Mirror to America

MIRROR TO AMERICA.

By Dr. John Hope Franklin (video from the Wednesdays at the Center Series - Sep. 2006).

JHF vision of the world at the crossroads.

In 2005, John Hope Franklin published his last book MIRROR TO AMERICA. JHF lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. 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.

In the second installment of this series, we will be rebroadcasting the September 2006 W@TC presentation in which Dr. Franklin brings all this history to an intimate moment, the two open wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and the imminent of an economic recession always hitting hard people of color. 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.