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"The president wasn't asking me to serve at some sort of PTA meeting," Franklin said. "This was the presidential commission on the subject. I thought of it as a task for a social scientist-hyphen-humanist who had been working on the problems of race and the nation for 50 or 60 years."

### Hot seat: Franklin had dabbled in the political world, serving on two commissions for President Jimmy Carter and, in 1987, testifying in Congress against the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork. But on Clinton's race board, Franklin was in charge, running meetings, talking to the press, sending requests to the president. For 15 months, the white-haired, supposed-to-be-retired professor from Duke University would be under the microscope. From the start, he heard from the critics.

On June 15, 1997, before even the first meeting, prominent black conservative Ward Connerly and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich published a piece in The New York Times blasting the race commission. Connerly wanted to know: Why wouldn't it reconsider affirmative action?

Franklin is still baffled by the question. His logic was simple. He had studied the social policy, lived through its effect and deeply believed affirmative action helped level the playing field. The president agreed. So did his colleagues on the race board. Recently, in an interview at his home in Durham, Franklin remembered an exchange about affirmative action at one of the board's meetings. He recounted the discussion the same way he carried it out at the time, speaking slowly, leaning back in his chair, never raising his voice.

"It is for the purpose of increasing diversity, and I don't see where we need to explore that," Franklin said.

What about the opposition to it?

"Well, the opposition is there, we know it's there," he said. "Why would you have a discussion of the opposition to it? That wouldn't get us anywhere in terms of increasing diversity."

For Franklin, a devoted newspaper reader, the Connerly editorial led to a general disillusionment with the media. The board's progress generated lots of stories, most with the same theme. The panel's work would be described as "pallid" (the New York Times), "stalled" (San Diego Union-Tribune) and "hamstrung" (Time Magazine). London's Weekly Standard, in an article titled "The Disgrace Commission," slammed Franklin for "running a fact-finding commission that deplores facts."

There were reports of a dispute he had with fellow board member Angela Oh, which they both called fiction. There was a steady flow of conservative attacks. What didn't get reported, Franklin says, were the suggestions made to the president. Beef up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example. As for the big problem - the race gap - Franklin wondered how so much could be expected, so soon. Real change tends to crawl, not run. One day, a Latino man from New Jersey even showed up unannounced at the house on Pineview. He had driven South after being fired, because of his race, he believed. Was there anything John Hope Franklin could do?

"People would ask me, 'Well, how's it coming?' as though I was out solving the problem," Franklin said. "You're not going to be successful in six months or 12 months or 15 months with a problem that's been with us for 200 or 300 years."

He reacted to the criticism by refusing to react. As he had throughout his life, whenever Franklin felt pressured, he didn't flinch, he remembered his mission. He had been asked to run a dialogue on race. A dialogue on race is what he would run. It was not always a popular decision, particularly for those people who wanted a heated confrontation on race. The question - debate vs. dialogue - became central to the board's work, to the point that its report, filed this fall, includes six full pages stressing the distinction, that "debate is to persuade others to one's point of view dialogue is to exchange ideas and find common ground."

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