Mirror on Our Libraries: A Southern Historian's Life Reflects American Racism through Its Segregated InstitutionsMirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. By John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. Pp. ix+401. $25 (cloth). ISBN 0‐374‐29944‐7.

Abstract

Providing a clear image of persistent and pervasive racism in America, historian John Hope Franklin’s memoir has great relevancy to librarians, archivists, and those who educate them as a vehicle for understanding racism in library and information science. His life, both personal and professional, reflects the racist atmosphere in which he and other black Americans live, work, and continue to struggle. Franklin’s memoir offers both personal and general U.S. history, but his encounters with libraries, librarians, archives, and archivists are especially revealing of the depth and absurdity of structural and customary racism in American life. As a black American, Franklin’s access to library research materials and archives crucial to the work of a historian were often either restricted or denied. Also relevant to the LIS community are Franklin’s experiences as a student at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, a historically black institution founded in 1866, where he worked in the library for four years as secretary for the head librarian, Louis Shores, one of North American librarianship’s recognized names. Aurelia Whittington, Franklin’s wife, whom he met while both were Fisk undergraduates, became a professional librarian— graduating with a second bachelor’s degree in librarianship from the Hampton Institute, founded because access to library science education for blacks was limited in the North and denied in the South. As students