John Hope Franklin

(1915-   )

Background and Early Years

John Hope Franklin was born January 2, 1915, is a historian and former president of the American Historical Association. Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University, he is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and is continuously updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Okla., and named after John Hope, a Black educator and political activist. He graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Okla. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree from Fisk University in 1935 and a doctorate degree in History in 1941 from Harvard University. Franklin is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, Inc.

Franklin met and courted Aurelia Whittington, a librarian, while at Fisk. They married on June 11, 1940, at her parents’ home in Goldsboro, N.C. The two has one child, John Whittington Franklin, who was born August 24, 1952. Their marriage lasted 59 years, until January 27, 1999, when she succumbed to a long illness and died.

The Duty of History

In the early 1950s, Franklin served on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense team, led by Thurgood Marshall, which helped develop the Brown vs. Board of Education case. He was responsible for providing the extensive historic research that was necessary to argue the case. Needless to say, his research helped to further the Brown case as it was a success. This led to the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision ending the legal segregation of Black and White children in public schools. "My challenge," Franklin says, "was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of Blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly."

Franklin's illustrious teaching career began at Fisk University and continued during World War II, where he taught at St. Augustine's College and North Carolina College. From 1947 to 1956, he taught at Howard University. In 1956, Franklin was selected to be chair of the History Department at Brooklyn College, and became the first person of color to head a major History Department. Franklin served at that post until 1964, when he was recruited by the University of Chicago.

Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis said that while he was deciding to become a historian when news came that Franklin, his mentor, had been named departmental chair at Brooklyn College. "Now that certainly is a distinction. It had never happened before that a person of color had chaired a major history department. That meant a lot to me. If I had doubt about [the] viability of a career in history, that example certainly helps put to rest such concerns."

From 1964 to 1968, Franklin was a professor of History at the University of Chicago, and chair of the Department of History from 1967to 1970. He was named to the endowed position of John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, which he held from 1969 to 1982. In 1983, Franklin was appointed the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University. In 1985, he took emeritus status. Franklin was also professor of legal History at the Duke’s Law School from 1985 to 1992. He was appointed to the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, where he served from 1962 to 1969, and acted as chair of it from 1966 to 1969. He was also named to the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s General Conference in Belgrade during 1980.

Following His Footsteps

In researching his prize-winning biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Franklin’s mentee, Lewis, said he became aware of Franklin's "courage during that period in the 1950s when Du Bois became an un-person, when many progressives were tarred and feathered with the brush of subversion. John Hope Franklin was a rock; he was loyal to his friends. In the case of W.E.B. Du Bois, Franklin spoke out in his defense, not [about] Du Bois' communism, but of the right of an intellectual to express ideas that were not popular. I find that admirable. It was a high risk to take and we may be heading again into a period when the free concourse of ideas in the academy will have a price put upon it. In the final years of an active teaching career, I will have John Hope Franklin's example of high scholarship, great courage and civic activism."

Franklin has served as president of a number of academic and civil organizations, for example, he was the first Black president of both the Southern Historical Association and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. He has been appointed to serve on national commissions including the National Council of the Humanities and the President's Advisory Commission on Ambassadorial Appointments.

Overtime, Franklin wrote a number of key historic analysis texts relating to Black-American history. Some of his numerous works include: The Emancipation Proclamation, The Militant South, The Free Negro in North Carolina, Reconstruction After the Civil War, and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Ante-bellum North. Though, his aforementioned work, From Slavery to Freedom, is his more known book. Franklin’s most recent book, My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, is a biography of his father that he edited with along his son, John Whittington. Franklin spent majority of his professional career researching the early Black historian, George Washington Williams, spending as many as 40 years on that subject. He finally published a biography with his findings in 1982.

In 1962, Franklin became an elected member of an exclusive organization out of Washington, D.C., called the Cosmos Club. It was seen as headquarters for the social elite of the district, and was a high point for many intellectuals that ever got chosen for membership. Fast forward to 1997, Franklin served as head of President Bill Clinton’s advisory panel that was created to address the racial divide America was facing at the time.

Awards and Honors

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  The John Hope Franklin Collection for African and African-American Documentation resides at the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library and contains his personal and professional papers. The archive is one of three academic units named after John Hope Franklin at Duke. The others are the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the Franklin Humanities Institute.
  
  


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  On May 20, 2006, Franklin was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters at Lafayette College's 171st Commencement Exercises.
  
  


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  On November 15, 2006, Franklin was announced as the third recipient of the U.S. Library of Congress’ John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. 
  
  

Sources: wikipedia.org; http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-855; http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/franklin/;  http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/franklin/; http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_181_Confronting_History_I.mp3/view; http://www.charlierose.com/guests/john-franklin; Mirror to America. The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005; Schweninger, Loren. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, John Hope Franklin, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=716&category=educationMakers; http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/franklin/bio.html; Smith, Jessie Carney. Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 2003.