John Hope Franklin reigns victorious - even in death
George Curry/NNPA Columnist
Issue date: 4/5/09 Section: Politics
His books include "From Slavery to Freedom," an American classic first published in 1947 and still in print; "Reconstruction After the Civil War;" "The Emancipation Proclamation," "The Free Negro in North Carolina," "The Militant South 1800-1861" and "The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century." His pioneering research was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board Education.
Franklin said his father experienced inequality in the early 1900s. He told Reynolds, "My father, for example, became so frustrated trying to make it in the White world where judges refused to let him represent his clients and ordered him out of the courtroom, that he took his family to an all-Black village. They would not let him practice. He simply said, 'This is not a world I want to have anything to do with.'" So he moved his family to Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Franklin was born.
The younger Franklin has suffered similar insults. On the evening before he was to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a woman mistook him for an attendant and asked him to get her coat. And a man at his hotel handed him a set of keys and told him to get his car.
When Barack Obama was closing in on becoming the nation's first Black president, Franklin told Walter Dellinger, a fellow professor at Duke University, that it could be more important "to have that family as the first family than to have Obama as president." History will probably prove him right.
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.
Franklin said his father experienced inequality in the early 1900s. He told Reynolds, "My father, for example, became so frustrated trying to make it in the White world where judges refused to let him represent his clients and ordered him out of the courtroom, that he took his family to an all-Black village. They would not let him practice. He simply said, 'This is not a world I want to have anything to do with.'" So he moved his family to Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Franklin was born.
The younger Franklin has suffered similar insults. On the evening before he was to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a woman mistook him for an attendant and asked him to get her coat. And a man at his hotel handed him a set of keys and told him to get his car.
When Barack Obama was closing in on becoming the nation's first Black president, Franklin told Walter Dellinger, a fellow professor at Duke University, that it could be more important "to have that family as the first family than to have Obama as president." History will probably prove him right.
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.
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