John Hope Franklin : Searching for Equality in History--and in Life

Historian John Hope Franklin, now 80, remembers no Fourth of July fireworks, barbecues or parades during his childhood in Oklahoma. His family celebrated a different holiday: the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1.

“There was always a meeting,” he remembers. “The Proclamation would be read and somebody would make a speech.” In 1927, young Franklin made the speech, which had been written by his father, a lawyer. He was 12, and it was his first public address. He has been teaching and writing the history of African Americans ever since.

His best-known book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans,” has sold more than 3 million copies since it was released in 1947. The new 7th edition, where “Negro” is changed to “African Americans,” features full-color pictures including paintings by such black artists as Jacob Lawrence, Henry O. Tanner and Aaron Douglas. Their works, as well as statues of Abraham Lincoln and pieces of African art, grace his home.

A prolific author, Franklin has written a dozen books about the Emancipation, the South and black Americans. His most recent book, “The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century,” came out in 1993 and he’s now finishing, “Dissidents on the Plantation: Runaway Slaves.”

A child of the segregated South, Franklin attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tenn., and earned advanced degrees--including a doctorate in history from Harvard University. Those credentials could not protect him from racial segregation. He began his career, a teacher like his mother, at black colleges including Howard, Fisk and what was then called the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. He taught there a half-century ago. Back then, in North Carolina, he remembers that German prisoners-of-war received better treatment than black Americans.

A staunch integrationist, Franklin did historical research for NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who wrote the legal brief in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

Franklin became chairman of the Brooklyn College history department in 1956--Barbara Boxer was one of his students. In 1967, he joined the University of Chicago, where he also chaired the history department. He was the first black president of the American Historical Assn. The nation’s preeminent black historian returned to the South in 1982.

Franklin is the James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University, and today black students, such as scholar-athlete Grant Hill, the NBA co-rookie of the year, are no rarity. Though Franklin researches, writes and lectures constantly, he also tends to his orchid collection in his greenhouse. He began growing orchids 35 years ago, while a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, one of many campuses at which he has taught.

As Independence Day approaches, Franklin believes black Americans are better off than they were a century ago--but still do not enjoy full equality as set forth in the Constitution.

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Question: As America celebrates Independence Day, what lessons can we learn from our past experiences?

Answer: We have always managed somehow to speak in several voices regarding Independence Day and regarding patriotism. On the one hand, we expect everyone to be patriotic . . . .

On the other hand, we practice things that contradict the principles of freedom and democracy, for which we theoretically fought in the 18th Century . . . .

Almost from the beginning, as, indeed, Justice [Thurgood] Marshall pointed out, our Constitution was a flawed document protecting the institution of slavery as it did in so many different ways, and yet expecting the blessings of independence to be spread over everyone--including slaves . . . . It was clearly, unequivocally hypocritical.

Q: The militia movement has distorted the definition of patriot. At the time of the American Revolution, what was a patriot?

A: A patriot was one who supported the Revolution--the war against Britain--and who looked toward the independence of this country. It was not defined in terms of an armed struggle . . . .

(In) these play militias, toy militias, as I call them, you have within the movement a great deal of resentment even toward our own government and toward many individuals who are part of the American scene. You have a kind of perversion of the principles of patriotism expounded in the 18th Century . . . namely, the notion that the best way you can strike out for freedom is to strike at the government.

Q: Were blacks patriots?

A: . . . They begged to be permitted to fight and they were turned away. It was not until Lord Dunmore and the other British offered slaves their freedom that George Washington and his Council of War changed their minds . . . .

They didn’t fight in the Civil War until 1863--and it had been going on for two years by that time . . . .

In World War I, they were accepted in the American Army but then transferred to the French, so they fought under the French flag. And, then, we sent people over there to France and Belgium to warn black Americans that when they returned they could not expect the kind of treatment they had gotten in France: Though you’ve been dodging bullets over here for freedom and democracy at home, you can’t have it yourself.

Q: Black Americans have fought in every war. Has that allegiance paid off with the full rights and privileges of citizenship?

A: Of course not . . . In World War II, my own experience was bitter and it remains with me--namely, my being rejected by the Navy, when I volunteered in 1941, in Raleigh, N.C.

. . . They were desperate for people to volunteer, to step forward and to assist them in the emergency. Pearl Harbor had caused so much damage to our Navy, that men who had manned the offices had to go off to war . . . .

I went down and volunteered. They asked, “What can you do to help man the office?” I said, “Well, I’ve got three gold medals in typing. I can operate simple business machines. I was secretary to the librarian at Fisk [University] for four years, and I have a PhD in history from Harvard.” They said, “You have everything but color. Thank you. Next.”

Q: Is integration achievable?

A: Yes, if people commit themselves to it, and drop some of the baggage that stands in the way of their marching toward a community of equality, justice and fairness.

Q: Is that baggage, are those ideas rooted in this nation’s history?

A: Very deeply . . . . In 1640, there were three indentured servants--not slaves--who were obliged to serve out their time . . . . Two were white; one was black. These three men ran away together. They were all apprehended. . . . The magistrate found them guilty of running away.

He sentenced the two white men to serve one year beyond the times the indenture called for. He sentenced the black man to a lifetime of service . . . . There was nothing in the world that caused that magistrate to discriminate against the black indentured servant except that he was black . . . .

Q: Is affirmative action still necessary?

A: . . . It’s necessary because of deeply rooted racism. Many people will always prefer not to give blacks an equal break--whether it’s in school, in housing, in employment . . . .

Affirmative action doesn’t have anything to do with qualifications, It has to do with preference . . . . When I was a graduate student at Harvard . . . the preference reflected itself in the fact that there were some professors on the faculty who hadn’t written anything at this big research university . . . . They were all white, and no one raised a question that these men were somehow not up to snuff so far as Harvard was concerned. One was a very favorite young man because his father was one of the big bankers of Boston and on the Board of Overseers at Harvard. Another professor, who hadn’t written anything, was a friend of the president. No questions were raised about qualifications.

But when I was chair of the history department at Brooklyn College and at the University of Chicago, if I mentioned a black person’s name as a possible member of the department, my colleagues would say, “We have to maintain standards.” Somehow black was translated as lower standards. One gets weary of it.

Q: In California, an anti-affirmative action initiative is expected on the ballot.

A: . . . There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when no governor of California or anywhere else would have the nerve to base his campaign on fighting affirmative action. Twenty years ago, that would not have happened. This shows a steady deterioration in the attitudes of people toward fairness. You now can get away with this.

In 1964, when the level of decency in this country was rising, you wouldn’t have had a leading politician, a governor of a state, certainly not of a non-Southern state, staking his political future on trying to destroy affirmative action.

Q: What has created the climate that would allow the governor of California?

A: It’s the kind of leadership we’ve had. I would argue President Reagan had a lot to do with this. So did President Bush.

From the time when Nixon was run out of the presidency . . . there was a vigorous, consistent effort to raise the level of civility in this country. President Ford helped considerably. President Carter did too. There was a sense of decency and decorum in public conversation, public discourse, public debate that began to leave at the time President Reagan took over . . . .

[In the 1980s] there was a kind of vulgarity in our public discourse. President Reagan . . . began talking about getting the government off the backs of the people and getting away from the responsibility that government has to maintain some semblance of equality.

Q: The political climate has changed?

A: . . . Kevin Phillips, in his book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” said one way you build a Republican majority was to make concessions to Southerners on the race question and to make them feel at home within the Republican Party at a time when the Democratic Party was becoming more liberal and attuned to the needs and aspirations of blacks.

Every time I look at a white friend of mine who is a Republican, who does not have the characteristics of a Jesse Helms, I wonder what caused him or her to become a Republican at this time. I always feel they have registered a complaint against me--or against other black Americans--by becoming Republicans. For the Republican Party is clearly the party that caters to hate groups of various kinds, religious and racial extremists of every conceivable kind.

Q: Is America still a melting pot?

A: It never was. How is it going to be a melting pot when you have all these various communities, ethnic groups, all over everywhere?

Q: Didn’t earlier immigrants assimilate, and adopt the values and language of the dominant culture?

A: To some extent they did. [But] if they assimilated, why do you have so much anti-Semitism in this country? If they assimilated, why do you have so many foreign-language newspapers in this country? If they assimilated, why do you have so many cultural and ethnic organizations in this country.

I don’t get the impression--even with Hector St. John declaring his: “What then is the American, this new man?”-- I don’t get the impression that the new American is a mixture of of all these wonderful, fine strains where his mother was this, and his father was that . . . .

Q: Are blacks a part of the melting pot?

A: I don’t think so. How are they part of the melting pot when the ghetto persists. . . . When the Robert Taylor Homes and all [public housing projects] in Chicago incarcerate them as though they were prisoners? Hundreds of thousands of them living there and not getting one slice, one fraction of the pie that is called the American dream.

Q: Are blacks assimilated?

A: We’ve been here longer than 300 years and white people still ask, “Why don’t they go back where they came from?”

Here I am. [My family] has been here an enormous period of time. We go back to the 18th Century and yet there are people who don’t accept my being an assimilated American. As long as they feel that why, I’m not sure I am . . . .

Q: You let someone else define you?

A: It’s a matter of how I define myself. You say, “I’m an American.” But when I was chair of the department of history at Brooklyn College, and my picture and salary were on the front page of the New York Times, I couldn’t buy a place for my wife and little boy to live in. I walked up to 135 real-estate dealers in New York in my best English and in my best suit. When I finally found a house on my own, no bank would lend me the money . . . .

Assimilation is freedom to move, to participate, to belong on your terms, not someone else’s . . . . It is a certain kind of comfort zone in which you function. I don’t enjoy that comfort zone--not even in 1995, not even as the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University.*