"It's my favorite haunt," the historian says as he steps inside the hothouse, gray gravel crunching underfoot. "I come out here three or four times a day _ not necessarily to work, but just to look and see and enjoy."
The humid air is alive with lacy ferns, spiny bromeliads and cascading streptacarpella. But they are only window dressing to his true passion _ his collection of more than 300 orchids. Hanging from a piece of cork is an Aerangis, an orchid from Madagascar whose pale beige blossom is the size of a small spider. Nearby, a vanilla plant snakes 7 feet up a wooden support.
And then there are his pride and joy: Phaelanopsis Aurelia Franklin, a diminutive yellow orchid, "long-suffering and tolerant," named for his late wife; and Laeliocattleya John Hope Franklin, a long-stemmed, lavender-blossomed hybrid that he says is like himself, "big and ungainly."
"To grow orchids, you have to be persistent, patient," he says, picking a dead, yellow bloom from a plant. "And to do the right kind of history, the kind of history I think is worth doing, of course, you have to be persistent AND patient and work hard."
His autobiography, "Mirror to America," which comes out this week, reveals a man who has been as much a participant in history as a chronicler of it.
Franklin helped Thurgood Marshall on the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. He became the first black historian to assume a full-professorship at a white college, and chaired President Clinton's Initiative on Race.
But it is his works, more than his deeds, that have earned the 90-year-old historian 137 honorary degrees ("obscene, don't tell anyone"), the NAACP's Spingarn Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. His landmark "From Slavery to Freedom," published in 1947 has sold more than 3.5 million copies and remains required reading in college classrooms.
"I would compare him to Carter Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois," says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack, who served as a graduate assistant when Franklin taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956, and has remained a fast friend.
"What he did was to demonstrate to a very skeptical and rather sometimes indifferent profession ... that the history of black Americans was a legitimate field for scholarly inquiry and investigation."
The "dean of African-American historians" lives in a five-bedroom, five-bath brick Colonial Williamsburg-style house not far from Duke University, where Franklin is a professor emeritus and a learning center bears his name. His home is decorated with sculptures from his many Africa trips and the works of American artists such as Jacob Lawrence.
Sitting in his favorite wing-backed chair, Franklin speaks in a clear voice, effortlessly plucking dates and names from the air. There is an agelessness to this aged man. His face and hands are smooth and unlined, his posture erect. If it weren't for the close-cropped head of snow-white hair, he might be mistaken for a man in his 50s.
He was born Jan. 2, 1915, in the all-black town of Rentiesville, Okla., where his parents moved in the mistaken belief that separation from whites would mean a better life for their young family.
His father, Buck, was an attorney. His mother, Mollie, a teacher, began taking him to school with her when he was 3. He could read and write by 5; by 6, he first became aware of the "racial divide separating me from white America."
Franklin, his mother and sister Anne were ejected from a train when his mother refused the conductor's orders to move to the overcrowded "Negro" coach. As they trudged through the woods back to Rentiesville, young John Hope began to cry. His mother pulled him aside and told him, "There was not a white person on that train or anywhere else who was any better than I was. She admonished me not to waste my energy by fretting but to save it in order to prove that I was as good as any of them."
Franklin attended historically black Fisk University, where he met Aurelia Whittington, who would be his wife, his editor, his helpmate and rock for 58 years. He planned to follow his father into law, but the lively lectures of a white professor, Ted Currier, convinced him that history was his field. Currier borrowed $500 to send Franklin to Harvard University for graduate studies.
Franklin decided to do his doctoral thesis on free blacks in antebellum North Carolina. His wife spent part of their honeymoon in Washington, D.C., at the Census Bureau, helping him finish his research. The resulting work, "The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860," earned Franklin his doctorate and, in 1943, became his first published book.
Four years later, he completed his seminal work, "From Slavery to Freedom," and accepted a job at Howard University. He went on to break numerous color barriers, becoming the first black department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke University; and the first black president of the American Historical Association, the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
His joy at being offered the chair of the Brooklyn College history department in 1956 was tempered by his difficulty getting a loan to buy a house in a "white" neighborhood.
In 1985, Franklin was in New York to receive the Clarence Holte Literary Award for his biography of historian George Washington Williams, a 40-year project for which he was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. The next morning, he and his wife were unable to hail a taxi in front of their hotel.
Ten years later, when he was to receive the freedom medal, Franklin hosted a party for some friends at Washington's Cosmos Club, of which he had long been a member. A white woman walked up to him, handed him a slip of paper and demanded that he get her coat. Instead of rage, his mother's words came back to him _ as they always do. He politely told the woman that any of the uniformed attendants, "and they were all in uniform," would be happy to assist her.
The "clearest, most unequivocal example" came when, as a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, he was asked to write a history of the topic to coincide with the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. The commission deemed the book too negative and asked for a heavy rewrite. Franklin agreed to rework the book but warned, "I cannot `tidy up' the history that Americans themselves have made."
"One thing I would say about John Hope Franklin is that he's never been fashionable," he says. "He's too good a historian to romanticize the past."
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose father was an eminent historian at Harvard, first met Franklin 70 years ago at one his father's Sunday teas. When the younger Schlesinger worked in the Kennedy White House, he recommended Franklin for an ambassadorship.
The Pulitzer-winning historian, philosopher and social critic says Franklin's great contribution was "showing a black American can beat white Americans at their own game. He's a statesman."
"I want to be out there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better world, a better place to live," Franklin says. He shares his home with Bouna Ndiaye, his Senegalese adopted son. Aurelia Franklin died in 1999 after a battle with Alzheimer's disease.
Franklin has enjoyed remarkable good health. He was treated for a stomach ulcer at 63 and survived stomach cancer in the mid-1980s. In late September, he fainted in the front hallway of his home. Doctors decided that his heart was racing and installed a defibrillator.
Except for perhaps another collection of essays, "Mirror" is likely his last book, not because he expects to die anytime soon, but because he's "written enough." His planner, which he refers to as "the slave manual," is full.
When asked to name his favorite book, he replies, without hesitation, "The Souls of Black Folk." In it, Du Bois describes the "twoness" of black Americans _ "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings."
Franklin says his career has been a lifelong crusade to pull black history "into the mainstream." But he finds that we have not bridged that "twoness" _ that the "problem of the color line," which Du Bois saw dominating 20th-century America, has persisted into the 21st.
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