Durham, N.C. - John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke professor emeritus of history at Duke, has just published "Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin." On Nov. 18, a symposium honoring the book as well as the 10th anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Collection of African & African American Documentation is scheduled from 1 to 7 p.m. in the Gothic Reading Room, Perkins Library, on West Campus. The event is open to the public.

In a recent interview with Sally Hicks of the Office of News & Communications, Franklin talked about what it was like to cast his historian's eye back on his own life, and what message he wants to impart about his experience as he nears his 91st birthday.

Listen to an audio excerpt from the interview here.

Q: Why did you want to write your autobiography? Was it a personal reason, political or professional?

JHF: It was partly personal but it was certainly partly professional. I was curious. I wondered whether writing about myself was different from writing about other things, other people. I've done a biography. Is this another biography? What historical problems arise?

The other point is that as I got older, people became curious about my life and they began to talk about writing papers on me and now, in more recent years, writing a biography of me, and I said, "Well, I'd better get my word in first," you see. They could pick over me after I'm gone. But I want the first word.

Q: And what did you find as you wrote about yourself?

JHF: In some ways it's terribly, deeply personal. But doing the research was like doing it on anyone else.

How do you reconstruct your childhood? The historian knows that you can go back to the census, the raw census data. And there you have the census taker [who] goes up and down the road, and takes the names and ages and religion and ownership of property and all that. I can look at that unpublished census and see who lives next door, and who lives down the road, and I can see all my playmates, you see?

The census has to be 70 years old before you can look at it. When I was 80, I could look at the census when I was 5 years old. Can you imagine what comes back when you see the name of C. Bell Jeffers or Clinton Robinson or somebody like that you'd played marbles with? The historical research triggers the memory.

[Duke Professor and novelist] Reynolds Price told me another trick. He said if [a] house is still standing and you walk in that house, the moment you walk in that house, the memories will flood back on you. And that was true. That was so true. Because I went back to the house, not the house I was born in, but the house we moved into when I was still quite small. I was 2 and 3 years old, and I remember so well riding my tricycle round that house and that sort of thing. I fell off that tricycle and busted my head. And I remember that. It's a lot of fun.

Q: And did you feel differently about writing this book?

JHF: As I've reflected on my experiences I want to be certain that I continue to be as dispassionate about it as I think a historian ought to be. [I wondered] as I would write about being discriminated against, would I somehow get furious and blow my stack? I fought that. I tried not to do that.

Q: I know that it was important to you to be a historian of the South as opposed to an African-American history specialist. Was that due to a concern that you would be professionally limited, or was that more of a philosophical issue?

JHF: It was partly both. I certainly didn't want to be limited personally or professionally.

I felt that I could not be a historian of blacks in a vacuum. So you begin to think in terms of a total community. You then see what's been left out of the history because they ignored blacks. And in ignoring blacks they distorted the history of themselves, you see, because blacks affected them. And that gives an entirely different slant to the whole historical process.

I'll give you an example. I was in Washington, talking to the advisory committee of the new Smithsonian African American museum of history and culture. And I was giving them my take and my view on how this museum ought to be. And I was saying that no museum in Washington -- not the Smithsonian, not the [National] Museum of American History, not any of them -- will tell you anything about blacks in the District of Columbia. About how the District of Columbia was a central slave market. And you go in the Museum of American History, right there, and there wasn't anything about it.

And so writing about African Americans is performing a corrective, revisionist approach to history. That's the way I have been looking at history and that has shaped my career.

Q: Did you ever have any concerns that being a historian of the South would limit you?

JHF: No, I'm a regionalist and so I didn't have that [concern]. I had to be mindful of the connection between the South and the rest of the country and even the world. When you look at the South in its totality, just as long as you look at everything in the South, everybody in the South, you are on target, it seems to me.

I've tried to get respect for myself not only as a black Southerner but as a Southerner. I'll give you a specific example. When Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi, was seeking a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, some Northerners began to wonder whether Millsaps College was advanced enough, civilized enough, was sufficiently tolerant of race, to be admitted into the holy chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. At that point I really blew my stack. I said, "Look, let me tell you something. Millsaps College is no backwater. It has been on the firing line in Mississippi, risking ostracism and all the rest to take stands, take important stands on questions of race and other social matters." I said, "And you know, it is no more prejudiced than some Northern chapters, some of which are not only anti-black, but anti-Semitic as well, so just let Millsaps alone." So that was sort of fun. Millsaps got in, too.

Q: You also said you were interested in getting your word in. Was there anything in particular that you wanted to say?

JHF: I want to put on the record that in spite of the obstacles, one can still make it in what I call this "racial jungle." I want to give an example of the necessary maintenance of mental health. Don't let this drive you crazy. There are a lot of people who succumb to it, a lot of people. The fact that black men have a higher incidence of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disorders ... that's not fiction. It's the result of the kind of social experience they've had. I want to tell people, "Don't you fret about this all the time, because it can kill you."

Q: You give a double message: Don't take it seriously in a personal way but take it extremely seriously professionally and politically. Do you think you've succeeded in those two things?

JHF: Well, personally I have, sure. It's a recipe for success, which I try to convey to others. [But] it's very difficult. I've had problems. I've had ulcers. Can you imagine if I took to heart the fact that when I'm 85, somebody tells me to go hang up their clothes or to pick up the trash or bring the car around to the front, that sort of thing? You can't internalize that. Otherwise it'll kill you, just as deadly as some virus would.

[But] I hope I'm not tolerant of prejudice and discrimination. Emotion should stay out of it, that is, wild and blind emotion...but I can be unequivocal in my opposition to any kind of hostility, racial hostility.