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From the Tulsa race riots and Jim Crow
to Brown v. Board of Education and Birmingham,
John Hope Franklin has lived the very history
he has chronicled so brilliantly.
His landmark work "From Slavery to Freedom,"
published in 1947, goes into its
ninth printing this year.
( Background music: fanfare instrumental)
ANNOUNCER: The President of the United States of America
awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom
to John Hope Franklin.
(Audience applauding)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: John Hope Franklin,
the son of the south, has always been
a moral compass for America,
always pointing us in the direction of truth.
"I look history straight in the eye and
call it like it is," John Hope Franklin has said.
This has meant telling the untold stories
of Northern Racism.
And of slaves successfully striking for better conditions
under the sinful confines of slavery.
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN: One of the reasons I
became attracted to history and studied it
with the enthusiasm and the zeal that I have studied it
is because I see a connection between the past and the present.
( footsteps echoing ) You could walk up and down,
around the White House and you wouldn't know in 2007,
you wouldn't know that there was ever a slave here.
You wouldn't know that down on Pennsylvania Avenue
was the biggest slave mart anywhere,
( Background music: Sad instrumental )
and as Frederic Bancroft called Washington,
'the very seat and center of the slave trade'.
I think people who come here can do a little more
than sightsee around the Washington monument
and the Lincoln Memorial.
( Audience applauding )
I can see what has been accomplished,
and that makes me sensitive to what needs to be accomplished.
And there is, therefore, that constant effort on my part
to thrust the past into the present and to work to
make the present what the past promises it should be.
( Background music: Triumphant instrumental )
That placed me in the category of what some people called an activist.
and, uh-- I would agree. I try to be an activist.
If one studies American history, I don't think
he could resist the temptation to be an activist.