REMEMBERING The historian John Hope Franklin took pains to remind us of how much of his and our history we would like to forget.

When he was a boy in segregated Oklahoma, where he was born in 1915, John Hope Franklin used to indulge in a subversive bit of wordplay like a small act of public and private theater.

“My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin said not long ago, his voice full of artful pauses, words pulled out like taffy. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.”

Even in a country where the far-fetched, for better and for worse, so often becomes reality, few historians achieved the stature, both as scholars and as moral figures — and as combinations of the two — that Dr. Franklin did. When he died last week, at the age of 94, an American epoch seemed to vanish with him.

Dr. Franklin was first and foremost a major historian, whose landmark book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947, was a comprehensive survey that sold more than three million copies. The book also permanently altered the ways in which the American narrative was studied.

“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon,” said David Levering Lewis, the New York University historian, who like Dr. Franklin studied under Theodore Currier at Fisk University in Nashville.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”

Dr. Lewis and others argue that Dr. Franklin’s work helped empower not just African-American studies, but the whole range of alternative stories — of women, gays, Hispanics, Asians and others — now so much a part of mainstream academia.

Dr. Franklin accomplished this not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry. In his discussion, for instance, of the intersection of race and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Franklin observed: “The United States, unlike other imperial powers, had a color problem at home and therefore had to pursue a policy with regard to race that would not upset the racial equilibrium within the United States. In Puerto Rico, for example, approximately one-third of the population was distinctly of African descent, and many so-called white Puerto Ricans had sufficient black blood in their veins to qualify as African-Americans in the United States.”

Complete Story Here…

John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness – NYTimes.com.

Miep Gies kept Anne Frank’s diary safe before its publication

The last surviving member of the small group who helped hide the Dutch Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis has turned 100 years old.

Miep Gies will celebrate her birthday on Sunday quietly with relatives and friends, she said this week.

She said she was not deserving of the attention, and that others had done far more to protect the Netherlands’ Jews.

She paid tribute to “unnamed heroes”, picking out her husband Jan for his courageous defiance of the Nazis.

“He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard,” Miep Gies said in an email to the Associated Press this week.

Accolades

Mrs Gies was an employee of Anne Frank’s father, Otto, who kept them and six others supplied during their two years in hiding in an attic in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944.

But the family were found by the authorities, and deported.

Gies, bottom left, and Otto Frank, next to her, were reunited after the war

Anne Frank died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen later.

It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne Frank’s papers, and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl.

In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947.

It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

She became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust-denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery.

For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades.

“This is very unfair,” she told the Associated Press.

“So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work.”

BBC NEWS | Europe | Anne Frank guardian reaches 100.

At 100, NAACP fights to keep struggle alive – Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com.

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama paid tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, at a celebration for the reopening of the theater where he was slain.

“Despite all that divided us — North and South, black and white — he had an unyielding belief that we were, at heart, one nation, and one people,” Obama said last night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. “And because of Abraham Lincoln, and all who carried on his work in the generations since, that is what we remain today.”

Obama, the nation’s first black commander-in-chief, often invokes the name and symbols of the assassinated president who ended slavery and brought the U.S. through the Civil War. Both men rose from the Illinois state legislature to the highest office in the land and both built reputations as skilled political orators.

The reopening of Ford’s Theatre after an 18-month refurbishment coincides with a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Obama, 47, who took the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible, will travel to Springfield, Illinois, today to mark the bicentennial.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, joined politicians and Ford’s Theatre donors to watch a series of songs, readings and speeches performed by celebrities such as Ben Vereen and Kelsey Grammer.

The theater also unveiled a videotape, to be shown at its museum, in which the four living past-presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, accompanied by Matthew Brady’s Civil War images.

Empty Presidential Box

The Obamas watched from the front row alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. None of the nation’s leaders have sat in the presidential box since John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln there during a performance of “Our American Cousin” on the evening of April 14, 1865.

The event was a retrospective of Lincoln’s life, from his humble beginnings described by James Earl Jones’s baritone to Vereen’s impassioned reading of the Emancipation Proclamation without the prompter, which broke mid-show.

The highlight for the audience of about 650 was classical violinist Joshua Bell’s “Variations on Yankee Doodle,” which was by turns playful and mournful.

Broadway singer Cheryl Freeman gave an electrifying rendition of a song from the play “The Civil War,” followed by Audra McDonald, Jessye Norman and Joshua Bell for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which earned a standing ovation.

Host and actor Richard Thomas called the facility the most-famous theater in America, which had morphed from a scene of tragedy into a symbol of Lincoln’s legacy.

Lincoln Medal

The gala event included the presentation of the Lincoln Medal given each year to someone whose work, accomplishments and attributes “exemplify the lasting legacy and mettle of character embodied by the most beloved president in our nation’s history,” Ford’s Theatre said. This year, the recipients were filmmaker George Lucas and actor Sidney Poitier.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the government bought the theater, which dates to 1861, from Ford for $100,000 and gave it to the War Department for use as storage space and an Army Medical Museum.

At one point, the interior collapsed, so now only the exterior walls are original. In the 1960s, the theater was rededicated as a memorial to Lincoln, and the National Park Service used historic photographs and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the box and the theater as it looked that night. Almost a million visitors pass through every year.

Red Upholstery

The theater has just 658 seats, done up in red upholstery. Lincoln’s box sits just above stage left. On the balustrade is one of the few surviving artifacts from that time, an engraving of George Washington.

The renovation was part of a larger $50 million fundraising effort known as the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign that’s also supporting the building of a new education center. The campaign benefited from a $5 million donation from Exxon Mobil Corp. and $2.5 million from the State of Qatar, the theater said.

Other donors included AT&T Inc., BP America Inc., General Dynamics Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and Lockheed Martin Corp., according to Ford’s Theatre.

Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture.

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Pam Risdon / PBS

‘A RELIEF’: “It was like a boil being lanced,” says Gates of being freed from the burden of his idealized views of Lincoln. Glorifying Lincoln has served different agendas, he adds.

In search of the flesh-and-blood Abraham Lincoln

Henry Louis Gates’ documentary examines the 16th president from many angles.

For Henry Louis Gates Jr., the challenge of making a documentary about Abraham Lincoln was daunting but ultimately too good to pass up.

The only question was, which Abraham Lincoln?

“I got this reading list, and every book I read had a different Lincoln in it,” says the Harvard University history professor by phone from Washington, D.C.

There was Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Lincoln the White Supremacist, Lincoln the Martyr, Lincoln the Tyrant/War Criminal, Lincoln the Romantic Lover, the Melancholic, the Atheist, the Orator, the Opportunist, the Gay, the Hero of Fidel Castro. . . . “And ultimately Lincoln the Unknown,” Gates summarizes. “I thought it could be fun, without even using the word, to do a postmodern Lincoln.”

That’s the Honest Abe (or one of them) who emerges in “Looking for Lincoln,” the lively, intriguing two-hour PBS documentary that airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KCET. Written and presented by Gates, “Looking for Lincoln” leaves no stovepipe hat unturned in its search for the prismatic 16th president. Although, or perhaps because, he is the most written-about of America’s chief executives, Lincoln remains something of an Rorschach blot. His Mt. Rushmore-sized legacy rests on the fault lines of the nation’s most painful and complex themes and leitmotifs: slavery, black-white relations and the sometimes precarious balance between states’ rights and federal unity. Gates, who grew up in Piedmont, W.Va., learning to rote-idolize Lincoln, was no exception. But as he dug deeper into his research, he unearthed a number of jarring insights. “All of a sudden I find out Lincoln used the ‘N’ word, Lincoln liked ‘darky’ jokes, Lincoln liked minstrel shows.”

In “Looking for Lincoln,” being shown to coincide with the bicentennial of its subject’s birth, Gates fittingly begins and ends his meditations at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In between, he attempts to carve through the monumental marble icon and discover the flawed, flesh-and-blood human within.

During his odyssey, he receives assistance from historians Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Herbert Donald, and Harold Holzer; former Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett; former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton; historical reenactors; and a number of ordinary Americans. “Lincoln is a composite of all these images that people see refracted and reflected inside themselves,” says Gates, who specializes in African American history and literature. “He is the mirror of the American soul.”

Gates acknowledges that looking for Lincoln required some soul-searching of his own, as a historian, an American and an African American. In the documentary, he quickly takes aim at what may be the most sensitive aspect of Lincoln: his attitudes about race.

In reality, Gates says, this discussion comprises three “sub-discussions”: one on race and slavery, a second on racial equality and a third on colonization. “My metaphor is like braiding hair.”

Although Lincoln found the institution of slavery morally abhorrent, he didn’t believe that blacks and whites were equal. He probably would’ve been appalled at the idea of an African American becoming president, an awkward twist considering that so many prominent politicians, civil rights leaders and other Americans regularly invoke his name as the patron saint of their righteous causes.

“He’s certainly my favorite president,” Gates says. “He’s George Bush’s favorite. And, my God, Barack Obama has adopted him as his father.”

Lincoln at various times advocated shipping blacks to Africa or Panama. “Whereas abolition was part of his moral compass, equality was not,” Gates says. It was pragmatism, more than dawning enlightenment, that finally drove him to write the Emancipation Proclamation. “The irony of Abraham Lincoln is that he changed,” Gates says. “He changed for two reasons. One is that he met Frederick Douglass [the venerable abolitionist, reformer and newspaper publisher]. And he decided that he needed black troops to win the war.”

But it was only with the adoption of the 13th Amendment several months after Lincoln’s assassination that slavery was formally abolished (in law, if not fully in practice). And despite the amendment’s passage and the mixed results of Reconstruction, three more generations of racial apartheid would persist in the South in the form of Jim Crow.

Gates also learned that Lincoln, like many whites in his day, apparently never sat down to a meal with a black person or spent an entire day in one’s company. Those facts typically were bowdlerized from the official hagiography that took shape practically from the instant that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, 1865.

Pondering these revelations, Gates felt a bit disillusioned with his hero. Then his colleague Goodwin — whom he says played Yoda, the sagacious advisor, to his questing Luke Skywalker — snapped him out of it. “Get over it,” she told him. “It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of all the historians who’ve represented him this way.”

Gates began to reconsider Lincoln in this new light, recalling W.E.B. DuBois‘ adage that Lincoln was “big enough to be inconsistent.” “It was like a boil being lanced,” he says of being freed from the burden of his idealized views of Lincoln. “It was a relief.”

Gates says that the idealization of Lincoln served different agendas for white and black Americans. The myth of Lincoln the Saint salved white consciences by allowing America’s Anglo-European majority to tell itself that it had done its part to liberate blacks by fighting the Civil War, and any further social progress was up to African Americans themselves.

The same myth may have impeded blacks by creating a shining model of white behavior that bore scant resemblance to the attitudes of most white Americans from the 1870s through at least the 1930s, a period that Gates calls “the nadir of black-white relations.”

For the historian, researching the program “challenged me to be tolerant of diverse views at the extremes,” never more so than when he attended a convocation of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. On camera, Gates assiduously avoids making judgments about the perspective of the organization or its members. “It’s easy to be a professor at an Ivy League school where everybody’s a liberal,” he says. “But I had to put myself inside the heads” of SCV members.

If there’s a moral to the epic, multi-shaded story of Lincoln’s evolving racial attitudes, Gates believes it’s that his example demonstrates how any of us likewise can modify or put aside our prejudices.

“Race and racism haven’t gone anywhere. But I think the capacity to confront one’s limitations, stare them in the eyes and become a better person in the larger good is what I want people to take away from the film.”

In search of the flesh-and-blood Abraham Lincoln – Los Angeles Times.

Racial jokes? Shipping freed slaves to Africa? These aren’t the sorts of things most people generally associate with Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday is on Feb. 12. In a new book, “Lincoln on Race & Slavery,” and a new series airing Feb. 11 on PBS, “Looking for Lincoln,” Harvard professor and documentary filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes a fresh look at the 16th president. (For more on Lincoln, see Dorothy Rabinowitz’s television review and the book review.)

PBS

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Wall Street Journal: There have been 14,000 books written about Lincoln, according to you, more than any other American. Isn’t that enough?

Mr. Gates: The only person who has received more attention in print is Jesus, which is astonishing. But, no one has done a book or film from my particular perspective.

Which is?

Here’s the complicated truth: Lincoln was always opposed to slavery as an institution, [but] he was deeply ambivalent about the status of black people. He gave a speech [in 1858] in Charleston, Ill., in which he said he was opposed to interracial marriage, opposed to blacks serving on juries or serving in the military and said the difference between the white and black races was permanent and fixed by nature. This is a long way from being the Great Emancipator, man. He had a penchant for the n-word [before 1860] and he proposed a constitutional amendment funding the colonization of the freed slaves.

Yet you grew to like him even more after delving into his racial attitudes, correct?

The difference between Lincoln and everybody else is that he had a capacity to grow. In the last speech of his life, Lincoln said for the first time in the American presidency: “I want to give the right to vote to [a few] black men.” He thought the Declaration of Independence included black men. Thomas Jefferson didn’t do that.

We’re in the midst of a Lincoln revival. Steven Spielberg is in the process of doing a Lincoln movie with a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Barack Obama has been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln’s cabinet. Why is he so enduringly popular?

There’s a Lincoln for all seasons in America. There are dozens of Lincolns. There’s Lincoln the atheist, the Northern Lincoln, the Confederate Lincoln, Lincoln the war criminal, Lincoln the savior of the union, Lincoln the humorous, Lincoln the melancholy. One guy wrote a book about Lincoln as gay, another of Lincoln the heterosexual lover. Lincoln the white supremacist; Lincoln the Great Emancipator…

In the film you criss-cross America, visiting a high-school class in downtown Chicago, the Ford Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated, and the Harlem office of President Bill Clinton. In Lincoln’s New Salem, Ill., a recreated town inhabited by Lincoln devotees, a woman threatened to eject you for hinting that Lincoln had an affair with Ann Rutledge. Were you surprised?

New Salem is all reconstructed log cabins and [its people] are dedicated to protecting the myth of Abraham Lincoln — the idea that he did no wrong. I find it charming, but as a scholar, it’s ridiculous.

Barack Obama swore the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible and references Lincoln frequently in speeches.

Barack Obama is the logical extension of Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery in the South and his embrace of black rights at the end of his life. Also, Lincoln was the Great Reconciliator “with malice toward none”: That’s Barack Obama.

In the film you show “Abraham Obama,” a work by street artist Ron English that melds Lincoln and Obama’s faces into a single image. Do you think the comparison is appropriate?

When we filmed they gave me a poster. I’m looking forward to having Abraham Obama sign it.

—Christina S.N. Lewis

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Takes a Look at Lincoln in His New Book and PBS Series – WSJ.com.

“Barack Obama is opening our hearts and minds to the true meaning of Black History Month,” Barron said. “African Americans won’t be viewed as just a minority but as people who make a difference.”

Obama’s election, and this year’s 100th anniversary of the NAACP, means there has probably never been more reason to celebrate the annual February observance, black leaders and historians say.

“We celebrate whenever a glass ceiling is broken and the presidency may be the highest glass ceiling,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, which is celebrating its 1909 founding this year.

But those leaders also agree those milestones don’t mean that racial inequalities no longer exist. While Obama’s breaking of the color barrier in the White House may make the NAACP’s job easier, Jealous said they will pressure Obama just as they have past presidents.

Gerald Early, a professor of African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, said that Obama’s election should not be viewed as the end of racism, but “should be taught as an event that signaled a new era in American race relations.”

“With Obama as president, I think people are more optimistic about race relations than they’ve been in a long time,” he said.

This optimism is seen in Black History Month celebrations planned throughout this month in the 1,700 local NAACP units and hundreds of primary, secondary and university campuses nationwide.

This year’s Black History Month theme is “The Quest for Citizenship in the Americas,” determined by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, said Daryl Scott, vice president for programs.

Stephanie Smith Budhai, 23, head of the University of Maryland’s Black History Month Committee, said the theme correlates well with Obama’s presidency.

“Barack Obama shows that (African Americans’) citizenship is just as important as the citizenship of any other ethnicity or race,” she said.

Black History Month has added meaning in 2009 – USATODAY.com.

YouTube – Black History Month Oprah Winfrey African Roots H L Gates AFROTAK cyberNomads reMIX.

Nearly 4 1/2 years ago, Barack Obama introduced himself to America by painting a picture of a country that was united, somehow, in spite of itself. The pundits, he said in the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, like to “slice and dice” the country: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. “But I’ve got news for them too: We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” His task that night in Boston was to ready the crowd for the presidential nominee, John F. Kerry, but in the end his words were most memorable for an argument that challenged the partisan divide and was built on the foundation of his own unique story.

His father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. But it’s more complicated than that.

Abandoned by his father, separated for long periods from his mother, Obama searched for many years to find his identity. He eventually learned to navigate between black and white worlds. He earned a reputation as a pragmatist and a consensus builder, and along the way raised the bridges that would sustain his ambition.

Race has been the steady undertow of his political career — and of his life.

As he paraphrased William Faulkner in March in a landmark speech on race: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

Early years

Interracial relationships in Hawaii are an accepted fact of life. Nevertheless, the parents of Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Hussein Obama didn’t like the idea of their children getting married. She was studying anthropology at the University of Hawaii. He was a graduate student from Kenya, the first African enrolled at the university.

They married in late 1960, and on Aug. 4, 1961, Barack Jr. was born. Two years after that, his father left to study economics at Harvard.

The separation led to divorce. Ann married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student at the university. In 1967, she and her 6-year-old son, whom she called Barry, followed Soetoro to Jakarta, a strange and wonderful place of kite-flying and crocodiles, exotic foods and strange religions.

But the adventure had a darker side. The poverty was inescapable. Ann and Lolo drifted apart. She took a job teaching English at the U.S. Embassy, and it was here in the library, Obama said, that he read about a black man who had tried to peel off his skin.

Although his mother tried to affirm his black heritage — bringing home books about the civil rights movement, speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. — Barry was learning the price people pay for being different.

When he was 10, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend the prestigious Punahou School. On an island where there were few blacks, he watched “I Spy” on television, tried to sing like Marvin Gaye and cursed like Richard Pryor. He stayed out late, shooting hoops, and started to drink and smoke weed, he said, just to “push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

On the mainland, the reality of race was more stark.

Full Article Here:

Barack Obama: In search of identity – Los Angeles Times.