My Life And An Era : The Autobiography Of Buck Colbert Franklin - 97 edition

Summary: An engrossing personal account of an exceptional man's life in one of the richest and most tumultuous times in America's history

"My father's life represented many layers of the human experience -- freedman and Native American, farmer and rancher, rural educator and urban professional.' -- John Hope Franklin

Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960) led an extraordinary life; from his youth in what was then the Indian Territory to his pract ...show moreice of law in twentieth-century Tulsa, he was an observant witness to the changes in politics, law, daily existence, and race relations that transformed the wide-open Southwest. Fascinating in its depiction of an intelligent young man's coming of age in the days of the Land Rush and the closing of the frontier, My Life and an Era is equally important for its reporting of the triracial culture of early Oklahoma.

Recalling his boyhood spent in the Chickasaw Nation, Franklin suggests that blacks fared better in Oklahoma in the days of the Indians than they did later with the white population. In addition to his insights about the social milieu, he offers youthful reminiscences of mustangs and mountain lions, of farming and ranch life, that might appear in a Western novel.

After returning from college in Nashville and Atlanta, Franklin married a college classmate, studied law by mail, passed the bar, and struggled to build a practice in Springer and Ardmore in the first years of Oklahoma statehood. Eventually a successful attorney in Tulsa, he was an eyewitness to a number of important events in the Southwest, including the Tulsa race riot of 1921, which left more than 100 dead. His account clearly shows the growing racial tensions as more and more people moved into the state in the period leading up to World War II.

Rounded out by an older man's reflections on race, religion, culture, and law, My Life and an Era presents a true, firsthand account of a unique yet defining place and time in the nation's history, as told by an eloquent and impassioned writer. ...show less

Edition/Copyright: 97
Cover: Paperback
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 03/28/2000

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"This is a unique, marvelous, and fascinating memoir, written by a talented, courageous, and consistently humane man who rose through poverty and racial prejudice on the triracial Oklahoma frontier during the last century [the nineteenth] into the highest practice of the law in this one [the twentieth]. On another level, it is also a five-generational story of a very strong family who by their own efforts took themselves from slavery to freedom and to broadly admired distinction."

--Winthrop D. Jordan

"This important autobiography is engaging and necessary as a critical piece of Americana, a story of struggle and triumph, racism and respect, cattle drives and desperados, black territory lawyers and hanging judges, freedmen and Indians, love and loneliness all coming together on the plains of unchartered land churning toward statehood."

--Tulsa World

"The lesson one learns from this book, skillfully and lovingly edited by Professor [John Hope] Franklin and his own son, is not that the Jim Crow universe was benign -- far from it -- but that it was not the same everywhere and for everyone, and that in it there were families like the Franklins with the courage and the wit to become survivors and, even more, achievers."

--William E. Leuchtenburg, Brightleaf

"Buck Franklin's ability to understand the complex and appreciate the simple aspects of existence mesmerizes the reader and brings the realities of slavery, poverty, and racial tensions to us in a firsthand account. . . . [He] strongly communicates the honor and stalwartness of his family."

--Library Journal

Louisiana State University Press Web Site, November, 2002