History’s Destined Future

“When I was 4 years-old, my mother told me that I could be the first Black President of the United States. I should have told Barack that.”

Both of his parents were college graduates. A teacher by profession, his mother brought a then two-year-old John Hope Franklin to the one-room school where she taught in Rentiesville, Oklahoma. She sat him in the back of the room with only a pencil and paper as his babysitters. Day after day, his mother would educate the many grade students left in her care while John occupied himself with the utensils left responsible for his own care taking. One day his mother decided to take a look at John’s paper. Not only had that pencil and paper kept John quiet, it had served as a depository for what he was learning. At two, he was able to read write and do the homework his mother had been administering to the other children.

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