MY LIFE AND AN ERA

“After my father had suffered a cerebral vascular accident in 1956, he refused to accept the limitations placed on him by his inability to use his right side, including the hand with which he wrote. He had many tasks to do, he insisted , among them the writing of his autobiography. He had long been a frustrated and unfulfilled writer; and I am convinced that if he could have eked out a living as an essayist, novelist, or columnist, he would have gladly done so. With several rejected manuscripts and some unfinished ones in his files, he abandoned them; and with a determination borne of the realization that his time was limited, he began to write about his own life. Once he had recovered sufficient strength to maneuver his own body, he began to write his story and thus fulfill a dream. Day after day, he sat before his manual typewriter carefully and precisely typing out, with the index finger of his left hand, the story of his life.... “It was not until several years after his death that I came to appreciate fully how committed my father was to being a writer... I knew, of course, that he had attempted, unsuccessfully , to launch a weekly paper, the Rentiesville ‘News’, when I was not much beyond the infant stage . Later, he would write an occasional piece that appeared in Tulsa’s African American weekly, the ‘Oklahoma Eagle.’ By the time I was in high school, I believed that his nightly habit of reading and writing was, somehow, related to his work as a lawyer.... “I learned what it meant to practice law in an environment where equal justice under the law meant that a black lawyer had to overcome overwhelming odds in securing that justice. I also learned that it took all that my mother and father had to rise above the hostility of the all-black village where I was born, a town that was under the control of members of one religious denomination who had no interest in the well-being or, indeed, the fate of those, such as my family, with other religious affiliations. I came to learn that our poverty resulted not from poor management but from the inability of my father to convince would-be clients that a black lawyer could prevail in a court of law regardless of the deep-seated prejudices of those who administered justice. He was unable to convince them often enough to make it possible for him to earn a comfortable living for his family. Sad to say, the would-be clients were realists who did not want to risk their fate in the hands of one whom the judge and jurors would have little or no respect.” P. xiii-xvii, “Buck Colbert Franklin: Appreciation,” MY LIFE AND ERA, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BUCK COLBERT FRANKLIN (1997) edited by John Hope Franklin and John Whittington Franklin