| While Dr. Franklin was teaching at Brooklyn College, he received an offer to join the University of Chicago as the chair of the history department. Franklin said that people in Chicago welcomed him and his family, and he did not experience the difficulties that he had faced when he moved to New York. He enjoyed teaching at the university, and he had about 32 students that he felt were his students, since he advised them directly on their dissertations.
In 1982 he accepted a teaching position as the James B. Duke professor of history at Duke University and moved back to North Carolina. While he was at Duke, he actively opposed two Supreme Court nominations: Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Franklin felt that Bork’s past judgments indicated that he would hand down unfavorable decisions for many African Americans, and he felt that Thomas’s character and historical decisions, despite the fact that he was African American, also would pose a threat to the progress African Americans had made.
Although Franklin states that many advances have been made for African Americans, and life now is very different from life before 1960, he says that insensitive people still make comments that can affect African American children for life. He gives the example of a young boy in school who worked for days on a paper, only to have the teacher ask where he had plagiarized it. He states that he would not want to raise a child today—any child—because of incidents like this.
Franklin was awarded the Medal of Freedom, and remembers President Clinton handing him the medal. Franklin was fond of President Clinton, and accepted a position on the advisory board to the President’s Initiative on Race. He recalls several controversial events and several criticisms of the board, including one that stated he had prevented any Native Americans from being on the board, but he responds that board members had no decision power over who was on the board, and that he would definitely not have made such a suggestion.
One of his other priorities as he approached 80 was to publish a book his father had written long ago. His father had asked him to help him publish it, but with his own busy life, he was unable to find the time. After he died, he found the manuscript, and when he was the same age as his father was when he died (81), he asked his son, who was teaching English as a Second Language, to help him prepare the manuscript for publication. The published book was a testimony to three generations of Franklins, as father, son and grandson had a hand in its publication.
Franklin also talks about his wife’s battle with Alzheimer’s and her eventual death, his own love of orchids and fishing, and his desire for the future.
Part 3 Issues
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