John Hope Franklin Publishes Memoirs of Life
DURHAM, N.C.
These days, Dr. John Hope Franklin spends more time in the greenhouse with his collection of 300 orchids than in library stacks.
Franklin fell in love with orchids because “they’re full of challenges, mystery” — the same reasons he fell in love with history.
His autobiography, Mirror to America, which came out last month, reveals a man who has been as much a participant in history as a chronicler of it.
Franklin helped Thurgood Marshall on the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. He became the first Black historian to assume a full-professorship at a White college and chaired President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.
But it is his works, more than his deeds, which have earned the 90-year-old historian 137 honorary degrees, the NAACP’s Spingarn Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. His landmark From Slavery to Freedom, published in 1947, has sold more than 3.5 million copies and remains required reading in many college classrooms.
