GreekChat.com Forums - Passing of Dr. John Hope Franklin

Brother Frankin was a great man and Brother. I saw him about three months ago at Brother Schooler's Omega Service. He was in spirits which was the norm. I am glad to have had opportunity to work with him through the NAACP. He will certainly be missed!!!!

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

John Hope Franklin winced when people called him America's greatest black
historian, as many did. It would be more fitting to call him the greatest
historian of black America.

In more than 70 years of scholarship, he documented the African-American
experience as no one had done before - a body of work that earned him more
than 100 honorary degrees, making him perhaps the most decorated academician
of his time.

Franklin, 94, died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at Duke University
Hospital in Durham, N.C. He was best known as the author of the
groundbreaking chronicle, "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African
Americans."

Published in 1947, the book was updated eight times and sold more than 3
million copies. But that was only his most visible achievement.

Starting in 1936 at Fisk University in Nashville, Franklin published
hundreds of academic articles and 16 books about African-American and
Southern history before ending his career as a professor at Duke. He was
part of a generation of historians, including C. Vann Woodward and David
Potter, who challenged the racial stereotyping and Lost Cause sentimentality
that had dominated the study of Southern history.

Unlike earlier historians, for instance, Franklin viewed the Civil War as
more of a liberation than a defeat for the region. "It had been delivered
from the domination of an institution that had stifled its economic
development and rendered completely ineffective its intellectual life," he
wrote.

Franklin challenged prevailing thought outside the ivy walls as well. Early
in his career, he helped research the lawsuit that Thurgood Marshall and the
NAACP took to the Supreme Court in 1954 to overturn public school
segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Decades later, he went to Capitol Hill to testify against the Supreme Court
nomination of Judge Robert Bork, whom he saw as an enemy of civil rights. In
the 1990s, President Bill Clinton appointed Franklin chairman of his
national commission on race relations.

Franklin's activism was rooted in the indignities of his personal
experience.

Born in 1915 in Oklahoma, Franklin was the son of a lawyer and a
schoolteacher who named him John Hope after the president of Atlanta
University. The family was moving to Tulsa in 1921 when one of the worst
race riots in American history broke out and Mr. Franklin's law office was
burned down. He worked out of a tent for months.

Franklin planned to follow his father into law when he went away to college
at Fisk. Instead, he fell under the sway of a white history professor,
Theodore Currier, who inspired him to change disciplines and enroll at
Harvard, then loaned him $500 when he was accepted. He earned his doctorate
there in 1941.

Holding a degree from a prestigious university didn't shield Franklin from
racial insults.

When he returned south to teach at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, N.C.,
he caused a stir by walking into the whites-only state archives. It had
never occurred to anyone there that a black scholar might want to use the
archives.

Franklin was given a room of his own to work in, safely segregated from the
other scholars.

It was one of many such slights over the years. After Pearl Harbor, Franklin
attempted to volunteer for a Navy desk job but was turned down because of
his skin color. As president of the Southern Historical Association, he
organized a convention in Memphis but declined to attend because he couldn't
stay in the segregated headquarters hotel.

When he was named history chairman at Brooklyn College - the first black man
to head a history department at a major, predominantly white college -
scores of real estate agents refused to show houses to him and his wife.

Despite such episodes, Franklin's work remained remarkably free of anger or
ideology. "He has never bowed to the pressure of fashions and the propaganda
of black nationalism, " Woodward, the eminent historian of the South, said in
1991.

Franklin had published only one book when editor Alfred Knopf approached him
in the 1940s about writing a history of Negro Americans. Franklin didn't
want to do it at first; the subject seemed too broad. But he acquiesced, in
part because no comprehensive history existed.

The result, "From Slavery to Freedom," was "the story of the strivings of
the nameless millions who have sought adjustment in a new and sometimes
hostile world," as Franklin put it in the preface.

Franklin wrote and edited many other books during a career that took him
from St. Augustine's to North Carolina Central (1943) to Howard University
(1947) to Brooklyn College (1956) to the University of Chicago (1964). One
of the best received works, "The Militant South" (1956), seemed particularly
relevant; it explored the antebellum roots of the region's martial spirit
and appetite for violence, which were again rearing their heads during the
civil rights struggle.

After years of teaching in the North, Franklin moved back South in 1980 and
eventually took professorships in Duke's history and law departments. The
move suited him. Franklin cut a distinguished figure, with his erect 6-foot
frame, thin mustache and courtly manners, and he found the gentler pace of
Southern life more to his liking.

"The South, as a place, is as attractive to blacks as it is to whites," he
explained in 1995. "Blacks, even when they left the South, didn't stop
having affection for it. They just couldn't make it there. Then they found
the North had its problems, too, so you look for a place of real ease and
contentment where you can live as a civilized human being. That's the
South.. It's home."

Franklin lived in Durham with his former college sweetheart and wife of 59
years, Aurelia, a librarian who died in 1999. Their only child, John W.
Franklin, became a program director at the Smithsonian Institution.