This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
Historian, civil rights activist, and public intellectual John Hope Franklin (1915 – 2009) transformed the field of American history. Franklin authored and edited 17 books, including the landmark From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (1947), which sold over three million copies. This book helped establish African American history as an academic field, one vital to American historical scholarship. His final work, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), offers a personal account of his experiences living through the tumultuous years that led to the dismantling of legal segregation.
Born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Franklin endured racism throughout his life. At just six years old, he was evicted from a train after mistakenly sitting in a whites-only car. At age 19, Franklin traveled to Macon, Mississippi, to assist the economist Giles Hubert in conducting interviews to create a report on the social conditions of Black cotton farmers for Professor Charles S. Johnson’s book Shadow of the Plantation. One evening, after buying ice cream, Franklin was surrounded by a crowd of white men on the store’s porch. The men questioned Franklin’s presence in Macon and asked if he was afraid of being lynched. Eventually, they allowed Franklin to leave, but after this thinly veiled threat, Franklin informed his supervisor that he wished to leave Macon immediately. Later, he was denied serving in World War II solely because of his race. Franklin recounted the experience of being rejected from military service in this Kluge Center-sponsored talk. Decades later, when he was 80 years old and a well-known scholar and author, he was nonetheless mistaken for a coat-check attendant at a Washington club where he was a member.
His family’s history was shaped by racial violence. When John Hope was six, his father, Buck Colbert Franklin, moved to Tulsa to set up a law practice, planning for the family to follow once his wife Mollie finished her teaching contract. But the very week the family planned to reunite, the Tulsa Race Massacre erupted. Although Buck Franklin remained physically unharmed, he lost nearly everything he owned, including his house, clothes, law office, and records. Resolute to help, he set up a law office in a tent and spent years fighting for restitution for his clients and successfully suing the city for blocking the reconstruction efforts of Black businesses. With no home and very little money, the move had to be delayed, separating the family for nearly five years.
Despite these challenges, John Hope Franklin led an extraordinary academic and professional career. He graduated from Fisk University in 1935 and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard. In 1956, as department chair of history at Brooklyn College, he became the first Black department chair of a predominantly white institution. He later taught at Fisk, Saint Augustine’s, North Carolina Central, Howard, and Duke.
He also played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement: joining the NAACP Legal Defense team to prepare research that helped Thurgood Marshall successfully defend Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965; and serving on President Bill Clinton’s Advisory Board on Race from 1997-98. Among many honors, he received honorary degrees from more than 130 colleges and universities, the 1994 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2006 Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.
Franklin began writing Mirror to America in 2001 while in residence as the very first Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center. “The fact that this is a John W. Kluge book bespeaks the immense generosity of the library,” he wrote in the acknowledgments. The Kluge Center had done what it does best, by providing a quiet environment to write and research, and unparalleled access to millions of books and manuscripts.
In 401 pages of finely crafted text, Franklin shares stories of both triumph and ongoing struggle. His autobiography provides a human perspective on the toll of segregation, the power of scholarship, and the need to continue fighting for a more just America.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.