John Hope Franklin died on Wednesday at age 94. In today’s NY Times Brent Staples writes about an unfinished conversation he had with Franklin, who, on December 7, 1941, was on a long automobile trip with his wife, Aurelia, north from South to North Carolina, but didn’t hear about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor until they arrived home because they didn’t dare stop:

Clearly, the car had no radio. But wouldn’t they have heard the news when they stopped to gas up and get something eat? No, he said; I had misunderstood the period. Black families motoring through the Jim Crow South packed box lunches to avoid the humiliation of being turned away from restaurants. They relieved themselves in roadside ditches because service-station restrooms were often closed to them. They worried incessantly about breakdowns and flat tires that could leave them stranded at the mercy of bigots who demeaned and wished them ill.

“You took your life into your hands every time you went out on the road,” he said. It was, of course, a relief to come upon a black-owned service station. But he said that you could drive from Charleston quite nearly to Baltimore before finding one.

Read Brent Staples’ column by following this link.

N.B.: The above photo of John Hope Franklin is from the Boston Globe. It gnawed on John Hope Franklin that racial segregation was replaced by class stratification in underfunded public schools. (Derrick Z. Jackson/Globe Staff).