DURHAM, N.C.
These days, Dr. John Hope Franklin spends more time in the greenhouse
with his collection of 300 orchids behind his home 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 comes out this week,
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, that have earned the
90-year-old historian 137 honorary degrees (“obscene, don’t tell
anyone”), 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 college classrooms.
“I would compare him to Carter Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois,” says
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack, who served as a graduate
assistant when Franklin taught at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1956, and has remained a fast friend.
