Franklin, John Hope

January 2, 1915

Historian and educator John Hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, an exclusively African-American town. At an early age he came to be introduced to white custom, law, and justice in the South. His father, a lawyer, was expelled from court by a white judge who told him that no black person could ever practice law in his court. Young Franklin was himself ejected, along with his mother (an elementary school teacher) and sister, from a train because his mother refused to move from the coach designated for whites. After moving to Tulsa in 1926, Franklin attended Booker T. Washington High School and learned the meaning of a "separate but equal" education—inferior facilities and a sharply limited curriculum. His avid interest in music introduced him to the Jim Crow seats in the local concert hall. He went on to receive his B.A. at Fisk University in 1935 and his Ph.D. in history at Harvard University in 1941.

Throughout his career, Franklin combined scholarship with social activism. As student body president at Fisk University, he protested the lynching of a local black man to the mayor, the governor, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Having once been barred from entering the University of Oklahoma to pursue graduate studies, he readily agreed to the request of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that he be an expert witness for a black student seeking admission to the graduate program in history at the University of Kentucky. At the request of Thurgood Marshall, he served on the research team whose work led to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation. In 1965 he joined more than thirty other historians on the civil rights march into Montgomery, Alabama.

Like Carter Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, Franklin demonstrated to a skeptical or indifferent profession that the history of black Americans was a legitimate field for scholarly research. His first book, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 (1943), explored the anomalous position of free blacks in the slave South. Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961) was a revisionist treatment of the unique experiment in biracial democratic government in the postwar South, particularly in its depiction of blacks as active participants and leaders, not simply as victims or passive tools of white politicians. In The Militant South (1956) and A Southern Odyssey (1976), Franklin explored different facets of the southern experience and varieties of southern white expression. His Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 1976, "Racial Equality in America," probed that troubled and elusive search. In a turn to biography, his George Washington Williams (1985) traced the life of a historian who wrote in the 1880s the first substantial and scholarly history of black Americans. For hundreds of thousands of students, Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom (first published in 1947) introduced them to African-American history. In Race and History (1989) he brought together his most important essays and lectures, including his autobiographical sketch and reflections, "A Life of Learning."

In his books, as in his teaching, Franklin transcends the distinction between African-American and American history. He has underscored the unique quality of the history of African Americans even as he has viewed that history as an intimate part of American history, inseparable from and a central theme in the national experience. Rejecting the need to replace old distortions with new myths and eulogistic sketches of heroes and heroines, he has demonstrated his full appreciation of the complexity and integrity of the American and African-American past.

Franklin's early teaching career included stints at Fisk University, St. Augustine's College, North Carolina Central College, and Howard University. In 1956 he went to Brooklyn College as chairman of the department of history—a department of fifty-two white historians. (The appointment made the front page of the New York Times; Franklin's troubled search for housing did not.) In 1964 he joined the history faculty of the University of Chicago, serving as chair from 1967 to 1970 and as the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor from 1969 to 1982. Moving to Durham, North Carolina, he chose to diversify rather than retire, becoming the James B. Duke Professor of History and professor of legal history in the law school at Duke University.

Franklin has been elected to the presidencies of the American Studies Association, the Southern Historical Association, the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association. More than seventy colleges and universities have awarded him an honorary degree. He has served on numerous national commissions, and in 1980 was a United States delegate to the 21st General Conference of UNESCO. In 1978 the state that initially forced John Hope Franklin to undergo the humiliating rites of racial passage elected him to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. Franklin retired in 1992. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and also received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. In 1997 he was called out of retirement to chair President Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race. Conservative critics accused the panel of problack bias on racial issues, and Franklin was criticized for his statement that the period after Emancipation was in many ways worse for black Americans than slavery. Despite the controversy, the commission's final report, issued in September 1998, was almost completely ignored by Congress.

In Franklin's honor, the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies opened at Duke University in 2000. In 2004 the John Hope Franklin Award was established to point the spotlight on scholars and education activists.

See also Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Fisk University; Howard University; Woodson, Carter G.

Bibliography

Franklin, John Hope. Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1989. See especially "John Hope Franklin: A Life of Learning," pp. 277–291.

leon f. litwack (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005