In its continuing efforts to keep the public informed about the ongoing admissions litigation, the University of Michigan makes these transcripts of the trial proceedings in Grutter v Bollinger, et al., Civil Action No. 97-75928 (E.D. Mich.), available to the University community and general public. As is often the case with transcription, some words or phrases may be misspelled or simply incorrect. The University makes no representation as to the accuracy of the transcripts.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
SOUTHERN DIVISION
BARBARA GRUTTER, for herself
and all others similarly
situated,
Plaintiff,
Civil Action
-vs-
No. 97-CV-75928
LEE BOLLINGER, JEFFREY LEHMAN,
DENNIS SHIELDS, and REGENTS OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,
Defendants,
and
KIMBERLY JAMES, ET AL.,
Intervening Defendants.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _/ VOLUME 7
BENCH TRIAL
BEFORE THE HONORABLE BERNARD A. FRIEDMAN
United States District Judge
238 U.S. Courthouse & Federal Building
231 Lafayette Boulevard West
Detroit, Michigan
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2001
APPEARANCES:
FOR PLAINTIFF: Kirk O. Kolbo, Esq.
R. Lawrence Purdy, Esq.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
2
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APPEARANCES (CONTINUING)
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FOR DEFENDANTS: John Payton, Esq.
4 Craig Goldblatt, Esq.
On behalf of Defendants
5 Bollinger, et al.
6 George B. Washington, Esq.
Miranda K.S. Massie, Esq.
7 On behalf of Intervening
Defendants
8
9 COURT REPORTER: Joan L. Morgan, CSR
Official Court Reporter
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12 Proceedings recorded by mechanical stenography.
Transcript produced by computer-assisted
13 transcript.
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GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
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I N D E X
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WITNESS PAGE
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6 WITNESSES PRESENTED ON BEHALF OF INTERVENING DEFENDANTS
7 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
8 Direct Examination by Ms. Massie 5
Cross-Examination by Mr. Payton 126
9 Cross-Examination by Mr. Purdy 130
Redirect Examination by Ms. Massie 149
10 Recross-Examination by Mr. Payton 153
Recross-Examination by Mr. Purdy 153
11 Redirect Examination by Ms. Massie 155
12 JAY ROSNER
13 Direct Examination by Mr. Washington 156
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E X H I B I T
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17 MARKED RECEIVED
______ ________
Exhibit Number 97 112
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GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
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1 Detroit, Michigan
2 Wednesday, January 24, 2001
3 9:00 a.m.
4 _ _ _
5 THE COURT: Okay, next witness.
6 MS. MASSIE: Intervening Defendants
7 call Professor John Hope Franklin.
8 MR. PURDY: Your Honor, we don't
9 intend to have any interruptions today, but may it
10 still be understood that we have a continuing
11 objection for the reasons as we set forth before.
12 THE COURT: Continuing objection.
13 MR. PURDY: Thank you.
14 THE COURT: Mr. Franklin, how are you
15 this morning?
16 THE WITNESS: How are you?
17 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN,
18 was thereupon called as a witness herein and, after
19 having been first duly sworn to tell the truth, the
20 whole truth and nothing but the truth, was examined
21 and testified as follows:
22 MS. MASSIE: Judge, I don't think
23 that Professor John Hope Franklin needs too much of
24 an introduction.
25 THE COURT: I don't think so either.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
5
1 But you may put it just for the record.
2 MS. MASSIE: Just working on this
3 case has definitely been the greatest honor of my
4 life, and one of the biggest intellectual challenges
5 as far as the stimulation of my life and the
6 opportunity to work with Professor Franklin. There
7 hasn't been any greater thing in either category.
8 THE COURT: I am privileged to have
9 him in my courtroom, so it's nice to have you.
10 DIRECT EXAMINATION
11 BY MS. MASSIE:
12 Q. Could you spell your name for the record, please?
13 A. John Hope Franklin.
14 Q. And that's F-r-a-n-k-l-i-n?
15 A. Right.
16 Q. When and where were you born, sir?
17 A. I was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma on the 2nd of
18 January, 1915.
19 Q. And where is that town?
20 A. Rentiesville, Oklahoma is 17 miles south of
21 Muskogee, Oklahoma. Muskogee, Oklahoma is 50 miles
22 south of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
23 Q. Is there anything north of Tulsa.
24 A. If it is, it's unknown.
25 Q. Tell us about your education, if you would, sir?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
6
1 A. Well, I began my education in Rentiesville, Oklahoma
2 where I, first of all, was sitting in the back of my
3 mother's school room, she was teaching, that's when
4 I was three years old. And I learned to read and
5 write that year to her great surprise. She was
6 teaching others, but I was also learning.
7 I was in the room, but I kept quiet,
8 there were no day care centers or anything like
9 that. She was babysitting me while she was
10 teaching. I went through the first five or six
11 grades in Rentiesville, and then we moved to Tulsa,
12 Oklahoma.
13 There had been a riot in Tulsa which
14 delayed our moving there. And we went to Tulsa,
15 Oklahoma the tenth of December 1925. I was ten
16 years old. And I went to high school there.
17 I graduated from high school there in
18 1931. Then I went to Fisk University in Nashville,
19 Tennessee, from which I graduated magnum cum laude
20 in May of 1935.
21 And then the fall of 1935 I went to
22 Harvard University as a graduate student in history,
23 and I got my master's degree that year. And four
24 years later I received my Ph.D degree in 1941.
25 And I was already teaching, I taught
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
7
1 three years by that time. And I would say that my
2 career was lodged probably after I got my doctorate
3 in 1941. But it was interrupted, of course, by the
4 war to some extent, and I had various other trials
5 and tribulations along the way.
6 But I began to publish in 1943, and
7 my first book was published that year. My second
8 book two years later, and my third book in 1947.
9 And a number of books later.
10 Q. I know there's a couple of graduate students who
11 took the day off to come in and hear your testimony.
12 I'm sure they're now considering giving up academe.
13 A. Thank you.
14 Q. Tell us about the school where your mother taught?
15 A. Well, it was a one-room school. She was an
16 elementary school teacher, and she was teaching
17 reading, writing to the first grade. I was given a
18 paper and pencil and in the back row with a desk,
19 and she would come back there periodically to see
20 what I was doing.
21 And to her great astonishment when
22 she didn't hear me making any noise she came back to
23 see what I was doing and I was writing what she was
24 writing on the board. And that was the beginning of
25 my education.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
8
1 From that point on, I was on my own
2 and I studied diligently I suppose, I tried to. But
3 both my mother and father were very important
4 intellectual powers or forces in my life.
5 My father was a lawyer practicing
6 first in Ardmore, Oklahoma where he received his law
7 license in 1907. The year of the statehood of
8 Oklahoma.
9 And from that point on he practiced
10 law successfully in Ardmore, Rentiesville, Tulsa.
11 In fact, he practiced law in Tulsa from 1921 to 1960
12 the year in which he died.
13 By that time I was already chair of
14 the Department of History of Brooklyn College, the
15 city of Richmond, New York. And I had already
16 taught by that time at Harvard University, and a
17 number of other institutions as visiting professor.
18 I have been a visiting professor at
19 Harvard University, Cornell University, and the
20 University of Hawaii and various other places along
21 the way.
22 Q. How many children were there in your mother's class?
23 A. I can't remember. I know the room was crowded, 35
24 or 40.
25 Q. And all of those children were black?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
9
1 A. Yes, yes. All the children in the town were black,
2 all the people in the town were black. It was an
3 all black town in Rentiesville, Oklahoma when I was
4 there. I was born there in 1915, there were no
5 whites in the town at all.
6 It was primitive life such as you
7 can't possibly imagine. No electricity whatever, no
8 central heating, no heating of any kind which wasn't
9 made from wood or coal. No running water, no
10 library except in my parent's home, the only library
11 to which I was exposed.
12 No facilities of any kind that I can
13 think of. No amenities, no amusement, no public
14 amusement. Just a few churches, that's about all
15 that was in Rentiesville.
16 And when I left from Rentiesville in
17 1925 to go to Tulsa, I thought that was a new world,
18 entirely new world opened up. Which it would be
19 difficult to describe, because it was so vastly
20 different in every conceivable way.
21 Traffic, street cars, schools, little
22 library, not much larger for African Americans than
23 this witness stand, but it was there. And it was
24 an expression of the desire on the part of the
25 African American community to have a facility like
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
10
1 that.
2 It was not publicly supported, it was
3 privately subscribed to. And the first time I ever
4 had the opportunity to use books not in my parent's
5 home, was to go to that little library. And it was
6 once more, opened up a new world, entirely new world
7 to anyone who had not experienced that before. It
8 was an amazing experience.
9 School in Tulsa was a different kind
10 of institution from which I had been accustomed. It
11 was orderly, fairly large, although the African
12 Americans population in Tulsa was only about a tenth
13 of the population of the city.
14 The schools was like I couldn't
15 imagine, it was a large number of schools. An
16 institution run by blacks. But, of course, it was a
17 public school. But it was a public--they called it,
18 I don't know, this was a different kind of
19 segregation.
20 They didn't use the term segregation,
21 they used separate, The Tulsa Separate Schools.
22 E.W. Woods was principal of Booker T. Washington
23 High School, of the Tulsa Separate Schools. And it
24 took me a while to understand what that meant.
25 It meant that only people of my color
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
11
1 could go there. And it meant that if you were not
2 of that color, you didn't go there. It meant also
3 that you didn't have the opportunities that you had
4 at Central High School. Vast complex building on
5 the other side of town where they taught modern
6 foreign languages, we had none. They taught French,
7 Spanish, German in centralized schools, but nothing
8 like that.
9 So, I went to college without ever
10 having had a modern foreign language. And I had to
11 take--and I knew that by the time I was a sophomore
12 in college and I was going to major in history.
13 And my major professor who was a
14 young white man, the chairman of the History
15 Department at Fisk University which was all black,
16 of course, it had a mix, it was white and black
17 faculty.
18 He almost immediately decided that he
19 wanted me to go to Harvard. And we sort of--as an
20 undergraduate I was doing everything that he wanted
21 me to do to be certain that I was eligible to go to
22 Harvard, including the Harvard requirement of two
23 modern foreign languages in order to qualify with
24 any advanced degree.
25 So, there I was as a sophomore and
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
12
1 junior at Fisk University taking elementary courses
2 in French and German, so that I could be eligible to
3 qualify at Harvard.
4 And I took them and I did qualify at
5 Harvard in both languages, and was prepared in a
6 very careful way by him to be able to do the work at
7 Harvard.
8 When I went to Harvard, I had no
9 problem. As a matter of fact it was, if I can say
10 so, it was a push over if that, because of his
11 careful preparation. It was no other explanation
12 for it.
13 Q. Were there many Fisk students at that point who
14 ended up at the Harvard graduate school?
15 A. No, there were not many Fisk students at Harvard
16 graduate school. Indeed, there were almost no
17 students, other than white students at Harvard. I
18 had no black students, fellow students in any of my
19 classes at Harvard.
20 There were a few at the university,
21 maybe one in English and two in law school and two
22 in the Biology Department, and maybe one or two
23 more. Two or three other graduates.
24 I would say that there might have
25 been as many as--this is a liberal figure, as many
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
13
1 as a dozen students that were African Americans at
2 Harvard in 1936 when I went there. In 1935 when I
3 went there.
4 Q. Of thousands?
5 A. What's that?
6 Q. Of thousands?
7 A. Yes, there were 10,000 or more students at Harvard.
8 And I went to Harvard, of course, it was the pit of
9 the Depression. My father had to become what we
10 describe generously as became bankrupt. We lost our
11 home simply because of the extraordinary bite of the
12 Depression. The poverty was unspeakable.
13 So, that I went to Harvard, I could
14 not have gone to the University of Oklahoma as you
15 certainly know. And the University of Oklahoma not
16 only did not admit any blacks, no blacks could be in
17 the town after dark.
18 And they gave me a scholarship, out
19 of state scholarship it was called, and that was for
20 a hundred dollars if, if I passed my courses. That
21 is, I did not have the freedom to fail as they did
22 at normal Oklahoma. You were admitted and then you
23 might or you might not pass.
24 But I didn't have that privilege, I
25 had to pass in order to get that hundred dollars
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
14
1 from the state of Oklahoma against--paid toward my
2 tuition. And that remained the practice down to the
3 time that they admitted blacks to Oklahoma in the
4 1950s.
5 Now, the matter of trying to do the
6 kind of work that I undertook to do in graduate
7 school and after, it would project my life work.
8 Brought me into contact with the kind of life that I
9 hadn't imagined.
10 When I took my general examinations
11 at Harvard in the spring of 1939, I decided to do a
12 dissertation on North Carolina. So, I went to
13 North Carolina and there I went in to see the
14 director of the state archives.
15 And I told him I wanted to do
16 research on free negroes in North Carolina from 1798
17 to 60. And he said, well, I suppose I will have to
18 do something about that. He said, I see no reason
19 why you wouldn't be able to work here, he said, but
20 when we built this building we didn't anticipate
21 that anyone of your color would work here. And so
22 we don't have any place for you to work.
23 He said, but if you will give me a
24 week I'll try to arrange something. And I remained
25 silent and I looked at him and I had my mental
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
15
1 adding machine, I was going to have to pay the rent,
2 board, room and all of that for a week while I
3 twiddled my thumbs.
4 And I just looked at him and he said,
5 well, what about a half week. I said, I'll be back
6 Thursday, this was Monday. I went back Thursday and
7 they prepared a place for me.
8 They cleared out one of the exhibit
9 rooms, the smallest exhibit room there was for the
10 archives or display of archives of materials. And
11 they put a desk and a chair and a waste basket in
12 there.
13 And he gave me a key, he said, I'll
14 give you a key to the stacks because I don't think
15 we can request the white pages to deliver materials
16 to you. So you'll have to get your materials
17 yourself.
18 I said, all right. He gave me his
19 key. He said, you go through the search room that's
20 where all the whites were sitting and doing their
21 research. You go through the search room to the
22 stacks, and you get what you want and bring it over
23 to your room and you can work there.
24 And I did that and it turned out to
25 be the most satisfactory arrangement, because I
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
16
1 could sort of window shop in the stacks, pull down
2 what I wanted, things that I thought I might want.
3 And I would come through the main
4 reading room with my dolly and my library card,
5 laden with materials. And the white researchers
6 looked at me with some disdain as well as jealousy.
7 And two weeks later the director of
8 the archives told me and said, I have to take your
9 key. And I searched my conduct and wondered what I
10 had done that was offensive.
11 I said what's the matter, he said
12 well, the white searchers who see you coming through
13 the room with all of your materials which you have
14 selected yourself, says that this is a
15 discrimination against them and they want keys
16 themselves.
17 He said, well, I can't give everyone
18 keys and I therefore will have to take your key.
19 And you will have to abide by the regular rules
20 which, of course, would involve your bringing one
21 request in, depositing it, then going back to your
22 room and waiting for that to be delivered to you.
23 And I said, well, if that's what you
24 think it should be, all right. Now, it was at that
25 point that I realized the inconsistency and the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
17
1 remarkable ingenuity, if I may put it, of racial
2 discrimination of those who practiced it.
3 I had to work in three libraries.
4 And within a radius of three blocks of each other,
5 literally within three blocks of each other. One of
6 them was the archives where I described that I had
7 used a separate room.
8 The other was the state library on
9 the other side of the square. And there I could go
10 into the main reading room and work, but there was a
11 regular place in the stacks for African Americans to
12 sit.
13 And we were not supposed to go take
14 the books off the shelf or take the newspapers in
15 there. But actually we were to make that request,
16 but we could sit there in the stacks and use the
17 materials.
18 Then on the other side of the square
19 was the Supreme Court library. And there were no
20 restrictions at all. We sat and did our work at the
21 same table that white people were sitting.
22 I said this is rather strange. In
23 the radius of two or three blocks, we had three
24 practices, three practices of racial distinction or
25 discrimination or segregation.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
18
1 And that gave me to understand that
2 the practice of racial segregation was sort of
3 improvisational. That is they made it up as they
4 went along.
5 They have did this on one side of the
6 block, they did another on the other side of the
7 block, and another on the other side of the block.
8 Whatever seemed to pass their minds, as long as
9 there was distinction.
10 As long as there was a mark of, as
11 old people say, a mark of distinction, a mark of
12 oppression of some kind. The differentiation was
13 there.
14 Or another way, not only was this
15 practice at the highest levels, what I think of
16 libraries would be fairly high. It was practiced at
17 the other extreme, that I couldn't say which was
18 more praiseworthy or meritorious.
19 Outside the city, just outside the
20 city there were two barbecue joints or places where
21 you could go. I didn't go, but some other people
22 did. I went once and that was enough for me. I
23 didn't have to have a barbecue, I had to have those
24 papers and things like that in the libraries. But I
25 didn't have to have a barbecue.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
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1 But this struck me as rather
2 remarkable, and it was not unlike what they were
3 doing downtown in the capital square. You go out to
4 one of these places, barbecue places.
5 One if you went in to one of them and
6 you wanted to be served, you sat in your car and
7 young white girls would come out and bring anything
8 you wanted, serve you with great applaud.
9 Across the road was another, and you
10 could go and sit in your car all day and they would
11 look out there, and you would be in your car and
12 they wouldn't come out.
13 But you go in the place and you were
14 welcomed heartedly, warmly. I said, what's going on
15 here? On the one side they say we don't serve
16 blacks in cars. On the other side they say we do.
17 On the one side they say you're
18 welcome to come in and eat. On the other side they
19 said you can't even come in the door. You need a
20 road map, or you need an encyclopedia and a number
21 of other aides to help you navigate your way through
22 these racial minds as it were.
23 And that gave me to understand that
24 race distinctions were not very significant, except
25 to make a difference to. And it must have done
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
20
1 something to the people, it must have given them
2 some sense of superiority, or it must have given
3 them a sense of satisfaction if they could be a few
4 notches above or away from others.
5 And I decided that that was a kind of
6 a sickness, a kind of searching for something that
7 would give them a sense of security and superiority
8 and advantage.
9 And that to me--see, I found it in
10 other ways too. I've described what doing research
11 at North Carolina meant. If doing research in North
12 Carolina was that bad, when I went to Alabama to do
13 research with the confederate flag flying over the
14 Archives Building, I didn't know whether I even
15 wanted to attempt to do research there.
16 And the first morning I went in to do
17 research, I told the woman in the search room that I
18 wanted these materials, and she said, yes, I will
19 get them for you. And she brought them and handed
20 them to me.
21 And I waited for her to tell me what
22 to do with these materials, with this background of
23 having waited three days for someone to arrange a
24 room in North Carolina, I thought that I might have
25 to wait a week in Alabama or a month.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
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1 And she gave me the materials and she
2 stood there and looked at me. And I stood there in
3 a quandary, I didn't know what to do with them, I
4 didn't know where to go, where to sit.
5 I'm in the reading room, but I assume
6 that that reading room was where I could not sit.
7 But since she had not indicated to me that there was
8 a room separate for me in the basement or somewhere
9 else, I then did what I would do in Detroit at a
10 library, I went to look for a quiet corner.
11 And so I went toward that corner, she
12 said you can't sit there. I was like, why don't you
13 tell me where to sit, I said to myself. I said,
14 well, where should I sit, she said, you sit over
15 here with the others. She said that's the coolest
16 part of the room where they're sitting, and they
17 need to meet you anyway.
18 And so she said, you sits there.
19 Then she made all of them stop doing what they were
20 doing, and she introduced them to me. And she said,
21 now you sit there with the others, so I did.
22 But this is all confusing, you see.
23 You can't be certain what to do, you see. That's
24 what I meant by improvisation, you don't know, you
25 don't know where you stand. And I work there off
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
22
1 and on for weeks.
2 And at one point I wanted to look at
3 a set of papers, Governor Winston papers. And I
4 said to the person in the search room, I want to see
5 the Winston papers, they said we can't show them to
6 you, they're in preparation.
7 The only way you can see them is to
8 get permission from the director of the archives.
9 Who at that time was Ms. Marie Bankhead-Owens. And
10 I said, well, when does she come in. They said,
11 well, she comes in, she will be in Thursday
12 afternoon. This is Wednesday morning.
13 She will be in Thursday afternoon. I
14 said, well, how will I know that she is here. She
15 says, well, you will know. Everyone knows when
16 Ms. Owens arrives.
17 So I waited. And the next afternoon,
18 indeed, the whole building took on a different
19 atmosphere. I said Ms. Owens must be here.
20 And I went up to her office and I
21 told her secretary, I want to have a word with
22 Ms. Owens. And she said, well, she's in there, go
23 in.
24 And I went in, and as I went in I got
25 another lesson. The secretary did not close the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
23
1 door behind me, and when I got in to speak to
2 Ms. Owens she did not ask me to sit down. I said
3 this is another mine field I'm in.
4 And she said, what can I do for you,
5 I told her I wanted to see Governor Winston's
6 papers. And she said certainly you can see the
7 Winston papers and anything else that you want.
8 You're free to see them, just let me know and I'll
9 be glad to facilitate your efforts.
10 I said, well, I do appreciate that
11 very much, I'm still standing. And she said, they
12 tell me that there's a Harvard nigger in the
13 building, have you seen him.
14 And the secretary whose door was open
15 and she was listening to the conversation, she said,
16 that's him, Ms. Owens, that's him. She said, are
17 you the Harvard nigger?
18 She said, I had no idea. She said,
19 you got right nice manners, why don't you sit down.
20 My first invitation to have a seat.
21 She said, where were you born and
22 raised, I said Oklahoma. She said, no, no, that's
23 not where you got those nice manners. I wanted to
24 tell her that my mother taught me, I was discreet
25 enough to let her explore the matter.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
24
1 She said, where did you go to school,
2 I said, Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
3 She said, no, no, I don't mean that. Where did you
4 go to school out of the state. And I said I went to
5 school at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
6 She said that's it, that's where you
7 learned those manners. Nice good old confederate
8 state. And I let that pass. And she then went on
9 to tell me about the south and about manners and so
10 forth.
11 And she didn't undertake to tell me
12 why she treated me like that, except that when she
13 told me of an incident where she had a relationship
14 with a black woman, wife of the president of
15 Tuskegee.
16 She said, I called her Ms. Moten.
17 She said, but I wouldn't call you--it would be
18 beyond the realm of possibility for me to refer to
19 you as mister, do you understand that? I'm not
20 going to ever call you mister, I don't call black
21 men mister.
22 I'll call you doctor, reverend,
23 professor, whatever comes to mind, except for
24 mister. You don't deserve that much respect. I
25 said, well, as you will.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
25
1 And the problem with her after that
2 was that she wanted to talk so much that she took up
3 so much of my time and I was busy. And she wanted
4 to talk to me about the race thing.
5 And I began then to think about what
6 race really meant to her and to people like her.
7 And I could not escape the conclusion that the only
8 thing that race meant to her was, well, the only
9 thing that race meant to these other people that I
10 talked about.
11 Is that they wanted to be certain
12 that there was maintained a distant, not laterally
13 but vertically. A distance where they were
14 somewhere above a cut above, that's very essential,
15 very, very essential.
16 And whether it's in a library or
17 whether it's in a hotel or rather it's in school or
18 wherever, this distance, this vertical distance must
19 be maintained this superior position. The position
20 of advantage must be maintained.
21 And I came to the conclusion that the
22 maintenance of this was so important that they
23 didn't mind being inconsistent. They didn't mind
24 being improvisational, as long as that gave them
25 this vertical advantage where they were somewhere
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1 above and somewhere beyond.
2 And that to me was a revelation just
3 to come to that conclusion and to reach the view
4 that these people were groping for a way to live and
5 to co-exist with other people.
6 And the only way they could do it
7 comfortably was to have this distance. To have this
8 sense of self importance and of superiority, if you
9 will.
10 And I have always had difficulty in
11 squaring that with the so-called American way of
12 living, practicing, doing things. And not only was
13 this improvisation was inconsistent and incongruous
14 too, with what we are taught to be the American way
15 of the practice of equality on the one hand, and
16 human relations on the other as well.
17 This came to me another way when I
18 was quite young and just starting my career, when
19 during the time of the war. And the war came and I
20 was teaching in Raleigh, North Carolina.
21 And, of course, the incident at
22 Pearl Harbor what happened there was on the Navy
23 vessels, put the Navy in a very desperate position.
24 And the men who were in their offices on land, were
25 rushed out to pick up the pieces as they were to
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1 serve in active duty in the Navy.
2 And this left great vacancies on land
3 among which was the need for large numbers of petty
4 officers, people to man the office and whatnot. And
5 they sent out a desperate call for volunteers to
6 come and serve in the Navy.
7 So, I decided to volunteer, this is
8 January 1943, I decided to volunteer. And I went
9 down to the Naval Recruiting Station and offered my
10 services.
11 He said, what can you do, the
12 recruiting officer, what can you do. I said, you
13 need people to run offices, he said yes, yes. I
14 said, well, I can do that.
15 I said I ran the office, I ran the
16 library at Fisk University for four years, that's
17 the way I worked my way through college. He said,
18 well, what did that mean. It meant that I could
19 type and do shorthand and stuff like that.
20 I said I have three gold medals in
21 typing. And he said, you do? I said, yes, and I do
22 135 words a minute at shorthand. I said I can
23 operate various kinds of simple machines, business
24 machines. And I have a Ph.D from Harvard.
25 He said, you have everything but
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1 color. I said, oh, he said, yes. I said, well, I
2 thought there was an emergency, I apologize for
3 taking up your time. And I bid him good day.
4 And I left with a solemn resolve if I
5 may say that, that I wasn't going to the army under
6 any conditions, there was no emergency. That they
7 were looking around for people of certain color, not
8 of people of certain ability. And I wasn't going to
9 fight on their terms.
10 The terms that my brother experienced
11 as a graduate of Fisk and principal of a high school
12 in Oklahoma. The sergeant told him when he was
13 drafted and went in to the Army, that I will spend
14 my life being certain that you don't do anything
15 more edifying than peeling potatoes.
16 Well, I wasn't going to peel
17 potatoes, I wasn't going into the Army on the terms
18 of that sergeant or anyone else and I didn't. And I
19 stand before you not ashamed of the fact that I did
20 not serve my country on my country's terms in
21 World War II or any war.
22 Q. How did that experience affect your brother?
23 A. How is that?
24 Q. How did that experience affect your brother?
25 A. It destroyed him, and he died right after the war.
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1 Never recovered from the inhuman treatment that he
2 received, not only at the hands of that sergeant,
3 but at the hands of various others. He was a broken
4 man and died in Veteran's Hospital Brooklyn,
5 Virginia in 1947.
6 Q. Professor Franklin, how did there come to be an all
7 black town in the middle of Oklahoma?
8 A. Well, there were not an all black town, not one all
9 black town, but 28 black towns in Oklahoma and
10 Kansas in the period--in the 19th century and period
11 before World War 1. Twenty-eight of these towns
12 established.
13 They were, for the most part, the
14 result of the migration of blacks out of so-called
15 cotton kingdom, that is out of areas extending from
16 Georgia over to Louisiana.
17 They migrated there with the hope of
18 escaping the rigors of the deep south, and the
19 treatment which they received at the hands of the
20 leaders in the cotton kingdom.
21 And they went to these communities,
22 or they founded these communities with hope that
23 they could somehow break the ties that caused them
24 so much distress and humiliation when they
25 associated with whites. They wanted to be
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1 independent, they wanted to be self respecting and
2 so forth.
3 An example is when my father decided
4 that he had to leave Ardmore, where he was a young
5 lawyer and practicing there and move to an all black
6 town. He had gone to Shreveport, Louisiana to
7 represent a client in a matter.
8 And he went over there with his
9 client, and when they called the case my father
10 stood. The judge said, what are you standing up
11 for, and he said I'm representing my client in this
12 case. And the judge shook his head and said, oh no,
13 you don't represent anyone in my court. And he
14 called him the "N" word, and he said, now you get
15 out.
16 And so that's why he not only came
17 back to Ardmore, but said, you know, I can't stand
18 this, I'm going to go where at least I'll enjoy some
19 self respect. I'm going to find a place where I
20 don't have to rub up against this everyday.
21 And that's why he and my mother went
22 to Rentiesville. But Rentiesville was so small, it
23 was not really viable as a community, as a community
24 to support a man who was a lawyer in a small town
25 where it was not much litigation anyway. And what
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1 there was, it was not for profit, shall we say.
2 Q. I'm familiar with that phenomenon actually.
3 A. Yes. I think that might be why I decided not to
4 pursue law as I intended when I went to college, I
5 wanted to go into history. It's no defamation of
6 the legal profession intended.
7 Q. How is it, in fact, that your mother came to be a
8 teacher and your father came to be a lawyer?
9 A. Well, my mother was born in West Tennessee in the
10 village of Gayid, not far from Brownsville,
11 Tennessee. The daughter of a very enterprising
12 farmer who elected to send his daughter and later
13 some other daughters to college.
14 So that they could come back and
15 train the young people. There was a scarcity, this
16 was in the late 19th century, there was a scarcity
17 to train leaders and teachers and so forth in the
18 black community.
19 So, she was sent away to Roger
20 Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee to study
21 and to teach training and come back to Gayid and
22 teach, and that's what she did.
23 But, of course, in Nashville she had
24 met my father who had come out there from Oklahoma
25 and they fell in love with each other. And that led
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1 to their marriage and going to Oklahoma to live both
2 of them. My father and my mother.
3 Q. Where did your father go to law school?
4 A. He did not go to law school. My father read law and
5 studied by correspondence and took the course, took
6 the examination in 1907 and passed it. He was
7 always somewhat distressed that he was only number
8 two in the bar examination. The first being a
9 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.
10 And he practiced law from 1907 to 1960.
11 Q. Tell us what it was like to be at Fisk and at
12 Harvard when you were there?
13 A. Well, Fisk was like you say, in the old south, the
14 old confederate south and that's where I learned it
15 very early it was the confederate south. I had
16 grown up in a very interesting racial climate in
17 Oklahoma.
18 There had been the riot, which the
19 white people of Tulsa were in absolute complete
20 denial up until 1996, this riot was in 1921. But in
21 that period between 1921, the time of the riot and
22 1931 when I graduated from high school, there was a
23 very interesting racial relationship, especially
24 after the riot.
25 Where we were free to do as we
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1 pleased, more or less. No one wanted to start, no
2 one wanted to have another riot. And the white
3 people wouldn't even admit that there had been a
4 riot.
5 Large number of whites including the
6 present mayor of Tulsa, and she told me just last
7 year that she did not know about a riot until just
8 very recently.
9 Meanwhile we enjoyed life and with
10 absence of this stress, we enjoyed our inferior
11 position without any intimidation. We went to these
12 inferior schools and nobody said much about them.
13 We got what we lost, in subject
14 matter we gained in terms of self respect and that
15 sort of things. It was pounded into us by our
16 teachers.
17 When I got to Fisk in the old south,
18 this is Ms. Owens' confederate south. I found that
19 the atmosphere was much more oppressive. And I was
20 told that almost immediately.
21 I went downtown, when I say downtown,
22 I mean in the business part of Nashville, the white
23 part of Nashville downtown when I was a freshman,
24 indeed, within the months.
25 I was 16 years old and I was far from
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1 home. Oklahoma to Tennessee in those days was very
2 far. And I went downtown to do some shopping, just
3 to look around more than anything else with some
4 other classmates.
5 And we started back and I went into
6 the place where you bought a ticket to get on the
7 streetcar. And I had only a $20 bill, that was
8 almost the last $20 bill I had in college.
9 But I presented it to the man with
10 some apologies, I said, I'm sorry this is all I
11 have. The streetcar fare was 15 cents, this is all
12 I have and I am very sorry and you can give me the
13 change in one dollar bills or whatever you wanted
14 to.
15 And he rose out of his seat, I
16 thought he was going to jump through the booth. And
17 he said, you don't know little nigger can tell me
18 how to make change. I didn't know, I thought I was
19 being very accommodating, very courteous.
20 And then he took the time to count
21 out the change to me in nickels and dimes and
22 quarters. Nineteen dollars and 85 cents in nickels
23 and dimes.
24 And he was right, I wouldn't try to
25 teach him or anyone else after that how to make
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1 change, if that's what he thought I was doing. I
2 thought I was calling myself being accommodating.
3 And that tend to blight my whole college life.
4 I never went downtown Nashville many
5 times after that. But I never went without
6 remembering that problem, I was absolutely
7 terrified, if you can imagine. I was 16, I was
8 terrified by this man.
9 And it's a big contrast to the kind
10 of atmosphere which I grew up where everyone was
11 holding back and trying to be congenial and not talk
12 about the riot, which they came and bombed us and
13 burned us down and everything, and caused me to be
14 four years tardy in getting to Tulsa in the first
15 place.
16 That was all on the board now and I
17 was confronted with this strange kind of treatment
18 that I had never had before. And that really
19 clouded my whole college life.
20 That was at one end of my college
21 life. At the other end, my senior year when I was
22 applying for Harvard Graduate School, 19 years old.
23 And I had to take the scholastic aptitude test.
24 This is before the graduate records exam. The
25 scholastic aptitude test is one which I had to take.
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1 And I went out to Vanderbilt
2 University, that's where you had to go to take it.
3 And I walked in that room and the man who came in,
4 the professor who came in, looked at me and said
5 what do you want. I said this is the room I have to
6 come to to take the scholastic aptitude test.
7 And he threw the test at me, I had to
8 catch it. That was not the best atmosphere in which
9 to try to perform on a test.
10 And I don't know what he did with the
11 test, but I didn't have much competence in his
12 sending it to where it was supposed to go. I don't
13 know what happened to it, perhaps he did send it in,
14 I don't know. But I was admitted to Harvard anyway.
15 I don't know what my score, I think
16 my score might have been zilch, it might have been
17 zero after that experience.
18 And as I walked away from that room
19 on the Vanderbilt campus, a black janitor he said,
20 were you sitting in that room, I said, yes. He
21 said, I have never seen a negro sitting down in any
22 rooms here.
23 He thought it was very strange. He
24 said, what were you doing, I said I was trying to
25 take this examination. And he was amazed and full
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1 of wonder that that had happened. And I was full of
2 wonder too, and I was very relieved to get off of
3 that campus.
4 So, at the beginning, at the end of
5 my Nashville experience, I had these two very
6 unsavory experiences which affected my whole
7 attitude towards Nashville.
8 I was later, much later, the chairman
9 of the board, a trustee of Fisk University and been
10 going back regularly both as alumnus and as a board
11 member. But I have never felt comfortable there
12 because of that experience when I was there in my
13 teens.
14 But we had a marvelous time at Fisk,
15 because Fisk was whereas that all the students were
16 African Americans, the faculty was racially mixed.
17 And we learned there in that rather strange and, I
18 think, some ways unrealistic climate.
19 We learned there that white people
20 were just plain people, just ordinary white people,
21 no mystery about them. And the man who sent me to
22 Harvard turned out to be my best friend outside of
23 my family. The best person I ever had any
24 relationship with.
25 And this was a little oasis there,
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1 where we didn't have any differences, no racial
2 differences of any kind. And where I remember so
3 well when President Roosevelt came to visit the
4 campus in 1934, I was a senior.
5 A student had been lynched, not a
6 student, I'm sorry. A young person living on the
7 Fisk property, the edge of the campus, had been
8 taken out and lynched the spring of 1934. And we
9 were, of course, very much exercised by that
10 experience.
11 And when we learned that the
12 president was coming to Fisk, the president of the
13 United States, students decided to bring him in on
14 the protest. To petition him to make a statement
15 about it.
16 Well, the president of Fisk was very
17 distressed about that and persuaded us not to do it.
18 And I was president of the student government at the
19 time, and he persuaded me not to do it.
20 But this was an experience too, which
21 I should have mentioned this coloring, my old
22 feeling about the town and so forth.
23 And we were called off from doing
24 that, that's another story of the president. The
25 president of Fisk said he would get us an
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1 appointment with the president of the United States,
2 if we would just not badger him when he was on
3 campus.
4 One of the things that we did though
5 that spring, was to not only to entertain the
6 president of the United States, the Fisk class
7 singing and that sort of thing. But we welcomed the
8 whole community.
9 The president said he was only going
10 to stop at Andrew Jackson birth place, and Fisk
11 University. Well, white people in Nashville
12 couldn't imagine the president of the United States
13 would come to Nashville and go to a black school,
14 and that's all he would do in Nashville. They
15 couldn't believe it.
16 And we therefore, arranged bleachers
17 and so forth for everyone who wanted to come and see
18 the president of the United States. And as
19 president of the student government, I was sort of
20 officiating around and people doing what I told
21 them, so to speak.
22 And one white man came up to me and
23 said, where are the white people sitting, I said
24 anywhere. He said, anywhere, and I said yes. And
25 he was very, I don't want to convey that he was
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1 hostile, he was not.
2 He said, you know, this is very
3 strange. He said, I voted democratic ticket every
4 time in my life. He said, but if Franklin Roosevelt
5 doesn't think anymore of my vote than to come out
6 here to a place where I have to sit with black
7 people, he said I'll never vote the democratic
8 ticket again.
9 And he wasn't hostile, he was
10 bringing me in on the resolution that he had taken.
11 He just couldn't do that. Democrats were going to
12 do that, then he had to turn his back on them.
13 And that put another cast on my view
14 of this whole thing. I was utterly and completely
15 confused by these different attitudes that I saw.
16 That I continued to see and I continue to see even
17 in my later years.
18 I sometimes think that if I'm going
19 to understand this, I need to be awarded another
20 degree. It's a conundrum, it's difficult to
21 understand.
22 Well, all of these experiences
23 happened since I--I won't belabor, I won't burden
24 you with anything since then. But the experiences
25 that I've had since I've been 80 years old, and that
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1 wasn't yesterday you see.
2 But I've learned not to be too
3 surprised, there have been lessons to me and I have
4 learned more lessons.
5 I remember the night before I was to
6 receive the medal, the Presidential Medal of
7 Freedom, I gave a dinner party to celebrate that in
8 Washington at the club which I belonged there.
9 And I invited some friends to come in
10 to have dinner with me that evening, and some of
11 them had not been to the club before and it was a
12 very wealthy place, and I was taking them on a tour
13 of the club.
14 And we got up in the library, we were
15 in the library and I remembered I had two more
16 guests that hadn't arrived. So, I would go down the
17 grand staircase to the lobby, to see if the guests
18 were there.
19 And as I came into the lobby, a white
20 woman walked up to me and said, listen, go and get
21 my coat. She gave me her coat check, she offered me
22 her coat check.
23 I said, madam, if you will present
24 that coat check to the uniformed attendant at the
25 club, and all of the attendants here are uniformed,
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1 perhaps you will get your coat. And I walked away,
2 I don't know whether she got her coat. I didn't
3 wait to see whether she did.
4 I thought that she might meditate on
5 that for a while and perhaps come to some conclusion
6 that she had reached out to a person who, in her
7 view, was there to serve her. Why otherwise should
8 I have been there if I wasn't there to serve her.
9 She could have looked on the wall and
10 seen my pictures the Man Of The Year the previous
11 year, but she didn't. I guess she didn't. But
12 maybe she thought that the Man Of The Year was also
13 a porter, I don't know.
14 Q. What was Harvard like when you were there?
15 A. What's that?
16 Q. What was Harvard like when you were there?
17 A. Well, it was the great university that it is, and I
18 didn't run into many racial incidents at Harvard. I
19 know that it was--there was so few of us there, so
20 few blacks there that I think we were inconspicuous
21 to the point of being almost invisible.
22 I remember that when I was taking a
23 course in economics, in this world economic history,
24 one of the very distinguished people in world
25 economic history, counsels, advisors, presidents of
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1 that sort of thing.
2 He told a so-called Negro joke in
3 class and I'm sitting there, but he was oblivious to
4 the fact that I might have been offended or that I
5 was even there. It just weren't enough of us there
6 to make any difference, no critical mass or
7 anything. He didn't see me.
8 You got one person and 35 or 40
9 people, I guess, you can't be seen I don't care how
10 dark you are. Your consciousness is not extended to
11 that point.
12 I think that the thing that I
13 experienced at Harvard, most searing experience, it
14 was not the anti--not the race, not racism but
15 anti-Semitism. And that was really a remarkable
16 revelation to me.
17 I didn't know what anti-Semitism was,
18 I had been so busy trying to wear my way through my
19 problems, life problems that I had before me, that I
20 did not know that other people had problems.
21 So, when I was a member of the
22 Henry Adams Club, which is a club of American
23 history students at Harvard. The time came for us
24 to have officers, to nominate officers for the
25 following year, we had a nominating committee.
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1 And I'm so naive that I did not
2 realize that when was I proposed for the nominating
3 committee, number one person on the nominating
4 committee, the first person proposed.
5 I didn't know that I was to be
6 certain that I wasn't nominated for anything. So,
7 when the nominating committee met and the chair, I
8 was not the chair, the chair said, well, for whom
9 should we have for president.
10 And I named the person who I thought
11 that should have the president. I said, he's an
12 outstanding student, best student in our group. And
13 I think he should be in. He's faithful, active in
14 the club, he should be the president of the club.
15 Dead silence all the way around,
16 absolute silence. I don't know what's going on,
17 what's the matter. And then one of the students
18 spoke up and said, well, he doesn't have all of the
19 attributes of a Jew. But he's still a Jew.
20 I'm so speechless, I don't even know
21 what they're talking about. And I finally was able
22 to indicate to him, I don't know what these
23 attributes are that the students have, what are
24 they.
25 Well, you know, but I did not know.
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1 And I was speaking honestly, I did not know. I
2 never heard that before. And so I really will have
3 to go back--it struck me as so untoward, so un
4 everything, so unAmerican that I don't even remember
5 what happened.
6 I can only say that that person when
7 all of these others fell by the way side, most of
8 them didn't even get their degrees, this person
9 became the most distinguished fellow in the history
10 of Harvard University.
11 He thought there were a few things,
12 and I was proud that we remained friends for 60
13 years.
14 But the other thing about Harvard was
15 that the climate was such that I was able to
16 understand immediately what there was about it that
17 caused so many young people to become full of
18 themselves and take themselves more seriously than I
19 thought they should.
20 As I said, I didn't have any
21 problems, I didn't have any difficulty with academic
22 problems at all. I had some financial problems, but
23 those were solved after the first year with
24 fellowships and so forth.
25 And when I finished my exams and I
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1 was asked by my major professor if I wanted any
2 further fellowships, and I said no, I just want to
3 leave, I want to get out of here. The atmosphere
4 was so stifling to me and I wanted to leave and
5 become myself again.
6 The pretensions were so great, and
7 the effort to be like professors was so great that I
8 thought it was no place for me, so I left. And I
9 was glad to get a job and write my dissertation when
10 I was working. I was writing on their money, on
11 their fellowship money.
12 I was happier and got more
13 experience, and learned more and was out of that
14 climate that--you see I began to realize that it was
15 something wrong with that climate, it was
16 anti-Semitic. So, probably I didn't see it because
17 it was anti-black too, much more than I really could
18 feel or experience.
19 It gave me, it put me on notice that
20 if Jews were special I must be very special. In an
21 unsavory and unattractive way.
22 Q. You said something earlier, Professor Franklin, that
23 I didn't understand when we first talked about the
24 riots in Tulsa delayed your arrival in that city by
25 four years?
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1 A. Well, my father had gone to Tulsa the year before to
2 start a new life, to make a living. And he did
3 well, he was prospering and everything. So much so
4 that he said that we could come up at the end of the
5 school year, he would come and get us and everything
6 at the end of the school year and we'll be together
7 again.
8 And I so was very anxious because I
9 was six and going to be with my daddy again. And we
10 were packed and waiting for him to come. And he was
11 coming on the point of day the first of June. We
12 waited and he didn't come. The next day he didn't
13 come. The next day he didn't come.
14 There was no means of communication.
15 There was no telephone, there was not a telephone in
16 Rentiesville. There weren't many telephones
17 anywhere in those days.
18 Finally my mother read in the
19 newspaper that had been dropped off at Rentiesville
20 from Muskogee, down in Muskogee, the Muskogee Daily
21 News, that there had been a riot down in Tulsa. And
22 there were many casualties.
23 And then she didn't know whether her
24 husband, our father, was living or dead and didn't
25 know that for several more days. And finally we got
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1 a note from him.
2 When the riot broke he stepped out of
3 his place, his office, to see what was going on and
4 he was seized, taken to a place of detention. Kept
5 for several days there.
6 When he got out everything that he
7 had had been destroyed. The house that he rented
8 for us had been burned to the ground. His office
9 had been destroyed, the building had been wrecked.
10 He couldn't find anything, any of his possessions
11 anywhere.
12 And that kept him really from writing
13 us or communicating with us for some days. And
14 because when he could get around, when he did get
15 around to communicating with us, he couldn't come
16 because by that time he had established his law
17 offices in a tent. There was no buildings in the
18 black community, no building at all.
19 He established his law office in a
20 tent, he stayed there at night. And he was busy
21 with his clients suing the insurance companies,
22 suing the city, suing the mayor, everyone in sight
23 for some compensation, reimbursement and so forth.
24 So he was so busy he couldn't come.
25 And he finally was able to--the city
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1 had passed an ordinance saying that there could be
2 no reconstruction in that section of town unless it
3 was a fireproof construction.
4 Well, they didn't have any money to
5 build fireproof. My father advised his clients to
6 build with orange crates, if necessary, build with
7 anything. And they, of course, were arrested for
8 violating the city ordinance.
9 And he took that case to the state
10 supreme court and it was declared, the ordinance was
11 declared unconstitutional. So we had to wait four
12 more years and then we went out to Tulsa in 1925.
13 And that's when I found what Tulsa
14 was like, and what life was like there, how
15 different it was, how wonderful it was in so many
16 ways.
17 But this climate that I'm talking
18 about, which is kind of an artificial climate, but
19 one that was maintained and that gave us a sense of
20 freedom and of well-being that it was probably not
21 quite true.
22 But it was enough for us to feel that
23 we could go where we wanted to, and do what we
24 wanted to do and be what we wanted to and without
25 any serious consequences, or adverse consequences,
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1 and we did.
2 But, of course, the town couldn't
3 have been more segregated or more Jim Crowe than it
4 was. And my parents, of course, would not and did
5 not ever demean themselves by accepting segregation
6 of any sort.
7 When I went to the courtroom with my
8 father, if the blacks were not segregated by law but
9 by custom they were, he never let me sit over there.
10 If it was a jury trial and the jury
11 was sitting, then he brought me to the bar and I sat
12 with him at the bar. If not, he said you can sit
13 you can sit over there where the jury is supposed to
14 sit.
15 When the Chicago Symphony Opera came
16 to town my mother was a musician she loved the
17 music, she wouldn't go to the opera because it was
18 segregated.
19 And she said, well, if you want--I
20 said, I want to see the opera. She said, well, it's
21 segregated we don't go to anything like that, but if
22 you want to demean yourself, if you want sell your
23 dignity that way, go ahead.
24 And I went with music teacher and so
25 forth, I went. I told this story in a PBS
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1 documentary and the director of the Metropolitan
2 Opera in New York saw it and wrote to me, and said
3 I'm sorry you learned a little opera under those
4 conditions, but I'm glad you've learned to love it.
5 From now on you will never have to do
6 that again, you can be my guest in my box at the
7 Metropolitan whenever you want to. And Joseph--and
8 I have become very good friends because I go to the
9 opera as his guest.
10 But they wouldn't tolerate any kind
11 of segregation. So, I grew up in a household that
12 was hostile to the practices of racism. And I
13 learned, I learned what they were, although--I
14 learned what that was, although I didn't practice it
15 as a youngster.
16 I would have to wait and learn what
17 the adversities were before I would be able to
18 practice it. As I was able to practice it after I
19 went to college.
20 Q. You were able to practice?
21 A. To abstain from going into segregated places. As a
22 child I did not, as an adult I did. It was
23 something that I was forced to like during the
24 research and that's all.
25 Q. You went back to Fisk to teach, is that right?
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1 A. Uh-huh. To Fisk?
2 Q. Yes.
3 A. Yes, I went back only for one year to teach. I
4 taught there in 1936, '37. Just an interim while I
5 was in graduate school, I went back to teaching at
6 my friend's place, the man who sent me to Harvard,
7 he was going away.
8 And by that time I had a master's
9 degree, and although I was a very, very junior
10 teacher at Fisk, they tolerated me for one year.
11 And I taught there and then I went back to graduate
12 school and finished my Ph.D.
13 But I stayed out of downtown
14 Nashville for the most part when I was back there
15 for that one year.
16 Q. What were your other teaching jobs, and how did race
17 become a factor?
18 A. Well, I taught at Fisk, St. Augustus college in
19 Raleigh. Then I taught at North Carolina College
20 for Negros in Durham.
21 It was when my luck ran out in
22 Raleigh with the draft board, and they were about to
23 draft me that I changed colleges.
24 And I called Dr. Sheperd, the founder
25 and the current president of North Carolina College
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1 for Negros. And this is after I was not able to do
2 anything else in Raleigh, and after the president of
3 St. Augustus College told me he would not write a
4 letter to my draft board.
5 He said because he thought the Army
6 would be good for me. And it would teach me to hang
7 up my clothes, to be neat. And I told him my mother
8 had done that already. And I got up and left.
9 I called the president of North
10 Carolina College in Durham, North Carolina for
11 Negros in Durham. I said is that offer that you
12 made to me last year still standing, and he said, of
13 course.
14 I said I'll come to your college,
15 I'll come over and teach under one condition, he
16 said what's that. I said, you're on the Draft
17 Appeal Board, aren't you? He said, yes. I said
18 that you will keep me out of the Army.
19 He said, well, it would be a disaster
20 for the United States for you to go into the Army.
21 He said, I will be glad to keep you out, maybe we
22 can win the war then. So I said I'll come right
23 over. So I went over there and I spent four years
24 there.
25 Then I went to Howard University, at
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1 that time I had published several books and I went
2 to Howard University as a full professor. I was 26
3 years--I'm sorry, 32 years old.
4 And then I stayed there nine years
5 and I went to Brooklyn College where I went as
6 chairman of the department and professor, it was
7 1956.
8 And it was there that I got some more
9 experiences in this life of what it means. I
10 learned a great deal about northern racism.
11 Brooklyn College is located in a
12 wonderful residential section of Brooklyn. And I
13 was living in an apartment, my wife and my son and I
14 were living in an apartment up on east--when I saw
15 all of these lovely houses there down there, and I
16 said, well, it must be wonderful to walk to work.
17 And so I began to look for a house.
18 And no real estate dealer in Brooklyn
19 would show me a house. I'd read in the New York
20 Times here is this house for sale, then I would go
21 and see the real estate dealer who advertised the
22 house, it wasn't available for me.
23 And I worked at that for several
24 months and I wasn't getting anywhere. I wasn't
25 seeing a house, I couldn't even see a house.
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1 And then I concluded that I wasn't
2 going do see a house through the real estate
3 dealers, and I decided the next level of search
4 would be to find houses offered for sale by the
5 owners.
6 And I would confront the person who
7 was the sales person who would be the owner. And I
8 began to see some houses, but not many.
9 And as I went into the homes that
10 were for sale by the owner, I remember one instance
11 we came out of this house, he told us that it was
12 just about concluded the sale. But if that fell
13 through, he would be glad to call me and took my
14 telephone number. I didn't hear from him.
15 But I came out of that house,
16 apparently the word had got through that we were
17 looking for a house. This black couple was looking
18 for a house, and every white person in the block was
19 out in front of their house. All the way down the
20 block, to watch to see this black couple come out.
21 It was sort of sending a message, I assume.
22 I thought I could read the message,
23 it said that they didn't want me in that block.
24 Well, they couldn't get me anyway, because the man
25 didn't call.
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1 We finally found one house though
2 that sounded interesting and we called, it was a
3 Saturday afternoon, we called this owner and this
4 owner said, what are you doing and I said, well,
5 we're not anything that we can stop doing--that we
6 can't stop doing.
7 He said, well, why don't you come
8 down here and see this house. And went down to this
9 house and we looked at it, and we were very
10 interested in the house as we approached it.
11 We parked and we rang the bell and
12 the man came to the door. He and someone else was
13 sitting in the kitchen, you could see it, this
14 living room, dining room, kitchen, you could see
15 that.
16 And he said just a minute, and he
17 went back and he took a drink. And he came back, he
18 said you want to see the house, you're the one who
19 called, and I said, yes.
20 He said come in. He said, this is
21 the living room, I said I thought that was the
22 living room. I didn't know, but I thought that.
23 Then I attributed his change in
24 attitude to the drink that he had taken, that that
25 might be a misreading.
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1 But by the time we got past the
2 living room and into the dining room, he began to
3 push his house. He began telling me how good it was
4 and that how much money he had put into it, and that
5 I might be very pleased with it.
6 And he said, how do you like this, I
7 said it is all right, I like it. He said, you know
8 how much money I put into this basement. And then
9 he took me upstairs, me and my wife and my son
10 upstairs.
11 And then he finished showing me the
12 house, he was pushing the house on me. So I told
13 him that I would let him know. He called me the
14 next week and said, what about the house, you want
15 it?
16 I said, I think so, but I've got to
17 go away to see my father, he's not well. He said,
18 when are you coming back, I said I'll be back by the
19 first of December, we'll be back soon.
20 He said, look, if you want this house
21 I'll take it off the market now, I'll wait for you.
22 I said, well, I think I want it, he said I'll take
23 it off, I want you to have it.
24 And so I came back and I told him I
25 thought I would take it. So, we signed the contact,
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1 my lawyer was in on the deal, and my lawyer, my
2 Brooklyn lawyer.
3 And he said, well, how we going to
4 pay for this house, he said, well, we've got to find
5 the money. And he said, do you have an insurance, I
6 said yes, and I told him the insurance company.
7 He said, well, your problems are
8 over. He said, they had set aside several scores of
9 millions of dollars for their own customers, their
10 own policy holders.
11 He said, what's your policy, I got it
12 out for him. How much was it, $20,000. He said,
13 what's the name of your insurance agent, I told him.
14 So, the next day I got a call from my insurance
15 agent.
16 He said, now I don't want you to get
17 a misunderstanding, we have done a lot for you
18 people. I said, what are you talking about. He
19 said, well, you want to borrow money to buy a house,
20 I said yes. And you've got lots of money for your
21 policy holders.
22 He said, it was not really for
23 everybody. He said you want to buy a house on
24 New York Avenue, I said yes, 1885, he said that's
25 the wrong block.
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1 He said, I can't lend you money to
2 buy a house that far down because you're leaping
3 over a white neighborhood going into this other
4 neighborhood, he said, that's too far. He said you
5 have to take it neighborhood by neighborhood.
6 I said, well, I want to live in that
7 neighborhood. He said, we can't lend money for
8 that. I said, well, what's this money for that
9 you've got.
10 He said it's for our customers, but
11 they have to conform to the pattern of living that
12 we want them to conform to. I said, so I can't buy
13 in that block, that area, because I'm black, he said
14 that right.
15 He said, but I'll get the money for
16 you, I said from where, he said another company I
17 can get them. I said well, then that's the company
18 that I should be insured by.
19 And I said and as of now, you can
20 consider me not your customer anymore. And I turned
21 him down. I turned his offer to get the insurance
22 company to get the money for me.
23 And there I was back where I started.
24 I went to my lawyer, Murray Gross, I said Murray, I
25 still don't have the money, this man won't let me
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1 have money from this insurance company and I
2 cancelled my $20,000 insurance with him.
3 And we have to start over. He said,
4 well there's banks, we'll get it from the bank. And
5 he told me the full story of this when I was about
6 to leave Brooklyn for Chicago.
7 He pulled out the folder of requests
8 that he made to New York banks. Not one bank in
9 New York would let me have the money, not one. This
10 included the bank in Harlem, it was a front for a
11 downtown bank anyway.
12 So there I am with no bank to lend me
13 money. And then he told me then how his father was
14 on the board of the South Brooklyn & Savings Bank
15 and he got the money through his father. That's the
16 only way I got money to buy that home.
17 I was so determined to have it and I
18 was determined to have it by the time the insurance
19 company turned me down, that he then decided that he
20 would help me get the money, and he did from the
21 bank on which his father served as a board member.
22 That was quite an experience for me.
23 In the community where I had been the
24 favorite, my picture was on the front page of the
25 New York Times when I went to Brooklyn. It was a
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1 spectacular historical appointment, an African
2 American the chair of the department at Brooklyn
3 College of the City University, that's a first.
4 But although I could teach their
5 children, I could not live among them. That's what
6 the message was. And I felt that perhaps I was like
7 the barber who could cut their hair, but could not
8 belong to their church. Or the maid who kept their
9 children, but could not sit down to eat at the table
10 with them.
11 I didn't know. This is a strange
12 kind of treatment of a person who do they entrusted
13 their young people to me. So that when I moved in I
14 felt that I was moving among enemies. And I was.
15 The man next door would not move his
16 car so that the moving van could come into the curb
17 by the house. It had to sit out in the middle of
18 the street and take our belongings out of the van.
19 It took hours, tied up traffic and
20 everything but he didn't care. I got anonymous
21 calls from people that I knew that they hated us,
22 they lived in the same block. Telling me things
23 about myself, telling me I thought I was more than I
24 was.
25 One time we went out, my son and I
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1 went out to paint the picket fence in front of our
2 house, apparently the word got around in the
3 neighborhood up and down in the block that we were
4 there, not to destroy the neighborhood, but to
5 improve it I suppose they might have said. It was a
6 half gallon of paint to put on a picket fence.
7 But they all came and stood and
8 looked across the street. Just looked, didn't say a
9 word. The silent treatment they gave me.
10 And it was the end of my wife's
11 career because they began to taunt my son who was
12 six years old. These are adults. Frightening him
13 when he would ride on his bicycle.
14 Telling him, aren't you afraid to be
15 here and that sort of thing. And he would come home
16 and tell us what they said. And my wife said, I
17 must be here for him.
18 So, she gave up her librarian career
19 and remained home until he went off to college.
20 Never set without him, never being without him.
21 Never letting him become a latch key kid, she was
22 there whenever he came home from school.
23 So it was my northern exposure to
24 racism was not better than my southern exposure.
25 Q. Was that different when you went to Chicago
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1 subsequently?
2 A. What's that?
3 Q. Was that different?
4 A. It was largely different when I went to Chicago. By
5 that time I had become accustomed to walking to
6 working to work, you see. And so in Chicago I
7 wanted to walk to work.
8 But there the University of Chicago
9 controlled all the real estate in that area and they
10 secured the home for me. They were the intervenors,
11 sort to speak.
12 They knew that a certain professor
13 was putting his house up for sale, because he was
14 going to Vassar, as president of Vassar. And so
15 they said, if you like this house we will arrange it
16 so that you can get it.
17 And I liked it and we purchased it,
18 and it was that. And the second day we were there,
19 or maybe the same day we moved in, the youngsters in
20 the neighborhood learned that there was a youngster
21 in the neighborhood in the house, so they wanted to
22 know if they could come in and visit with him and so
23 forth. And they welcomed him.
24 We only had one incident, and that
25 was when my son who by this time was becoming fluent
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1 in French. Belonged to the French Club which was
2 made up of adults and students.
3 And he had gone across the street
4 from our house to the home of one of the wives of a
5 professor in the English Department.
6 And the University of Chicago
7 policeman saw him coming out of this house and he
8 stopped him. And he said, what are you doing in
9 this neighborhood, why are you coming out of this
10 house. He said, I live across the street. And they
11 wanted to know what I did.
12 And then my son came into the house
13 out of breath and he said, the police, University
14 Police stopped me and wanted to know what I was
15 doing in the neighborhood.
16 And I called Edward--the president of
17 University of Chicago that moment. And told him
18 that the person who was patrolling that neighborhood
19 had stopped my son.
20 I said he cannot grow up being
21 stopped by the University of Chicago Police, I want
22 this stopped now.
23 He called the policeman in and
24 reprimanded him and issued an order to the police
25 department of the University, that they were not to
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1 do this, not to accost young blacks in the
2 neighborhood because it was a presumption, it was
3 early profiling you see.
4 It was a presumption that something
5 was wrong if he was coming out of one of those
6 houses. And I said you can't do this, my son cannot
7 like that, we cannot live in this situation. And
8 that was stopped immediately.
9 That was the only experience that we
10 had that I would say untoward or adverse. And he
11 lived happily ever after that at that school and
12 went on to Stanford after that.
13 Q. Chicago is your last appointment before Duke, is
14 that right?
15 A. Yes, I retired from the University of Chicago in
16 1980, driven out by the weather. And retired to
17 Durham where I wanted to live. I was a fellow of
18 the National Humanity Center, I was a senior fellow
19 at the National Humanity Center.
20 And I was there writing the life of
21 George Washington Williams, one of my subjects. And
22 the second year there I was invited to be the Duke
23 professor at Duke University.
24 So, I didn't go from Chicago to Duke,
25 I went from Chicago to Durham to the National
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1 Humanity Center, then I became a professor of the
2 Duke. Called out of retirement, I had no intention
3 of teaching anymore.
4 But those were eight or nine years of
5 the most delightful times of my life of teaching at
6 Duke. Both first and the second year. And then in
7 the law school I taught in the law school for seven
8 years, teaching American constitution.
9 Q. What made you like Duke so much?
10 A. Well, it was a different kind of experience, and I
11 was invited to be the James B. Duke professor. I
12 had had two chairs, one in this country and one in
13 England. And I was accustomed to chairs.
14 But Duke had never had an African
15 American sitting in a chair, named chair, and I
16 thought that it would be a good experience for Duke.
17 And that was one of the main reasons that I
18 accepted. And I think it was good experience for
19 Duke. And I hastily say that it was for me too.
20 I said this was some crowning
21 experience of my career, and a very packard one. It
22 was no unhappy experiences about that at Duke at
23 all. And they have been very good to me and paid me
24 homage that I could be paid, I think.
25 I have an honorary degree from Duke.
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1 There's the John Hope Franklin Center for Africans
2 and African Americans documentation at Duke. And on
3 the 8th of February, they will open the John Hope
4 Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and
5 International Studies, the whole building.
6 It will open on the 8th of February.
7 So I have no quarrel with Duke about what they do.
8 Q. I will say though that on the honorary degree
9 they're not really standing out a list of
10 institutions that you have degrees from, it's
11 probably easier to go through then the list of ones
12 that have?
13 A. I wouldn't say that. There are maybe a thousand
14 colleges and universities in that country, two or
15 three thousand, I have only 128 honorary degrees.
16 Q. Tell us about your scholarship, Dr. Franklin?
17 A. Well, you mean my public work, my writing?
18 Q. Yes.
19 A. I was very fortunate in picking a subject for my
20 doctorate dissertation, which at the end of the line
21 that is when I finished with it, my mentor at Howard
22 Professor Shaveying announced at my final
23 examination, said my dissertation was ready to be
24 published. He recommended that I publish it, that
25 it be published.
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1 Mr. Crittenton the head of the
2 North Carolina Archives, the one who put me in a
3 separate room and so forth. Who was a Yale Ph.D in
4 history, by the way. And upon reading my
5 dissertation, asked if he could send it to the
6 University of North Carolina Press, he says it's
7 ready to be published. So he did and they published
8 it. They published it.
9 Its been published and republished
10 and reprinted. And the University of North Carolina
11 Press has even brought out a new edition on it the
12 last three or four years. That's at one end.
13 And then my second publication it was
14 off of one of my students. I was lecturing on the
15 Civil War at St. Augustus College and one my
16 students came up to me and said, you know, you're
17 talking about the Civil War and it reminds me that
18 we have a Civil War diary that's been in the family
19 since 19--he said since the end of the Civil War.
20 And would you like to see it and I said, yes.
21 And he brought it, he sent for it and
22 it came up, and I read it and it was so interesting.
23 It was a diary of a white man who at the age of 57
24 years old, wanted to go into the Army and he did.
25 He enlisted in the Union Army, but he was put in the
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1 Infantry, you know, how long a 57 year old would
2 last in the Infantry.
3 And he was then transferred after
4 1864, he was transferred into the recruiting
5 section. And he was dispatched to recruit black
6 soldiers after the United States proclamation, to
7 recruit black soldiers.
8 And he kept an account of that. And
9 I then published that as a Civil War diary of
10 James T. Ayers. That's just been reprinted by the
11 Louisiana State University Press this year.
12 Then I began to work on the Militant
13 South. And I was in the middle of that when I was
14 asked if I would be interested in writing a history
15 about African Americans and I said no, I'm busy.
16 I'm busy doing this.
17 But the head of the college kept
18 nagging me and nagging me and finally I relented,
19 and agreed to write from Slavery To Freedom, The
20 History Of African Americans. That was 57 years
21 ago. 53 years ago, I'm sorry. 54 years ago.
22 And that, of course, has gone through
23 eight editions. And it's used widely. It's, I
24 guess, between three and four million copies are in
25 print.
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1 And I then proceeded to do other
2 things, write out for other books. I wrote a book
3 at the University of Chicago on the subject of
4 Reconstruction After The Civil War.
5 The Militant South which I postponed
6 to write From Slavery To Freedom, the Harvard
7 University Press published it.
8 That's a very interesting angle. I'm
9 writing my autobiography now, and the only thing I'm
10 finding is the actual historians through that book
11 on the Militant South. Which is not about blacks at
12 all, it's about whites.
13 There was a feeling that maybe I was
14 not qualified to write about whites. And the reader
15 whom I know now who it was, reading it for the
16 Harvard University Press said that, I don't see why
17 you need a Negro view of the south.
18 But if you insist on having a Negro
19 view of the south, maybe Franklin is the best person
20 you can get to do it. That's in the review which he
21 submitted to the Harvard University Press, which I
22 later did receive.
23 And I said to the director of the
24 Press, I don't see no Negro view of the south, it's
25 a view of the south period. The director of the
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1 Press said, we understand that, that's why we wanted
2 it and they published it.
3 Then I wrote a book on the
4 Emancipation of Proclamation from a textual study of
5 the Emancipation. Like Lincoln came to write it and
6 so forth.
7 And then I wrote a book, another book
8 on white southerners it's called Southern Odyssey
9 Travel of the Annabella North. Which I described
10 the addictions that southerners had to the north, it
11 was a real addiction.
12 So much so there were large numbers
13 of them in the north at the time of the Civil War.
14 And they ran home from the war, but the day the war
15 was over they began to come back. And that story is
16 a bit interesting in itself.
17 That book won some kind of prize from
18 the Southern History. And I don't know, you remind
19 me that I wrote that. I will be able to tell you
20 why I wrote it, but it goes on.
21 Q. Let me ask you about your experience recently as the
22 chair of the President's Initiative on Race?
23 A. Uh-huh.
24 Q. What was the initiative, or how did you become to be
25 involved in that?
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1 A. Well, I can tell you what the initiative was. The
2 president decided very early in his administration
3 that we had to do something about the problem of
4 race in America. This is President Clinton.
5 He come to North Carolina when he was
6 running for president and asked if I would visit
7 with him and I said, yes.
8 And I met him and the vice president
9 candidate, the candidate for vice president and the
10 family all at the same time, they came to Durham.
11 And I met them all a week before the election in
12 1992.
13 And then shortly after he became
14 president, the next contact I had with the
15 administration was through the vice president who
16 said to me one day he said, you know, I want to know
17 something more about race too.
18 And I wonder if you would help me
19 understand it by providing the intellectual feed if
20 I will provide the other kind of feed.
21 He said, I propose to hold three
22 seminars at my house and then invite 25 or 30 people
23 to each one of those. And I would like for you to
24 meet these--these would be influential people. Some
25 would be members of the cabinet, some will be
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1 members of Congress, some will be scholars and so
2 forth, and I did that for three consecutive weeks.
3 The vice president and Mrs. Gore.
4 And my next contact I think was with
5 the president, when he conferred on me the Medal of
6 Freedom. And he made a speech on me that day which
7 surprised me, I didn't know he knew that much about
8 me. This was 1995.
9 And he told stories about me, some of
10 which I shared with you, and I was really amazed.
11 But it was shortly after that, that he began to talk
12 to me about the Initiative of Race, which he had set
13 up in the White House already.
14 And it was through that initiative
15 that they began to develop programs of various parts
16 of the government for the immediate racial
17 situations in those departments and so forth.
18 And then finally, he decided he
19 wanted an advisory board to the Initiative, which
20 was staffed by people in the White House.
21 He wanted an advisory board that
22 would recommend to him, that would study the
23 situation and recommend to him some things that we
24 thought he ought to do.
25 And the board was created on the 13th
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1 of June, 1997, announced, it was the day. And the
2 next day it was announced at the meeting--at the
3 commencement at the University of California
4 San Diego.
5 The president met with us the day
6 before, and he took us all out there in Air Force
7 One, and we were really part of the commencement
8 exercises back there at U of C San Diego.
9 And he made the announcement there,
10 had all of us to stand. Told what we were up to,
11 what he wanted us to be up to, and he met with us
12 and brought us back to Washington.
13 Then we were on our own after that.
14 We were organized as an advisory board, under the
15 public laws of the federal government, which meant
16 that we were a public agency, no private meetings at
17 all.
18 We were getting acquainted, we had to
19 get acquainted in public. It was awkward for me to
20 say, now, what's your name and put that down.
21 But we began to develop a plan of
22 work with staff of about 25 to 30 people who helped
23 us. And we decided to study various aspects of the
24 problems of race in this country.
25 To start a dialogue is what the
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1 president wanted us to do, is start a dialogue.
2 Some people felt that that was not terribly
3 necessary in view of the fact that we have been
4 talking about race for three or 400 years.
5 But we felt that it was desirable,
6 very necessary to look at the problem
7 systematically, and to bring to bear on the problem
8 the research and findings that scholars and
9 statesmen had brought to it.
10 And that we could enlighten ourselves
11 and inform the Initiative on Race and the president
12 on the subject, and to make recommendations to him
13 about what he should do or could do.
14 We met in various parts of the
15 country as a board, and we individually were
16 burdened because by this time large numbers of
17 invitations were coming to us from all over.
18 And I traveled from Florida to
19 Seattle, and from California to Boston, you know,
20 and in many parts in between.
21 And we held hearings, I suppose you
22 would call them, which were largely airings of
23 people's feelings. We got informational scholars to
24 respond to a very deal. And we also invited people
25 to come and tell us what they were doing, how they
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1 felt, what their experiences had been.
2 And I remember that there were a
3 large number of people that did that. And even when
4 we didn't invite them they came. Is this
5 particularly true, they came to me, they came to me.
6 Came to my home.
7 One man traveled from New Jersey to
8 North Carolina just to tell me about a problem of
9 race as he experienced it.
10 Some people in North Carolina came to
11 my home. I didn't know that this was going to be a
12 part of the experience.
13 There were some feeling that maybe we
14 were going to do something about the matter, but we
15 were not going to solve the problem, you see. We
16 were to air the problem and to give information to
17 the president.
18 But as I traveled about the country,
19 I got the impression that people thought that I was
20 the sort of ombudsman of the race problem. I was
21 the coming, you would say. What's the score, you
22 know, who's on first.
23 You know, it's amazing the kind of
24 presumption that people make about people who are
25 given some responsibility, and how they define,
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1 people define that responsibility. In every way in
2 ranging from you do nothing, to you do everything.
3 A page appeared in the New York Times
4 on the Monday after we were appointed on Friday,
5 describing the hopelessness of doing anything about
6 race. And that this was the worst way to go about
7 it.
8 And it ranged from there all the way
9 to the insistence on the part of some people that we
10 should be given Carte Blanche to do anything and
11 everything, and that we could, we were empowered to
12 do these things.
13 Well, neither one of those things is
14 true. We couldn't do everything on the one hand,
15 and we couldn't do nothing on the other. We did
16 some things, but not as much as people might have
17 expected.
18 I regarded the undertaking as a
19 relatively modest undertaking. And that's the
20 historian's prospective, that is that we're not
21 going to solve in 13 months, we're not going to
22 solve in 13 months what we haven't been able to
23 solve in 300 years, you see. It just doesn't work
24 like that.
25 But you work at it and you do what
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1 you can, and perhaps you will make a dent and you
2 might turn a corner even. And we worked hard and we
3 made the report.
4 People who felt that the president
5 was distracted by his many efforts and activities
6 and his non-presidential activities. But I said,
7 you know, people said, well it's too bad he's not
8 paying more attention to you, he's paying attention
9 to her or whoever.
10 I said, well, you know, we didn't
11 expect the president to come to every meeting, these
12 guys have a few more things to do. He had the
13 Middle East that's seizing and Yugoslavia and so
14 forth, and that all the problems in this country,
15 economic, political, social.
16 So, that we're supposed to do our job
17 and tell him what we're doing, and to make
18 recommendations for him.
19 Now, we made recommendations to the
20 president over and over again, he responded. And I
21 wrote the president every month, people would see
22 our report and think that's what we did. But no, we
23 wrote him every month. We had contact with him
24 every month that we were in the office.
25 And he responded every month.
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1 Frequently we would go in to see him and talk to
2 him. Or we would go with him on some of his jobs.
3 We went to, I don't know, meeting
4 with him in Pittsburgh, he went to meeting with him
5 in Akron, Ohio, Houston, Texas, various places where
6 he went we went.
7 And he was always exciting, willing,
8 inviting us to come. Even invited me to the
9 White House at times I didn't have time to go to the
10 White House. After all I was doing a few more
11 things besides that.
12 And the recommendations we finally
13 made he was still carrying out this past summer.
14 One of the things that we did, we recommended that
15 he set up at the White House meetings with--we felt
16 that there were things that he could do that we
17 couldn't do.
18 That the power of that office so
19 great, that we thought that he should call the
20 Legal Fraternity. The Legal Fraternity wouldn't
21 listen to us perhaps, but they might listen to him.
22 And we had the meeting at the
23 White House, of course, when he did that he asked me
24 if I would come to the meeting, which I was pleased
25 to do. But he had, I don't know, how many attorney
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1 generals from all over the United States there.
2 He had members from major law firms,
3 small law firms, single lawyers. He had officials
4 of the American Bar Association, the National Bar
5 Association.
6 That's the Black Bar Association that
7 was organized when the American Bar Association
8 wouldn't let blacks in, it was organized. They were
9 there.
10 And the Attorney General of the
11 United States was there, the President's Council was
12 there and so effort. And they had several hundred
13 people in the east wing of the White House.
14 And they would talk to the Attorney
15 General by the president of the American Bar
16 Association, by the president of the United States
17 and so forth.
18 And what they were trying to do is to
19 get the support and the cooperation of the
20 Legal Fraternity to do various things, including
21 increasing the pro bono work so that every person
22 would be protected by--every person in litigation
23 would be protected by adequate counsel and so forth.
24 There was a promise on the part of
25 these various entities, the lawyers, the officials
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1 of the Bar Association, that they would do precisely
2 what was asked of them.
3 They would regard the whole matter of
4 Civil Rights, as a right which would be extended to
5 people in legal difficulty. And that they would do
6 everything they could to be certain that adequate
7 legal services were provided.
8 Then we had recommended that we do
9 the same thing for the so-called faith community.
10 And this past summer or spring, he called in the
11 offices of the National Council of Community
12 Injustice.
13 It used to be Christians and Jews and
14 now they have Muslims and Buddhist, they do the same
15 thing. They have expanded the office, or the title
16 to be more accurate, to more accurately describe
17 what they do. What their constituency is.
18 And every conceivable religious group
19 was there. The president of the National Council
20 was there, and the head of the Orthodox Church was
21 there. There was a cardinal or two there. This
22 were Muslims and there were Protestants of every
23 strip there.
24 So, several hundred members of the
25 faith community came to the White House that
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1 afternoon. They had been in meeting in the morning,
2 by the way, and they had come to the conclusion that
3 racism is a sin, they announced that.
4 Racism is a sin, which they wanted to
5 solve the whole world and everything. And they
6 testified that they were going to do everything they
7 could to wipe out racism in American.
8 So, that was the last of the formal
9 meetings, or organizations that were held under our
10 recognized look by recommendations. At least the
11 last ones so far as I know.
12 But there were other activities that
13 continued. The Initiative On Race continued until
14 Saturday. The director of the Initiative On Race, I
15 had a letter from him yesterday in which he said he
16 had been packing up and leaving, and we talked the
17 previous week. The last week of this activity.
18 And that's what has happened up until
19 Saturday. I don't know what has taken place now.
20 Q. I want to be sure, Professor Franklin, to give you a
21 chance to tell us about so many experiences you've
22 had serving as chair, but it's our regular morning
23 break time. It would be a good time now.
24 THE COURT: Whenever you want.
25 MS. MASSIE: Okay.
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1 THE COURT: I think Professor
2 Franklin needs a break. We'll take 20 minutes, I've
3 got one sentencing I need to do, maybe 25 minutes.
4 And we'll take it from there.
5 (A brief recess was taken.)
6 (Court back in session.)
7 THE COURT: Okay.
8 MS. MASSIE: Thank you, Judge.
9 BY MS. MASSIE:
10 Q. Professor Franklin, could you please tell us about
11 some of your experiences as the chair of the
12 Advisory Committee to the President's Initiative On
13 Race?
14 A. Well, I would simply say that the Advisory Board had
15 a life of 13 months. That we made twelve monthly
16 reports to the president with responses from him.
17 That we met in every part of the country for the
18 purpose of receiving information from specialists in
19 the field.
20 From getting testimony from persons
21 who wanted to voice their opinions. And for just
22 letting people sound off as it were, and to tell us
23 what they thought we ought to be doing.
24 We covered views that ranged from the
25 place of affirmative action and resolving problems
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1 of race, to matters of representation on the
2 Advisory Board itself. As the Native Americans very
3 vigorously protested the fact that there were no
4 Native Americans on the committee.
5 We had covered the whole area
6 spectrum not only in terms of people, but in terms
7 of projects, problems and subjects that the Board
8 felt that it should deal with.
9 Our relationship with the public was
10 on the whole good one, a healthy one. There were
11 protests, of course, from place to place, time to
12 time. But it came with the territory, so to speak.
13 That there were people who felt very
14 deeply and very seriously about the plight of
15 various groups, minorities in this country, and who
16 expressed it. There were those who expressed it
17 with great emotion and so forth.
18 I think the accomplishments of the
19 board were several. I indicate the fact that we
20 made recommendations to the president, and that he
21 followed them I think with some enthusiasm for the
22 most part.
23 Initially meetings which he held our
24 recommendation, there was one thing that we asked
25 him to do which he did not do, and that is to
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1 establish a permanent body to deal with the question
2 of race. That would be composed not only of public
3 officials, but of people from the private sector as
4 well. And this would be ongoing from one
5 administration through another.
6 It would be non-partisan and it would
7 be oblivious to the whole occurrence of politics.
8 He didn't do that, and he never told us why he
9 didn't do it.
10 We learned that for every breath you
11 take in Washington, there's a political
12 consideration that might be behind it and you have
13 to change your breath or whatever it is, on the
14 basis of that political consideration.
15 So, it might have been that, but we
16 did not know. We did not know why he didn't. And
17 that was in our final recommendation, we had no
18 opportunity after that to question him about it.
19 So, that was, we felt it was a
20 major--it would have been a major contribution of
21 ours in its absence. As we felt that was something
22 that was to be regretted.
23 Q. Did your work on the committee, leave you more or
24 less optimistic about race in America?
25 A. It left us more optimistic about race in America.
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1 We couldn't go all over the country and see the
2 enormous intense interest in the question. And to
3 witness the imagination and ingenuity and creativity
4 in our communities without feeling good about what
5 was going on. We published a book called Paths
6 To--I can't remember.
7 Q. Do you remember if the name of it is the Executive
8 Summary?
9 A. No, it's a separate book altogether.
10 Q. Okay.
11 A. Paths to something of the 21st Century. And the
12 subtitle is Promising Practices In Race Relations.
13 Promising Paths Through One America in the 21st
14 Century, that's it. Promising Paths Through One
15 America.
16 And in that we listed several hundred
17 activities that were going on. Many of which were
18 stimulated by our Advisory Board and its work. And
19 these were community activities of all kinds, that
20 ranged say, from the kind of survey of conditions in
21 the various parts of Seattle and the recommendations
22 for the improvement of those conditions.
23 Ranged from that all the way to, say,
24 an incident in Winston Salem, North Carolina where
25 on one day they had a luncheon where they would
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1 explore the problem of race in Winston Salem and
2 make some suggestions for its improvement.
3 But the luncheon was itself a
4 remarkable step. Each person who came to that
5 luncheon not only had to pay for his or her
6 luncheon, but had to bring someone to the luncheon
7 of a different race.
8 And I was in Winston Salem not long,
9 and this happened in 1998. I was in Winston Salem a
10 few months ago and was talking to people who said,
11 they had letters of remarkable friendships that had
12 grown out of that one experience in 1998.
13 Well, that's the sort of thing that
14 we got. Promising practices, all kinds all over the
15 country. The practices of coming together were so
16 spectacular in Akron, Ohio that the President
17 decided we should all go out there and look at it,
18 and have some contact with the people who were
19 involved in their, what they call Coming Together
20 Program.
21 And we all went out on Air Force One
22 and visited with the people a half day. And we were
23 very much encouraged by what we saw there.
24 I would say that the promising
25 Practices were numerous and very effective of the
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1 whole. And they recommended themselves to other
2 communities, that was the beauty of it, the
3 importance of it.
4 That not only was this community
5 successful in doing this, but then other communities
6 could replicate this success in their own if they
7 felt that it was feasible or viable.
8 I think that in some ways that was
9 one of the most effective results, one of the most
10 successful results.
11 As a publication of these experiences
12 and the myriad of communities, several hundred
13 communities and the offering of these experiences to
14 others, and in that way I think they were able to
15 see what they could do in their community that was
16 commended or recommended by other communities.
17 Q. Did the Committee make any findings about the
18 presence, or not, of gaps in understanding in
19 perception between people of different races?
20 A. Yes. We were the ones, we were among those who made
21 some noise about racial profiling. We felt that
22 that was--that should be shared, that the findings
23 should be made and shared nationally and that's in
24 our report.
25 We recognize the differences in
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1 perception of problem of race from one section to
2 another. And even within ones state we found
3 differences in perception of race.
4 And even among groups within
5 communities, it's the problem that connected what I
6 was talking about before our recess. The confusion
7 over what one group conceives as opposed to what
8 another group conceives, or perceives. Much
9 confusion.
10 We found that to be a part of the
11 problem itself. That is the way in which people
12 looked at the problem, it was so, so different in
13 different communities, different places, different
14 areas. And we sought to point that out.
15 And when you see differences like
16 that, or like those, they are unamenable to
17 correction and they are amenable to creative
18 resolution of them.
19 It is when you find that people have
20 different perceptions of the problem of race, and if
21 you can make it quite clear what those differences
22 are, and if you can make it possible for them to see
23 those differences, that step in itself is a move
24 toward the resolution of the problem. And we were
25 able to do that, I think, on a number of occasions.
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1 Q. Could you generalize for us about how the white
2 people who spoke to the Committee about matters of
3 race, saw the question of race?
4 A. I could not generalize to the point of making a
5 statement that would cover all of the white people.
6 I can generalize it to this extent, that there were
7 a number of white people, but no black people who
8 came before the board and said that there was no
9 need to do anything else, the problem was solving
10 itself.
11 That view was not shared by any
12 African American or Latino or Asian American who
13 appeared before the board. That was a view held
14 fairly widely, but not universally among whites who
15 appeared before the board.
16 There were those, of course, who felt
17 that--there were whites who felt a lot more needed
18 to be done. But I have the feeling that that group
19 was in the minority.
20 That surely those who voluntarily
21 came out, I'm not speaking of the specialists that
22 we asked to come and share with us their findings.
23 But those of who voluntarily came, expressed a view
24 that we can describe as satisfied, or a view that
25 held nothing needed to be done on our part or anyone
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1 else's part. It would work itself out in due
2 course. Everything would be all right.
3 That, you know, was not consonant
4 without findings in other areas. Our own studies
5 and so forth, left the impression with us that a
6 great deal needed to be done and could be done, and
7 was being done. That's what these promising
8 practices were about.
9 Q. How do you explain that lack of consonant?
10 A. Well, I would say that there's a widespread feeling
11 on the part of people in the white community that
12 things were all right. They were working themselves
13 out. And that we don't need to be tampering with
14 anything, that in due course it will be all right.
15 On the other hand, I think that the
16 vast numbers of African Americans and some of their
17 white colleagues feel that it will not work itself
18 out, unless you work at it.
19 And it requires not only vigilance
20 but active effort to eliminate some of the causes of
21 the problems of race. And, of course, all the
22 litigation that we see almost daily, settlement of
23 cases of bias.
24 We can find it even in the
25 Fortune 500, we would be busy reading about those.
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1 And that would indicate that things are not all
2 right, that they will not work themselves out unless
3 you work at it or with it. And that's what we felt
4 needed to be done on the board.
5 Q. Was that true in all different sectors of American
6 life? When I say sectors I'm thinking education,
7 transportation, employment?
8 A. I think the generalizations that I made would be
9 true more or less in the various sectors of American
10 life.
11 Q. Professor Franklin, you were involved in Brown
12 versus the Board of Education as a historian, were
13 you not?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Tell us about that?
16 A. Well, I was teaching summer school at Cornell
17 University in the summer of 1953, when I got a call
18 from what already was my very good friend,
19 Thurgood Marshall, asking me what I was going to be
20 doing in the fall.
21 And I said I'm going back to
22 Howard University to teach. And he said in his
23 usual sort of jocular fashion, do you know what else
24 you're going to be doing, I said no. Well, I'm
25 telling you, you're going to be working on Brown
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1 against the Board of Education.
2 And you're going to be coming to
3 New York every week to work with us in our offices.
4 And you're going to head up the nonlegal research
5 staff, which is to answer the questions which were
6 propounded by the Supreme Court in its statement of
7 June of 1953 when they asked us about, asked the
8 counsel on both sides, what were the intent, what
9 was the intent of the framers of the Fourteen
10 Amendment with regard to segregation in the schools.
11 What was the intent of those who
12 voted for the Fourteen Amendment in the state, that
13 so forth and so on.
14 And so I went back to Washington in
15 August of 1953, and began what turned out to be a
16 weekly trip to New York. From the extent of from
17 Wednesday afternoon until Saturday each week. My
18 schedule to teach the classes at Howard was arranged
19 so that I could do this.
20 And I went there and I worked in the
21 offices. First to be there as kind of a resource
22 for the lawyers, and this was a great revelation to
23 me, who admitted that they did not know certain
24 things.
25 And so it was a great satisfaction to
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1 me being a son of a lawyer, to hear when I would
2 take a deep breath and they would say, just a
3 minute, John Hope is about to say something.
4 And they would all listen to me
5 whatever it was I was going to say. They would hang
6 on to my every word. I thought that was very good,
7 very healthy relationship with the lawyers.
8 MR. PAYTON: As we are today.
9 THE COURT: Yes.
10 A. So, I was asked to write several papers on the
11 subject of the evolution of Jim Crowe and education
12 in the south, and various aspects of problems
13 arising out of reconstruction that dealt with
14 segregation of schools and other institutions.
15 And I did research in the library of
16 Congress and various other people were doing
17 research in other places.
18 We also had the way of trying to find
19 out whether the other side, something Thurgood did
20 not approve of, whether the other side was using any
21 materials.
22 And I suppose the statute of
23 limitations might have run by now.
24 THE COURT: We'll give you immunity.
25 A. Thank you. That we sometimes would misplace these
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1 materials in the library so that they could not
2 easily be discovered. After we used them and got
3 what we wanted out of them.
4 THE COURT: Lot of these students
5 probably still do that. I did that when I was going
6 to school.
7 A. In any case, we were able to gather a considerable
8 amount of information which bore on the subject of
9 the role of the views of the holders of the
10 occupants of Congressional seats, legislative seats
11 at the state level and so forth.
12 And to conclude that they did have
13 some notion of what the framers of the Fourteen
14 Amendment felt. And we sought to expose these
15 views.
16 We could not say, we were not able to
17 say that a majority of the members of the Congress
18 had any sense of what the Fourteen Amendment would
19 do with regard to segregation in the public schools.
20 Or even the framers of it, or even
21 the members of the state legislature could not say
22 definitely what their views were on this particular
23 subject.
24 We did find though among people like
25 Thaddeus Stevens and others of the more articulate
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1 and probably left wing in the Congress, that they
2 did express themselves. That they did hope that
3 this would end the separation of race in schools and
4 so forth.
5 How convincing that was to the court
6 we never did know. And we were admonished by
7 Thurgood Marshall almost from day-to-day. That we
8 would find the material and they would use it, they
9 would present their material and it wasn't our
10 business to speculate on how the court would react
11 to any of it.
12 We would rush in and say, this will
13 get them and he said, you don't know what will get
14 them. And he said, you're not going to sit around
15 here and speculate.
16 He said you're going to sit around
17 here and work, and provide all information you can
18 about the subjects that the court has asked us to
19 give. And that's all you can do.
20 And we did some other things, we did
21 some speculating, but not in his presence. He said,
22 we ought to run scared.
23 I would work there, as I said, from
24 Wednesday afternoon until Saturday or Sunday. And I
25 never left the offices, but when I would leave
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1 Thurgood Marshall would be sitting there working.
2 It could be midnight and he sometimes
3 would say we'll have a 15 minutes break, or it could
4 be 10:00. I don't know what happened after midnight
5 because I was gone, I left. But I always left him
6 there.
7 And the remarkable thing about that
8 although his wife was dying at the time, and I
9 learned that later. She did die within the year.
10 He was absolutely unflapped by any personal problems
11 that he was having.
12 And that he simply worked day and
13 night. He would call and talk to her, he stayed
14 there and worked. I don't think I've ever seen
15 anyone work as hard as he did on that case, ever.
16 And it was an inspiration to all of
17 us who worked with him. He set a new standard for
18 just plain hard work for all of us. And after that,
19 I said that's the least we can do to try to solve
20 our problems, if they can be solved at all by work.
21 And by the time we finished our work
22 in December of 1953, we had the satisfaction of
23 knowing, a feeling that we had done all we could.
24 And that the lawyers then would have to take it on
25 in their arguments before the court.
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1 And we could only stand back and see
2 them use our material, or not use it as they wished.
3 But that was the experience we had.
4 And then there was the long wait, of
5 course, until May. And May the 17th, 1954 when that
6 decision was handed down, my wife who was a
7 librarian at Spingarde High School, I think a rather
8 remarkable one, she was a librarian at the high
9 school the main floor the founder of the NAACP,
10 Joel Spingarde. One of the founders.
11 She called me and told me that, well,
12 it's all over, she said, have you heard, I said no.
13 And she told me what the decision was and we then
14 began to celebrate.
15 Well, we were to learn later while we
16 were celebrating, there were those who had no
17 intention of conforming to the orders of the court
18 or wishes of the court, that they were plotting and
19 planning beginning the night of May the 17th, 1954,
20 and going on until the fall when they put into play
21 their various proposals, such as special actions on
22 the parts of school boards to do what they could.
23 Pupil preferences and all kinds of
24 activities, all kinds of formula that would keep the
25 schools segregated as they had been.
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1 And we didn't know until we were into
2 that year that every step that was taken, that had
3 to be taken in order to promote or to push the
4 desegregation of schools just a little more, just a
5 little further.
6 There were all of these blocks and
7 obstructions of every conceivable kind that were in
8 place wherever we moved. So that you couldn't do
9 anything without getting up against the fight once
10 more.
11 So, that the Brown decision was not
12 the end of the problem, it was the beginning of a
13 struggle. Which continued for an indefinite period
14 of time.
15 The motto, the south never, the south
16 will never. So, those became more than
17 platitudinous statements, they became words that
18 reflected the position, the unassailable position of
19 vast portion of the south. Not all of them, but
20 many of the south.
21 And to win even one or two or three
22 over, would have had to stretch it--had exert its
23 energies and efforts to a great degree.
24 So, that in the 1950s and '60s, we
25 had to fight all over the battles that we thought
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1 Thurgood and his staff had won in 1954. And there
2 was little relenting.
3 Where there was relenting, the
4 situation was bright and beautiful. In my own home
5 town, for example, Tulsa Oklahoma.
6 The governor had said to the people
7 of Oklahoma that, you know, we're not going to--the
8 Supreme Court has spoken, and we're not going to
9 have any riots or any resistance to court orders,
10 we're going to conform to them.
11 Well, the school authorities in Tulsa
12 not only took the governor's statement seriously,
13 but then they decided to go beyond that and to try
14 to conform to the court's orders in the first place.
15 And with the result that they redid
16 the schools in Tulsa. Eliminated to a remarkable
17 degree the desegregation, and created one of the
18 best school systems in the state, if not in the
19 country.
20 Booker T. Washington which I had
21 graduated in 1931, became the great institution in
22 Tulsa for the education of Tulsa students. And
23 within a decade, white people would kill to get
24 their children in Booker T. Washington High School.
25 And when I was there a few years ago
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1 when I was elected to the Booker T. Washington High
2 School Hall of Fame, the party celebrating it was
3 held on the south side.
4 That means in Tulsa in the
5 wealthiest, poshes part of the town where not more
6 than two houses to the block, sometimes only one.
7 And the president of the Booker T.
8 Washington PTA whose children were going to
9 Booker T. Washington High School, gave the party.
10 And it was just another world from the way the world
11 was when I graduated from high school.
12 And there they were, the great
13 supporters of Booker T. Washington High School. And
14 it wasn't merely that you had people of that
15 stature, that wealth.
16 It was that the curriculum,
17 everything had been done over. And the school
18 hadn't moved, the school was still over in the
19 ghetto. Not even near the line that divided the
20 whites from blacks, and the line was very clear in
21 Tulsa.
22 But they sent their kids to school
23 over there. And the curriculum was so vast, there
24 were seven modern foreign languages taught at
25 Booker T. Washington High School. With the most
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1 elaborate, most extensive programs in computer
2 science and all the other areas of knowledge.
3 And that's what could happen, that's
4 what did happen. Busing worked, chauffeur driven
5 cars worked, transportation of every description
6 worked. And people seemed quite satisfied with it.
7 But that was the extreme as opposed
8 to the other extreme, where there was the
9 resistance, the bitter resistance. The complete
10 obstruction of the move to desegregate schools, and
11 the maintenance of segregation in the status quo as
12 it were, the status quo anti-Brown as it were.
13 And not really until more recently
14 have we seen the affects of that long standing
15 persistent resistance what the affects would be.
16 It would be turning back the clock as
17 it were, as has happened in Charlotte, North
18 Carolina where Swarn against Meganburg is gone by
19 the board, so to speak.
20 And where bussing has been now
21 declared to be unnecessary. And where we've had the
22 resegregation of the schools in that community, and
23 that's one of the great tragedies it seems to me of
24 the whole process of resistance.
25 The resistance was kept alive until
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1 it could be rekindled and made into the kind of
2 strong force that would make it possible to repeal
3 Swarn for all practical purposes.
4 Q. When you first heard about the Brown decision before
5 you later learned about the resistance to it, what
6 did it mean to you?
7 A. What it meant, it meant the end of a
8 long--wonderful, wonderful end of a long arduous
9 task. I think that there were those of us who were
10 in nonlegal research who tended to take a little
11 more credit than we deserved to take. But we didn't
12 object with it pretty much.
13 If someone said to us, it was a good
14 job you did in Brown, thank you, very much. We
15 worked hard.
16 But we did feel that this was a
17 victory that all of us, in which all of us could
18 share. And it was victory which the country needed.
19 Q. Why?
20 A. Well, it might put an end to the problem of racial,
21 not only segregation, but the problem--but the
22 racial divide, it seemed to have been so poisonous
23 to this country. And that it seemed never to end,
24 it will go on and on and on.
25 And we thought that maybe this
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1 decision would do, would put an end to some of that
2 and would set us on another road. And in the course
3 of activity and action that would be healthy for the
4 nation as a whole. But it turned out not to be that
5 way.
6 Q. Have we made any progress on these matters in your
7 lifetime?
8 A. Yes, yes. I don't want to convey the impression
9 that we have gone to the dogs, or that this effort
10 has not been profitable to some extent, it has been.
11 I try to indicate that now and then
12 you had a system of schools like the Tulsa system,
13 which I'm very proud. And you have the extensive
14 segregation of some of our colleges and
15 universities.
16 You have the increasing opportunities
17 for work. The labor force is to a considerable
18 extent different from what it was 40 years ago, 50
19 years ago.
20 I've never see a black man driving a
21 Trans Continental truck without stop and marvel that
22 this didn't happen, couldn't have happened 35 years
23 ago. Not any.
24 When he see a black man operating a
25 jack hammer, I have to stop and say this is
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1 something, this is really something. That couldn't
2 have happened.
3 I remember so well when George Monroe
4 a playmate of mine who was in the riot and who hid
5 under the bed, he was five years old. And a white
6 hoodlum stepped on his fingers and he didn't even
7 cry, he didn't shout out. He just took it.
8 When I saw him later driving the
9 first Coca Cola truck in Tulsa that any black person
10 could drive, and he was lifting those cartons of
11 Coca Colas, I wondered if his hands hurt from that
12 experience he had many years earlier when he was in
13 the riot.
14 You know, there have been some
15 dramatic changes, dramatic to me as I watched and
16 seen these changes through the years. They're
17 almost miraculous to me when I see them.
18 It's like I was celebrating, I
19 remember we celebrated when the daughter of one of
20 my best friends graduated from medical school and
21 then passed her boards and then became a diplomat at
22 the American College of Internal Medicine.
23 And we were celebrating and she said,
24 what's all the fuss about. And I had to remind her
25 that she didn't know it, but she was a pioneer.
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1 That there were no black diplomats of
2 the American College of Internal Medicine when I was
3 growing up, or even when I was in college. And that
4 this represents a change for the better.
5 And to see changes so much so that
6 she didn't even recognize that there was this
7 dramatic difference, the turn around from what had
8 been the lot of her parents and my parents, no.
9 Yes, I could sit all day and talk
10 about changes for the better that have taken place.
11 And if they hadn't taken place, one would wonder
12 whether this was a country worth fighting for or
13 living in, you see. The evolution of change is very
14 important to keep you going.
15 MS. MASSIE: May I approach the
16 witness?
17 THE COURT: You may. While you're
18 doing that, Professor, you have talked about the
19 work that you did, the historical work on Brown, has
20 that been published other than perhaps in the briefs
21 that were filed?
22 A. No. I published the one paper, I think it was in
23 the South Atlantic Quarter, they called it Jim Crowe
24 Goes School. The history of segregation and the
25 reconstruction right after.
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1 THE COURT: But the Congressional
2 work that you did and so forth was used internally?
3 A. Yes, that's right.
4 THE COURT: Thank you.
5 A. And some of it can be found in the footnotes in the
6 Brown brief.
7 THE COURT: Okay.
8 A. That's all the credit we got.
9 THE COURT: It was the result that
10 you were looking for.
11 A. Yes.
12 BY MS. MASSIE:
13 Q. The table I just handed you, Professor Franklin, is
14 entitled University of Law School Graduating Classes
15 By Race. And it indicates a range of years from
16 1950 to 1999.
17 MS. MASSIE: Judge Friedman, you
18 should have a copy.
19 THE COURT: I have it right in front
20 of me.
21 MS. MASSIE: It's exactly the same as
22 Exhibit 97, it's just been stuck on one page and
23 counsel have copies. And I think the gallery also
24 has copies.
25
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1 BY MS. MASSIE:
2 Q. Did you have a chance to look at this a little bit
3 yesterday?
4 A. Yes, I did.
5 Q. I want to ask you first whether given your knowledge
6 of desegregation patterns in higher education over
7 the last half century, this looks fairly typical to
8 you.
9 And then second, ask you to kind of
10 describe it. And third, ask you if you have any
11 other thoughts about what the chart means, or how we
12 should interpret it, what we should take from it?
13 A. Well, I would say that you could by the various
14 things called the monitor act, there's no such book,
15 on drawing from this chart and interpreting these
16 numbers. Particularly the numbers that have to do
17 with the minority groups.
18 You move in the way that the African
19 American representation was in the '50s and '60s,
20 that are not unlike the representation I think that
21 would be in the earlier years. Just a few, a token
22 few, four, three, five, whatever.
23 And then something happens in the
24 late '60s and early '70s. And what's happened is
25 that you have got a very vigorous effort on the
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1 part, largely of African Americans and their allies,
2 to open up the institution. And to have more than
3 token representation in the institutions.
4 And that begins to occur in 1971,
5 '70, '71 and on. And that corresponds almost
6 precisely to the Civil Rights Movement and the
7 struggle to increase African American representation
8 in American society generally, you see.
9 And all of these numbers from 1971
10 on, I think, tell us a good deal about that effort.
11 Or put it another way, this is the result of the
12 effort that's made.
13 And not very characteristically is
14 that once you open up--you see the paradigm is first
15 of all, the black/white paradigm, which I think is
16 very important to recognize. The black/white
17 paradigm.
18 And then as this becomes fairly
19 successful, it makes it possible for these other
20 elements to be admitted too, you see. You get Latin
21 Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans
22 come in, I wouldn't say on the coat tails, but come
23 in as a result of the opening up of the
24 opportunities. First by blacks and then the
25 opportunities for these other groups as well.
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1 So, that I think it must not be
2 overlooked that once the society opens up to blacks,
3 that others will have a greater opportunity as well.
4 And that's what you see in Latin American, Asian
5 American and Native American groups.
6 It's very interesting, I'm not able
7 to explain the certain aberrations falling off of
8 numbers. Except that down toward the end when you
9 see in 1998 the number of African Americans at your
10 University of Michigan graduating class, fall from
11 32 to ten. 32 in 1997 to ten in 1998.
12 This might reflect the growing
13 uncertainty about the status of African Americans in
14 your law school and in future classes. And that
15 represents, I suppose, some discouragement on their
16 part.
17 The same thing was true in Berkley in
18 the graduate schools and professional schools. The
19 same thing was true in some other state
20 institutions, where the great drive to eliminate the
21 attractiveness of these institutions in terms of the
22 effort they made to include minorities.
23 When the great drive came to exclude
24 them, then the reaction of the students themselves
25 was that they didn't want to be in hostile
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1 environments or environments where they didn't seem
2 to be very welcome, or where people were working
3 against them and so they began to drop off.
4 Now, there might be other
5 explanations too, it might have been depressions or
6 something like that. But I think that these social
7 forces are operating there to pull the numbers down.
8 And that might be true even of the
9 Latinos who would be declining sharply after 1996.
10 Is that what--you have any other questions to ask
11 about this?
12 Q. Does the general--just one. Which is rather the
13 general trajectory that the chart gets out in terms
14 of the representation of different racial groups at
15 the law school, seems more or less speaking rather
16 typical to you?
17 A. Yes, I think so. I think it's what you would expect
18 given these forces that I suggested, that I
19 indicated. The drive in the 1960s to open up the
20 situation, that results in the increase in the
21 numbers. That results in the admission of these
22 other minorities groups.
23 And the fluctuation cannot always be
24 explained, until you get down to the 1990s, the late
25 1990s when you got anti-affirmative action efforts
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1 being mounted. And then you get the hostility that
2 comes with that and the drop in enrollment.
3 MS. MASSIE: Judge, I'm going to move
4 the admission of 97.
5 THE COURT: I'm sure there's no
6 objection.
7 MR. PURDY: No objection.
8 THE COURT: It will be received.
9 BY MS. MASSIE:
10 Q. What were the arguments that the people made in the
11 desegregation in the years leading up to Brown?
12 A. The arguments were so numerous that it would be
13 difficult to recall them. Let me say here that the
14 major arguments were that there were differences,
15 there were racial differences in the intellectual
16 gifts and talents of blacks and whites.
17 And that they should not be mixed
18 together, in view of the fact that blacks and
19 whites--blacks could not keep up with whites.
20 There was the argument also that this
21 is the first step toward social equality. The first
22 thing you know, black and whites will be marrying
23 each other. And you must keep them apart, otherwise
24 they might be doing that.
25 That they live, for the most part,
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1 their residential segregation, separates the black
2 and the whites. And that bringing them together is
3 artificial by bussing or by some transport. It was
4 artificial and that that should be rejected.
5 It was not in passing, it ought to be
6 observed that bussing was not new. That buses were
7 used to transport school children from the time that
8 the first bus was invented.
9 And to transport them racially, to be
10 certain that blacks and whites did not study
11 together or go to school together. They were
12 transported, they were transported all during the
13 '20s, '30s. It's not new, you see. But that was an
14 argument that was used.
15 It was so terrible to get these
16 children up and put them on a bus early and they
17 would come home late on the bus. That was the
18 argument used in the 1950s and before, and on into
19 the '50s after Brown.
20 There was too the argument that the
21 educating of these children together might in some
22 way cause them to redefine their roles in society.
23 Which had been defined and ordained by forces more
24 powerful than the schools or anything else.
25 So, that you cannot do this, you
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1 cannot put them together because they're not
2 supposed to be together. And that was some kind of
3 a violation of nature itself. To intervene in this
4 way, and to prevent the natural normal kind of
5 relationship that ought to exist. Namely superior
6 and inferior relationship.
7 Separate and equal, or separate and
8 unequal. Separate by all means. These were
9 essentially the arguments that were asked. To keep
10 the races apart, you keep the schools separate.
11 Q. Did you ever encounter later on arguments about
12 inferiority and superiority in standards, or
13 arguments like that expressed anywhere in other
14 schools?
15 A. Yes. In other contexts, yes, that becomes common.
16 You see, the presumption, the presumption almost in
17 all cases where we are talking about different
18 races, the presumption is that there's difference in
19 ability, difference in temperament and so forth.
20 And I can tell you when I was chair
21 of the Department of History at Brooklyn College,
22 and later when I was chair of the Department of
23 History at the University of Chicago, whenever I
24 talked about increasing the number of African
25 Americans, the response would be, well, don't forget
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1 the standards.
2 I said, who has forgotten the
3 standards, we're not talking about standards, we're
4 talking about people and the standards are to be
5 understood.
6 When I say let's bring in X person
7 who happened to be white, no one raised the question
8 about standards. But I mention that somebody who
9 happens to be black, and they say what's the
10 standard. don't forget. We got to have smart
11 people.
12 What's that got to do with race.
13 Aren't there smart blacks. Aren't there smart
14 Eskimos. So, I rejected that, I always rejected
15 that argument.
16 But there were efforts made even in
17 Chicago, even in Brooklyn, efforts made to block any
18 move toward increasing the number of blacks. And I
19 resented that very much, because as long as I was
20 the only one, I couldn't help but feel that I was
21 somehow the token. One never wants to be the token.
22 But I couldn't resist the temptation
23 of describing myself to myself as the token black,
24 even at these great universities where I've been.
25 It was not really until I went to
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1 Duke where there were already five blacks in the
2 department when I got there, that not until I got
3 there that I felt that I was not a token. And
4 that's the way the ball was.
5 MS. MASSIE: Judge, I would like to
6 ask your permission to huddle briefly with
7 Mr. Payton and Mr. Kolbo about scheduling the rest
8 of the afternoon.
9 THE COURT: Of course. Absolutely.
10 MS. MASSIE: Thanks, Judge. If we
11 could have lunch at two, break for lunch at two
12 which is--I realize it's late. It's that
13 Professor Franklin has a flight out at three to
14 Washington, D.C. where he chairs the National Park
15 Service as I understand it, or commission. He'll
16 correct me maybe.
17 THE COURT: I have a docket too, so I
18 have no problem with that.
19 MS. MASSIE: Great.
20 THE COURT: You want to approach the
21 bench?
22 (Discussion off the record.)
23 THE COURT: We'll take a five minute
24 break. Not more than a five minute break.
25
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