John Hope Franklin is the author of several historical works including A Southern Odyssey: Travellers in the Antebellum North, Racial Equality in America, The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century, and In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he was the first recipient of the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Cleanth Brooks Medal. Franklin has been awarded the Spingarn Medal for Achievement from the NAACP, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Gold Medal for History by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Franklin released his autobiography, Mirror to America, in 2005.