Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993                   TAG: 9306140360
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

SCHOOL'S DIRECTOR DRIVES HARD IN HIS ACTIVIST ROLE

He steers his 1969 pickup into the parking lot, yellow light flashing atop the cab.

The truck is big, wide, ugly. It has a hydraulic lift on the back. He got it for next-to-nothing at a school auction. He loves it.

Franklin is one of Roanoke's most eccentric activists.

At 60, he considers himself a "thug" by nature. But a thug who quotes Locke, Marvell, Milton, Shakespeare.

Hanging above his head in his Alternative Ed office are about 20 flea-market ties. Wide ones, narrow ones. He dresses up the boys at Alternative Ed for job interviews or to host meetings when business leaders come to his school.

From 1971 to 1981, Franklin ran the federally funded job-training program with the hard-to-say name, the Opportunities Industrialization Center, or OIC. His newspaper file is thick with stories about FBI and IRS investigations of how the program handled its money. Franklin's name and his agency's were cleared.

Now his cause is Roanoke's teen-agers, particularly the ones being tossed out of middle and high schools and coming to the Alternative Ed Center.

He directed it this year while his friend, former director Peter Lewis, took a job as a visiting teacher to ease his stress and hypertension.

Franklin wound up putting his own health in jeopardy.

He began the school year trying to break up an argument between an Alternative Ed senior and a former student. The former student shot the senior in the hip. Franklin was inches away when the gun was fired.

Last winter, Franklin developed a blood clot that nearly caused a stroke.

Franklin wasn't fazed. In the hospital, he worked phones on either side of his bed, taking calls about kids.

Once he got out, Assistant School Superintendent William Hackley had him work out of central school offices to make him slow down. He let Franklin go to Alternative Ed one day, on condition that he stay 15 minutes.

Five hours later, Franklin was still there, standing in the hallway talking, his trademark pencil riding above his right ear.

Franklin played halfback when Hackley was quarterback at Lucy Addison High School, Roanoke's former all-black school. It's now Addison Aerospace Magnet Middle School, and the school where Lewis, Franklin and Hackley eked out a wing to house Alternative Ed.

In the 1950s, Franklin won a football scholarship to Notre Dame. He was its only black player. He dropped out. "There were no girls, and no black folks."

He transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro. "They had girls, and it was a black school."

He was in the Air Force ROTC there. He wanted to be a jet pilot, so, "big shot me," he said, he quit and joined the Air Force.

After service in Seattle and Germany, he won a football scholarship to Virginia State College, graduating in 1962. He later went to graduate school.

He returned to Roanoke and headed OIC, fighting for jobs and training for poor people.

He put a picket line around City Hall. He upturned a table when a meeting didn't go his way, and he punched out a cop at the Civic Center.

Bankers took him to lunch at the old Miller & Rhoads department store tearoom. Franklin says he didn't understand that they wanted him to be a power broker between them and the poor. "I'd just be very crude and very rude."

He quit OIC, and painted tin roofs and sanded floors for a living. He has 17 children - from a 10-year-old son to a daughter in her 40s.

Lewis and Franklin are a team at Alternative Ed. Lewis is the earnest advocate for kids, the soft-spoken negotiator with the powers-that-be.

Franklin is aggressive - still a bit of the thug, he says.

Franklin is a savvy grants-writer. Alternative Ed supplements its school money with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year.

Franklin says he's mellowed. At OIC, he was outside the establishment, and he jabbed it all the time.

Now he represents children, and the school system. "I changed my image. I softened it."

Not much, some would say. He still has a fiery tongue.

He has harsh words about what he calls Roanoke's "black bourgeoisie" - the black middle and upper class who, he says, blocked his plan to turn all of Addison into a center for troubled kids. He says they thought that would taint the memory of Lucy Addison, the black teacher and principal for whom the school is named.

Franklin wants to outfit every summer school kid this year with a baseball glove, and pair them up with an adult mentor for long rounds of throw-and-catch.

"You hang in there," he said, "and you learn not to blink, and you gain the confidence to overcome the fear. Then we're going to transfer that to the classroom."

In the fall, he wants to form crews of Alternative Ed youngsters who would repair elderly people's homes. They would learn the dignity of work - and demonstrate to the community that they're not bad.

"He's not a traditional public school person, because he's going to stand up for that young person," said Sara Holland, youth services director for Total Action Against Poverty. "And when they're wrong, he's going to stand up to that, too."