Young Franklin, eyeing the perfect opportunity for his daily good deed as a newly-minted Boy Scout, politely asks the woman waiting to cross the road if he can be of assistance. She is clearly blind, and he is only too eager to help.
The woman graciously accepts his offer. Halfway across the street, she asks the young boy who’s carefully guiding her by the arm, “if I may ask, are you white, or are you colored?” Franklin nervously answers: “colored, ma’am.”
“Get your filthy hands off of me, boy!”
The setting is the 1920′s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Franklin is one John Hope Franklin, a towering figure in American academia who died this week at the age of 94. He recounted that story to his son in November 2008, and it was replayed on NPR this morning. Dr. Franklin carried memories of events like that throughout his life, and although he rose to the highest ranks in his predominantly white field, he didn’t pretend to be somehow unaffected by or above the sting of all of the similar incidents that he personally experienced.
From a Washington Post editorial by former Duke University colleague Walter Dellinger:
John Hope never compromised on principle. Well, almost never. He told and retold the story of a decision he made as a young teenager in Tulsa to see a performance by a star of the Metropolitan Opera. His parents strongly disapproved of his decision, since it entailed sitting in a segregated balcony. He later wrote, ‘I am not altogether proud of going to Convention Hall, and there are times, even now, while enjoying a symphony or an opera, when I reproach myself for having yielded to the indignity of racial segregation.’
John Hope Franklin overcame. Whether he forgave, I can’t say (though it appears doubtful). But this much is obvious: he never forgot. In the spirit of the freed slave’s letter to his former master linked to by another post by Jim Knutsen on Inside from the Inside, along with the sentiment expressed by Harry Allen in a comment which can also be found on this blog, John had this to say in a 2007 interview with Olufunke Moses:
People are running around apologizing for slavery. What about that awful period since slavery—Reconstruction, Jim Crow and all the rest? And what about the enormous wealth that was built up by black labor? If I was sitting on a billion dollars that someone had made when I sat on them, I probably would not be slow to apologize, if that’s all it takes. I think that’s little to pay for the gazillions that black people built up—the wealth of this country—with their labor, and now you’re going to say I’m sorry I beat the hell out of you for all these years? That’s not enough. They ought to develop some kind of modus operandi that they can do something else—something to absolve themselves of three centuries of guilt from which they are the direct beneficiaries.
Since this project began, my outlook has changed considerably. Not just with regards to racism, but in all manner of things that I haven’t lived. No matter how well-read or “enlightened” you think you are about something, you just aren’t. Not unless you’ve literally experienced it as actual people did/do. Reading about it, talking about it, viewing pictures of it, writing about it doesn’t do it – nothing really can. Only living it can make you really know.
John Hope Franklin can’t know what being a slave was really like, because he wasn’t one. People today can’t know what Jim Crow was really like unless they lived it. White people in America can’t comprehend what being black in America is like, despite CNN’s best efforts. The best we can offer is to try to know what we don’t know, and to come up with something that corrects the problem of hundreds of years of oppression and economic and social disadvantage.
Today’s minority Americans will also be repaying the debt owed to their ancestors, as anything that is done will be done with tax revenue derived from Americans of all races. But the repayment will benefit future generations of Americans. Virginia and North Carolina, I’m sorry, but your sincerest apology simply won’t do.
