John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining
twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally
protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored
that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his
3.5-million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. Born
in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but
participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined
to segregated schools, threatened-once with lynching-and
consistently subjected to racism's denigration of his humanity. Yet
he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black
historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution,
Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of
Chicago's history department and, later, John B. Duke Professor at
Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history
is understood and taught and become one of the world's most
celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But
Franklin's participation was much more fundamental than that.
From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a
petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek
lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the
President's Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present,
Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation's
racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall's preparation
for arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, marching
to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert
Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed
the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a
life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times
revelatory, Mirror to America chronicles Franklin's life
and this nation's racial transformation in the twentieth century,
and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of
America remains the problem of color.
