John Hope Franklin died seven weeks after my mother, Dona Lolita Irvin, of same cause: congestive heart disease. World renowned and universally mourned, he was two years older than my mother, she, a celebrity in her own right on a closely circumscribed, very local stage. They had just a little in common--both grew up in Southwest in relatively privileged circumstances, steadied by ballast that even relative privilege can provide. And he, with characteristic generosity, blurbed her first book. She adored him, but otherwise they lived widely separated lives. Yet in my emotion of grief, their deaths have merged. Giants in my life in very different ways, Franklin and Irvin, survivors of American apartheid, insisted on their personal uniqueness while situating themselves proudly as African Americans with much to contribute to United States as black people and as individuals. Their stance demanded enormous intelligence and a constant expenditure of energy, not simply in exercise of their vocation as authors. In a segregated world, Franklin received accolades in abundance as author of From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947 and still in print and flourishing. The handsome portrait on John Hope Franklin Center website by Simmie Knox (who paints our society's eminences) situates him between a portrait of his beloved late wife, Aurelia, and his namesake orchid. Franklin holds a copy of From Slavery to Freedom so that its title may be read clearly. For all of us of a certain age, From Slavery to Freedom spoke a different language from that of our schools. In myriad schools, the Negro did not belong in America. He (and he was a he) appeared in public quite briefly, and only in guise of slavery, feckless slave emancipated by actions of other men--if not exactly crouching naked figure freed by Abraham Lincoln, then imprisoned within that iconography. A fleeting, passive, ridiculous figure, this mid-20th-century image then disappeared from history. Like so many others before and after me, I underwent a quintessential Negro-child experience in Oakland, California, in supposedly liberal and enlightened San Francisco Bay Area. Thank heaven I had John Hope Franklin and my parents as counterweights at home, for my junior high school homeroom pictured Henry Ford's Americanization ceremony across top of one entire wall. On left, myriad white people in traditional peasant dress lined up to enter melting pot. They emerged on right in suits, ties, and hats as Americans. Nary a dark figure among them. With knowledge of true nature of American history on my side, I confronted my homeroom teacher. She stamped me as a troublemaker, a label I have yet to outlive. John Hope Franklin, bless him, delivered a different image and a larger story, which evolved over decades with evolution of history and of historiography. Were his greatness to have ended there, it would deserve my deepest gratitude. As a scholar-citizen, Franklin very rightly deserves honors for finest and most enduring history of African Americans. He also deserves recognition for a good deal else he has written. In addition to contributing a distinguished oeuvre in African American history, Franklin also thought and wrote across color line to alter meaning of American history, especially of southern history, as a whole. A southern historian from outset, he wrote perceptively of white as well as black southerners and of all Americans. …