John Hope Franklin: Race & the Meaning of America
Drew Gilpin Faust
DECEMBER 17, 2015 ISSUE
The historian John Hope Franklin, who died in 2009, would have turned one hundred this year ...
Many Americans in 2015 seem to be undertaking an unprecedentedly clear-eyed look at the nation’s past, at the legacy of slavery and race that has made us anything but a colorblind society. There could be no more fitting tribute to Franklin’s one hundredth birthday than this collective stock-taking ...
... Misrepresentations of the past, Franklin came to recognize, had given “the white South the intellectual justification for its determination not to yield on many important points, especially in its treatment of the Negro” ...
... the US Commission on Civil Rights invited him to write a history of civil rights since the nation’s founding, to be completed in time for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1963. When Franklin delivered the manuscript, however, it was greeted with disappointment by commission members who had anticipated “a note of greater tolerance and moderation.” Franklin reminded the commission that the history of blacks in the United States was “not a pretty picture,” and continued, “I am afraid that I cannot ‘tidy up’ the history that Americans themselves have made” ...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/dec/17/john-hope-franklin-race-meaning-america/
= new reply since forum marked as read
