Thursday, March 26, 2009

John Hope Franklin died

John Hope Franklin is dead. I don't have much time to write about him (and I have a bad cold or flu--I can never tell the difference). I never met Franklin but he really touched me deeply by his writings. I so strongly recommend his autobiography. I remember that I was reading it and hoping that it was longer. His book From Slavery to Freedom should be translated into Arabic. And look at this: "Yet even on so august an occasion, Dr. Franklin could not escape the legacy of discrimination. In a talk he gave in North Carolina 10 years later, he recalled that on the evening before he received the medal at the White House, a woman at a Washington club asked him to fetch her coat, mistaking him for an attendant, and that a man at his hotel had handed him car keys and told him to get his car."