gossip about Brazilian politics (he was especially pleased by the 2002 election of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva). This engagement originated, in part, from a family friendship that with two Brazilian intellectuals Eduardo and Marta Suplicy who were at Stanford in 1973. This had grown into an ongoing personal connection with this couple of remarkable white intellectuals, prominent opponents of the military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985. Linked to the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT), they would each come to have a larger-than-life impact on Brazilian politics: Eduardo as a repeatedly elected PT Senator from its largest state and Marta as the elected mayor in 2002 of its largest city, Sao Paulo.

Brazil may be the world's largest least-known country (fifth in world population) but it fell within Franklin's spirited engagement with the past and present as we strive for a more democratic world without base hierarchies of social, racial, ethnic or religious differences. Thus it made complete sense that this most "American" of men, to use our preferred if distorted U.S. terminology, would have a center named after him at Duke that made a place for the rest of the world at the core of its mission: The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies.

John French is a professor of history.