Bush's failing grade on racial issues
NASHVILLE
HISTORIAN John Hope Franklin has lived through 16 presidents and has met many -- or tried to.
In 1934 as a college student here at Fisk University, he attempted in vain to deliver a petition to President Roosevelt to protest a 1933 lynching of a boy who had been seized by his killers only three blocks from the campus chapel. In 1976, President Ford appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities. In 1980, President Carter sent him to Belgrade as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization conference. In 1997, President Clinton appointed Franklin to chair the White House's Initiative on Race.
Asked to rate the presidents on their contributions to America's racial climate, Franklin cited Clinton, Carter, Johnson, even Ford, a Republican whom he described as a ''nice man" who ''didn't conspire to destroy people."
No such niceties were reserved for the 16th president of Franklin's life.
''President Bush is not even on the ratings scale where I can rate him," Franklin told the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists Monday at his alma mater. Franklin, 90, is on tour to promote his autobiography, ''Mirror to America."
He said that to rate someone, you have to have a performance to rate. ''I find it difficult to find his performance," Franklin said. ''I don't want to say what I really think of him because that might be unfair. But he is not among the presidents who I think have made constructive contributions, not among them at all. I wish that I could say the time would come when he will rise to the occasion, though I don't think he is capable of doing that."
Asked why Bush is incapable, Franklin's voice rose toward a roar. ''There's no evidence he's interested in the public good, the public weal. Father was the president of the United States. You'd think he'd travel with his father. He'd never been out of the country except for Mexico when he became president of the United States. Father was ambassador to China, ambassador to the United Nations. Traveled everywhere, gone everywhere. At least read the papers!" -- yet the son ''boasted he doesn't read the papers. So what is there to talk about with George Bush? I'm sorry. I'd be delighted if I could find anything to give me hope. . . . We're not very far for the gains we thought we made."
The incapable president has incapacitated the nation's discussion on racial issues, except when he inflamed it by joining the side of white students who wanted to destroy affirmative action at the University of Michigan, against the wishes of his highest-level African-Americans, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and education secretary Rod Paige. As bad as that is, Franklin sees it as just part of national paralysis that is hurting everyone, not just African-Americans.
''I'm afraid the country is so bogged down in corruption and in double talk and in intrigue and in conspiracy and in lack of regard for the intelligence of the American public that I don't know where we're going. I wish I did. It keeps me awake at nights. I struggle to find something to say that would be good and constructive. But it's not possible."
What keeps Franklin awake is how little Americans themselves seem to feel any insult to their intelligence. ''Nobody's standing up in this country, almost nobody now," Franklin said. ''Black people are not standing up, white people are not standing up. Nobody's standing up. . . . We are almost incapable of having any critical judgment. Who is criticizing this country for sending billions that they bilked out of the American people? Billions! We take it as though it's just something we can't do a thing about."
Franklin said Americans clearly care more about sports teams than government chicanery.
''It's amazing," Franklin said. ''I sat at a table with three of our university presidents not too long ago. I thought they might discuss scholarship and the future of academic life in this country or something like that. But they were talking about how to make it into Class A athletics and what it would take and who would lose and who would gain.
''I'm not opposed to that, but these three great talents or talented three people in position of leadership are concerned with these matters and not with certain other matters . . . to assist us in moving to the next level. As long as we are concerned, not with those matters, but with other matters which it seems to me are inconsequential, I despair for the country."
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
