Mirror To America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin.

John Hope Franklin, Mirror To America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, xi, 401 pp. Acknowledgements, photographs, index. Cloth $25.

John Hope Franklin, the greatest living senior scholar of American history, must be wryly alert to the resonant meaning of the subtitle of his book, "The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin." Franklin was named in honor of the eminent African American educator, John Hope, and he also shares the surname of the iconic founding father, Benjamin Franklin, whose Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is addressed to "Dear Son," by which he meant the youth of America Similarly, John Hope Franklin dedicates his autobiography "To all my students." Both Franklins are concerned with the future of America, notably its youth. Both autobiographies are didactic, in the tradition of exemplar history: They are American success stories, about "making it." But Mirror to America is about more than that.

The two autobiographies stand in sharp contrast to the alienation and condescension contained in the most brilliant American autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. The scion of U.S. presidents, Adams was a patrician elitist, estranged from the land of the patriarchs. Neither of the Franklins is estranged, both subscribe to democratic, egalitarian principles. But whereas Benjamin is self-satisfied, even congratulatory, John Hope, like Adams, is critical of the sordid history of America, but for different reasons. Unlike Benjamin Franklin or Henry Adams, just beneath the surface of John Hope Franklin's graceful scholarly prose is a controlled rage and a fiery critique. In this regard, his autobiography is a stunning addition to a powerful genre in American social thought, rooted in the great slave and neo-slave narratives and including the autobiographies of Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, and, as well, the fictional Miss Jane Pittman.

John Hope Franklin was born in 1915, and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of college educated but struggling Methodist parents, Buck Franklin, a lawyer, and Mollie, a teacher. The Tulsa race riot of 1921 destroyed the African American community and left the Franklin family destitute economically; it did not destroy their "high moral standards." The young Franklin graduated valedictorian from Booker T. Washington High School in 1931, the same year that Daniel Boorstin, the future encyclopedic historian and head of the Library of Congress, graduated valedictorian from Central High School, also in Tulsa. Segregated schools kept them apart.

Franklin matriculated at Fisk University, where he encountered Professor Ted Currier who inspired him and prepared him well to study history. The three heroes in Franklin's life are his parents and Professor Currier, a white scholar, dedicated to Fisk; he was "my dearest friend," says Franklin. Franklin went on to excel at Harvard, completing his M.A. under Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and his Ph.D. under Paul H. Buck. He worked his way through college and graduate school. At Harvard, the racism he experienced was the anti-Semitism aimed at Oscar Handlin, a fellow student who Franklin dared to nominate for president of the Henry Adams Club. Handlin later conducted pioneering work in American immigration and social history, won a Pulitzer Prize, and became the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

While in Cambridge, Franklin married his sweetheart from Fisk, Aurelia Whittington. Theirs would be a close, enduring relationship. She supported and encouraged him throughout his career, which started at historically black colleges including Fisk, St. Augustine College, North Carolina College, and Howard University, regarded, says Franklin, as the "'final'" institution for black scholars. During these years, as throughout his life, Franklin worked with an intense self-discipline, mastering archives, revising racist history, and repositioning African American history as integral and central to the understanding of American history. His magisterial survey, From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1943 while he was at North Carolina College, has sold more than 3.5 million copies.

Franklin became the first black historian to be appointed to a full professorship at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College, where his "diplomacy" as chair of the department won him high regard. Less regarded, however, was his young son, Wilt, who endured the taunts of neighborhood bigots, children and adults alike, on President Street in Brooklyn. A celebrated scholar, Franklin would be awarded over 130 honorary degrees; one of them was bestowed by Long Island University's Brooklyn campus in 1964, the year I graduated there. I was thrilled by his commencement address, a concise restatement of the import of his 1963 book, The Emancipation Proclamation. Then, I thought Brooklyn a better place, the place of the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson, but Mirror to America reflects a different, uglier image. That next year, Franklin left Brooklyn for the world-class University of Chicago where he would eventually become chair of its distinguished department of history.

Franklin moved from project to project, advancing his reputation as he reshaped American history. Increasingly, he became a "public intellectual" by engaging the scholarly community and America itself in a dialogue on race. From his attempt in 1934 to petition President Roosevelt for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, through his work with assisting Thurgood Marshall prepare his case in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, to marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, and to chairing President Clinton's advisory board on the President's Initiative on Race in the 1990s, Franklin has been a scholar-activist. He has confronted racism and injustice. Working within the system and always adhering to the canon of sound scholarship, he has waged hermeneutical combat and interpretative warfare with the forces of reaction. He also has criticized the strident forces of excessive "black power," and was deeply hurt when students at Fisk launched an ugly attack on his mentor and closest friend, Ted Currier. Franklin became a member of the liberal historical establishment, yet he never shied away from taking them on, as in his famous dispute with his colleague and fellow civil rights activist, C. Van Woodward. This lifelong effort, this steady integrity, earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995.

After his long tenure at Chicago, he returned to the South, a principal region of his studies, as the John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. There, Franklin continues his work, extending the thesis of W. E. B. DuBois: The problem of the twenty-first century, Franklin argues, will continue to be race. Franklin was the keynote speaker at DuBois's 80th and 90th birthday celebrations--acts of courage, given the temper of the nation and the government's active hostility toward that giant, dissenting Marxist scholar. He fully recognizes that his own work rests on the shoulders of still other pioneering scholars, including George Washington Williams, Carter G. Woodson, Charles Wesley, Rayford Logan, E. Franklin Frazier, Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, and many more.

Throughout Franklin's life, "the specter of race has ever been present." Living in the shadow of the Tulsa race riot, at twelve years of age he was humiliated by a blind white woman for trying to help her cross a busy street; at sixteen he was insulted by a white ticket agent; at nineteen he was threatened with lynching in Mississippi; he was evicted from white-only train cars; he was confined to segregated schools. Now a mature adult, at age forty he was called a "Harvard nigger"; at forty-five he was denied a loan, because of race, by a New York bank; at sixty he was ordered to serve as a porter for a white person at an upscale hotel; at eighty he was told to hang up a white guest's coat at a Washington club. "There were times," he confesses, "when I was on the verge of giving up."

He was intent, nevertheless, "to be acknowledged as a scholar on an equal footing with my white counterparts." His colleagues and associates were among the esteemed of his generation in many areas--in the academy, in public service, and in the cause of civil rights. He served as president of the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and Phi Beta Kappa. His classroom extended to the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies and to Cambridge University as Pitt Professor; he lectured on every continent, and he advanced international education during his tenure on the Fulbright Board. Franklin acknowledges a debt to the "liberal forces that opened the learned professions." And he "assume[s] ... responsibility for keeping them ajar for others."

Franklin stands high in the annals of American historiography, but he displays no interest in post-modernist theory, deconstructionism or the "linguistic turn." He is trained in the traditional rigor of the historian's craft; he works the archives. He is, in methodology, an empiricist. He defines his career "on the basis of the highest standards of scholarship" and he uses that scholarship "to expose the hypocrisy underlying so much of American social and race relations." He insists on using his "knowledge and training to improve society." He seeks "to envision a world beyond race [Franklin's italics] .... in order to realize the dream of equality."

In the tradition of the progressive historians, Franklin is a moralist who worries about a complacent view of "our progress." Like a latter day Jeremiah, he excoriates Americans for being "indifferent, insensitive, and uncaring." The new black bourgeoisie is singled out for special criticism: "I have come to regard most of these success stories as millionaire wastrels, spending their fortunes on huge mansions, and custom-built automobiles, with little thought for their fellows in the ghettos, from which many of them came.... In particular, black professionals--physicians, lawyers, engineers, those in business, teachers, and others--could do much to rescue young African Americans from the brink of failure if only they would be willing to take the time." He is desperately concerned about vulnerable black youth, particularly males. "Our entire social system bears the special responsibility for the current plight of these young people who, in a very real way, may be regarded as a metaphor for the ills of our society ... It was the nation's slave policy, even before it was a nation, that sealed their fate and the fate of the nation."

Finally, he refuses to accept financial demographics or success in mass culture as persuasive measurements of progress. "The test of an advanced society," he closes, "is not in how many millionaires it can produce, but in how many law-abiding, hard-working, highly respected, and self-respecting loyal citizens it can produce." Here, then, is the American ideal, nothing other than the values and ethos of his parents, Buck and Mollie Franklin, and the exemplary life of John Hope himself.

Reading Mirror to America is a teachable experience. It's about "making it"; it's also about an abiding dedication to historical scholarship, fidelity to family, and the race politics of America in the twentieth century; further, it is a call to Americans to understand and to critically examine ourselves and our relationship to the world.

Gary Marotta, Buffalo State College