WASHINGTON — I was honored, humbled, and thankful that my alma mater, Yale University, accepted my donation of my congressional papers and journals that span several decades.

Following last week’s ceremony with Yale University President Peter Salovey, the university established the Gary Franks Papers as part of Yale’s Special Collections section. It will chronicle my journey, including the 12 years I spent as a pioneer Black elected official (Waterbury Board of Aldermen and in Congress), including being the first Black person from an Ivy League undergraduate college to be elected to Congress.

I come from very humble beginnings, and was blessed by the Grace of God.

I once asked my mother where I slept when I was growing up, given I was the sixth of six children. The question was not met with a smile. In fact, it would be one of the rare instances in which my mother would give me that look, that why-are-you-asking-me-this look.

Her curt response was: “Well, you grew up, didn’t you?” I learned to never bring that up again.

But with five siblings, two parents, and always at least one cousin living in our small five-room apartment, I really did not know.

Yet, I am so thankful for the life I have had and would not trade it with anyone on the planet.

From my illiterate father and my wise mother, I learned how to never quit and how to handle racism. I also learned how to work your butt off and look in the mirror first before blaming someone.

I had three sisters – two were actual grade school teachers – who acted as my full-time tutors. They would go on to earn doctorate degrees (they became college professors and one a lawyer). My brother exuded character and strength (he became an Army Colonel). Another brother taught me how to jump high which helped me become a free agent with the NBA’s New Orleans Jazz. He became a school teacher.

I have been the millionaire “slumlord” (by the accounts of my opponents – not true), alderman, congressman, manager for Fortune 500 companies, lobbyist/consultant, visiting college professor, and now a weekly nationally syndicated columnist.

I have a beautiful wife of 30+ years, three children, and three grandchildren who have never given me gray hair. They “put God First” in their lives, worked hard, helped others and were thankful for their achievements.

I would be remiss not to mention my great grandfather, G.W. Petteway, born in 1836 as a slave. He became a minister. He and my great grandmother, Cecilia White (possibly related to 19 th-century Congressman George White), are historical figures in North Carolina for building and starting the first school for former slaves in 1870.

Adversity? I have been attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). That must be unique.

As a child, soon after we moved into a previously all-white area, the KKK burned a cross, killed a dog on our lawn and stuffed a dead bleeding possum in our mailbox. We incessantly received phone call death threats. The drama lasted nearly three months until the FBI got involved.

Years later as an adult, I took the spears, the attacks, the hate from some of the Black Democrat Members of Congress as well. One member’s father physically attacked me on the stairs of a federal courthouse after my testimony before a U.S. Appeals Court in Savannah, Georgia.

What was my “heresy”? I claimed that white people would vote for a Black person. The racial gerrymandering of super minority districts in order to get a Black elected to Congress, I argued, was unnecessary. I also said this at a White House CBC meeting with former President Bill Clinton. Within hours the CBC voted to kick me out of the caucus.

As fate would have it, all of those CBC members were proven wrong. Packing districts based on race is wrong and destructive to a democracy. Plus, it is not needed to get a Black person elected. I had proven that by getting elected in a 4% Black district/92% white district, making me the first Black elected in an overwhelmingly white congressional district.

The U.S. Appeals Court agreed with me.

The result? Today you have more than double the number of Black congressmen as well as several Black senators. The growth of Black representation in Congress is due to Black people representing majority white districts – just as I had predicted. Almost a dozen Black members of Congress have also been Republicans since my election in the 1990s.

This change has helped America. It dramatically increased the number of Black senators and also paved the way for America’s first Black president – Barack Obama.

My contribution to passing legislation is revealed clearly in my papers and diaries. It was a different era. Republicans and Democrats actually worked together. I had more Democrat friends in Congress than I had Republican ones.

But race-neutral ideas were the ones I promoted most.

Take HUBZones legislation, for example. I called the bill I introduced the Urban Entrepreneurial Opportunities Act (UEO). Others, after my unexpected departure, took the idea and cut the initiative in two and passed each component into law in the late ’90s, calling them HUBZones and New Market Fund.

The point of this legislation was to not necessarily give benefits to a person because of the color of his or her skin, but instead to give benefits to anyone who was willing to build a business in an economically depressed area, regardless of the color of the business owner. And, the business owner also had to produce jobs for the people in the area.

Over the decades, the Small Business Administration (SBA)-run program has produced tens of billions of dollars for those companies, in federal contracts to provide products or services for the federal government.

I trust that my donation of materials and the study of the Gary Franks Papers at Yale will prove helpful, inspirational, and insightful to others for generations to come.