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Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin
The 20th century fight for civil rights told in the first person singular by the nation's preeminent African Amerian historian.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2005
Featuring: John Hope Franklin
416 pages
ISBN: 0374299447
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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. And he was, and remains, an active participant.
Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could
not but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train
cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened-once with
lynching-and consistently met with racism's denigration of
his humanity. And 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, 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 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 towards 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 20th century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent
to which the problem of America remains the problem of
color.
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