All this, only weeks after completing 15 months as chairman of President Clinton's advisory board on race, perhaps the most visible assignment of his career. Most people would consider a presidential appointment the culmination of a life's work. In Franklin's case, it is just a chapter in the story of a great intellectual, a figure mentioned in the same breath as C. Vann Woodward, E. Franklin Frazier, Thurgood Marshall and John Kenneth Galbraith. He, like one of his mentors, W.E.B. Du Bois, is a black leader embraced by the white establishment, but also willing to push it. His writings on American history was a focus of the African-American experience, which is basically the untold dimension of American history.
American history is the relationship between the slaves and the slave masters.
Clinton chose Franklin not only for his accomplishments, but also for how he continues to achieve in a society that still manages to let him down. Franklin has lived through race riots, civil rights crusades and days when he, with a doctorate from Harvard, couldn't get a sandwich because of his dark skin. It has been a long road, for a poor boy in an all-black town to become an ambassador for the South. And it was that persistence Clinton needed on his board. During a time of relative racial peace, it wouldn't be easy to prove that race still mattered.