[A Rick Horowitz Commentary,
from Milwaukee Public Television’s “InterCHANGE”]
"When big names in academia die, the news doesn't usually make it onto the networks' evening newscasts, or onto the front pages of major newspapers. But it did when the historian John Hope Franklin died this week at the age of 94.
“Rick
Horowitz has read plenty about Dr. Franklin’s distinguished career and
extraordinary accomplishments -- but it was a couple of brief anecdotes that
may have made the deepest impression. Rick?”
Imagine
you’re a towering figure in the intellectual life of your country. You helped
fill a yawning gap in American historical scholarship. Almost single-handedly,
you created and gave heft to a new academic discipline, studying the role of
black people in the American experience.
You
did some of the research that helped the United States Supreme Court put the
first large cracks in the wall of legal segregation..
You were the first of your race -- the
first Negro -- to be department chair at a majority-white college. You’ll go on
to receive well over one hundred honorary degrees from colleges and
universities across the nation.
And
now you’re in Washington, about to receive one of the highest honors of all:
the Presidential Medal of Freedom. You’ll be getting the medal tomorrow, so
tonight you’re hosting a party at your club in Washington.
And
while you’re standing there, some woman you don’t know comes up to you and puts
a slip of paper in your hand and expects you to go get her coat.
...
Another
time -- in a hotel this time -- a man hands you his car keys and expects you to
fetch his car.
“I
patiently explained to him,” Dr. Franklin said later, “that I was a guest in
the hotel, as I presumed he was, and I had no idea where his automobile was.
And, in any case, I was retired.”
...
So
tell me: Which is the harder stretch? Imagining yourself winning the
Presidential Medal of Freedom? Or -- if your skin is roughly the same color as
mine -- imagining yourself ever being mistaken for a coat-check clerk or a
bellman?
“I
very much doubt, Mr. Doe, that you have had such experiences.” Dr. Franklin
once spoke those words to an imaginary white reader, trying to explain what
white people still find nearly impossible to grasp.
“Your
race,” he went on, “and your consequent position of power and privilege have
doubtless immunized you from the experiences that a black person confronts
daily, regardless of his age, education, position or station in life."
“The
experiences that a black person confronts daily.”
John
Hope Franklin was 90 at the time.
Those
are a lot of days.
# # #
Rick Horowitz is a syndicated
columnist. You can write to him at rickhoro@execpc.com.
