ABSTRACT
D r. John Hope Franklin was ninety-four years old and still a formidable progressive historian, having lived through two world wars, five decades of segregation, the sixties civil rights movement, and Barack Obama’s presidential campaign when I sought to see him during the North Carolina presidential primary. (He passed away on March 26, 2009.) Because there was no comparable or greater authority alive, I was eager to ask him to evaluate this long history. I ventured to North Carolina for meetings and dinner with Dr. Franklin in Raleigh-Durham, where he kept office hours at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Center. It was April 16, and Barack Obama was rolling through North Carolina that week, the state where the student sit-in movement had begun three years before Obama’s birth. I was especially wondering where Dr. Franklin placed Obama in African American history.
