Thank You Dr. John Hope Franklin; You Taught Us Well
One of our historical icons left us last week; and as we didn’t document it then, we are giving him his flowers today -
Too Often we let those who are Champions slip away from us; with only a slight glance to their passing. Dr Franklin did so much to further the cause of History; and Black History. He was a tireless worker who gave us the epic “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” which has sold millions of copies and been translated into six languages.
Dr Franklin was recently rebroadcast on the Tavis Smiley show and the look in his eye was of sheer joy. he discussed his travels, his history and his fight against Racism; which he waged his entire life.
He taught at many very fine worldclass institutions; as well as establishing himself as a visiting scholar at Oxford in the 1960’s. which in america wouldn’t have happened. his quest fed my interest in My History.
As a child it was stressed to me that we all need heroes; and they should be people we can see on a daily basis. the teacher, the crossing guard; the lady at the corner store who lets you round down the change on your momma’s purchase cause she knows just how tight things really are; these are the real heroes in our life, thanks to people like Dr. Franklin and My Mom.
We Are All Living History Everyday – Live to Leave a powerful legacy..
I heard him say these words when I saw him speak in the 80’s and I have lived my life this way, ever-since.
these are a few pieces that I collected about Dr Franklin; in fragments. you should click the title link to get the entire article on it’s home site.
Remember Your Heroes Today, because tomorrow may be too late,
John Hope Franklin, Scholar of African-American History, Is Dead at 94
John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94.
John Hope Franklin at home in Durham, N.C., in 2006.
Speaking on race in 2005, with former President Bill Clinton.
Dr. John Hope Franklin on Obama Nomination
President Obama Discusses Legacy of John Hope Franklin
A spokeswoman for Duke University, where Dr. Franklin taught, said he died of congestive heart failure at the university’s hospital.
During a career of scholarship, teaching and advocacy that spanned more than 70 years, Dr. Franklin was deeply involved in the painful debates that helped reshape America’s racial identity, working with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall and other major civil rights figures of the 20th century.
“I will always think of John Hope as the historian of the South who grasped the complexity of Southern public life as shaped by the horror of personal slavery,” said Nell Irvin Painter, the Princeton University historian. “Franklin was the first great American historian to reckon the price owed in violence, autocracy and militarism.”
It was a theme Dr. Franklin wrestled with into his last years. In an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 2007, he wrote, “If the American idea was to fight every war from the beginning of colonization to the middle of the 20th century with Jim Crow armed forces, in the belief that this would promote the American idea of justice and equality, then the American idea was an unmitigated disaster and a denial of the very principles that this country claimed as its rightful heritage.”
Dr. Franklin combined idealism with rigorous research, producing such classic works as “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947. Considered one of the definitive historical surveys of the American black experience, it has sold more than three million copies and has been translated into Japanese, German, French, Chinese and other languages.
Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, called it “a landmark in the interpretation of American civilization.”
Dr. Franklin also taught at some of the nation’s leading institutions, including Harvard and the University of Chicago in addition to Duke, and as a scholar he personally broke several racial barriers.
He often argued that historians have an important role in shaping policy, a position he put into practice when he worked with Marshall’s team of lawyers in their effort to strike down segregation in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools.
“Using the findings of the historians,” Dr. Franklin recalled in a 1974 lecture, “the lawyers argued that the history of segregation laws reveals that their main purpose was to organize the community upon the basis of a superior white and an inferior Negro caste.”
Dr. Franklin also participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., with Dr. King.
“One might argue that the historian is the conscience of the nation, if honesty and consistency are factors that nurture the conscience,” Dr. Franklin said. Still, he warned, if scholars engage in advocacy as well as scholarship they must “make it clear which activity they are engaging in at any given time.”
President Bill Clinton, in awarding him the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1995, said Dr. Franklin had never confused “his role as an advocate with his role as a scholar,” adding that he had held “to the conviction that integration is a national necessity.”
Yet even on so august an occasion, Dr. Franklin could not escape the legacy of discrimination. In a talk he gave in North Carolina 10 years later, he recalled that on the evening before he received the medal at the White House, a woman at a Washington club asked him to fetch her coat, mistaking him for an attendant, and that a man at his hotel had handed him car keys and told him to get his car.
Dr. Franklin’s prestige led Mr. Clinton to select him in 1997 to head the Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race, which was formed to promote dialogue about the country’s race problems.
The panel, however, drew criticism. White supremacists protested at some of its forums, and at others American Indians and other minorities complained that they were being left out of the process. A group of conservative scholars repudiated the panel and formed their own.
And when Dr. Franklin’s group finally issued its report after 15 months, the document was criticized as, in one disillusioned scholar’s words, “a list of platitudes.”
The controversy did little to dim Dr. Franklin’s standing as a groundbreaking historian, however. He was the first African-American president of the American Historical Association; the first black department chairman at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke; the first black chairman of the University of Chicago’s history department; and the first African-American to present a paper at the segregated Southern Historical Association, one of many groups that later elected him its president.
John Hope Franklin was born on Jan. 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Okla., the son of Buck Colbert Franklin, a lawyer, and Molly Parker Franklin, an elementary school teacher. His parents had moved to Rentiesville, an all-black town, after his father was not allowed to practice law in Louisiana.
In the 1920s, the family moved to Tulsa, and at age 11 he was taken to hear the great civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom Dr. Franklin later became friends.
His youth was marked by frequent brushes with racism. He was forced off an all-white train and made to sit in a segregated section of the Tulsa opera house. He watched black neighborhoods of Tulsa — including the one where his father had his office — being burned during the infamous 1921 race riot, and he was barred from admission to the University of Oklahoma.
Instead, Dr. Franklin attended historically black Fisk University in Nashville, receiving his B.A. in 1935. There he met Aurelia E. Whittington, who would become his wife, and sometime editor, of almost 60 years. They had one son, John Whittington Franklin, who survives him. Mrs. Franklin died in 1999.
In 1997, Dr. Franklin and his son edited an autobiography of his father, Buck Franklin. The book told the tale of free blacks in the Southwestern Indian territories in the late 1800s. Buck Franklin’s father, a former slave owned by Indians, became a cowboy and rancher, while Buck, who taught himself law by mail, was an advocate of black pride and nonviolence.
Before graduating from Fisk, Dr. Franklin considered following his father into law but was persuaded by a white professor, Ted Currier, to make history his field. Professor Currier was said to have borrowed $500 to help Dr. Franklin pursue graduate studies at Harvard. There, Dr. Franklin later recalled, he felt the isolation of being one of only a handful of blacks on campus. He received his master’s degree in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1941.
Two years later he published his first book, “The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860,” which explored slaveholders’ hatred and fear of the quarter-million free blacks in the antebellum South. Almost 20 other books followed, either written or edited by Dr. Franklin.
In “The Militant South, 1800-1861” (1956), he described Southern whites’ “martial spirit” and “will to fight,” which he said gave the pre-Civil-War South its reputation for violence. He approvingly quoted Tocqueville’s observation that, because of slavery, “the citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy.”
In “Reconstruction After the Civil War” (1961), he wrote that the end of Reconstruction reforms left “the South more than ever attached to the values and outlook that had shaped its history.” He lamented that “in the postwar years, the Union had not made the achievements of the war a foundation for the healthy advancement of the political, social and economic life” of the nation.
“The Emancipation Proclamation” (1963), written a century after the proclamation was issued, examined how it evolved in Lincoln’s mind and its impact on the Civil War and later generations. Dr. Franklin concluded hopefully, “Perhaps in its second century, it would give real meaning and purpose to the Declaration of Independence.”
And in “The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century” (1993) he argued that race would remain America’s great problem in the 21st century.
Despite his acute awareness of the South’s troubled racial history, Dr. Franklin was often angrier about Northern racism and frequently defended his adopted home state, North Carolina.
His major biographical project was a 1985 study of George Washington Williams, a self-educated black Civil War veteran and author of a 1,000-page 1882 history of blacks in America from 1619 to 1880. He said he spent nearly 40 years of intermittent research on the project, calling Williams “one of the small heroes of the world.”
Dr. Franklin’s first passion was teaching, and he continued to log classroom time despite his increasing prominence. His teaching career began at Fisk in 1936 and continued over the next 20 years at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C., North Carolina College in Durham and Howard University in Washington.
As his first books drew national notice, Dr. Franklin left the world of historically black colleges and went to Brooklyn College, where from 1956 to 1964 he served as chairman of what had been an all-white department.
“Having John Hope Franklin at Brooklyn College in the 1960’s was like having a real star in our midst,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, who was a student of Dr. Franklin’s. “Students who were lucky enough to get into his class bragged about him from morning until night.”
Dr. Franklin later taught at the University of Chicago before returning to North Carolina in 1982 to teach at Duke and at the Duke Law School.
Dr. Franklin was also a Fulbright professor in Australia and had teaching stints in China and Zimbabwe. He taught at Cambridge University in England; Harvard; Cornell; the University of Wisconsin; the University of Hawaii; the University of California, Berkeley; and other institutions. Since 1992, he had been James B. Duke professor emeritus of history at Duke. A John Hope Franklin Research Center was established in his honor at Duke.
At his home in Durham, Dr. Franklin continued a lifelong hobby of cultivating hundreds of orchids; one species was named for him, the Phalaenopsis John Hope Franklin.
His honors, awards, and professional and civic affiliations were so numerous as to fill several single-spaced pages of a long curriculum vitae. He received more than 100 honorary degrees.
In 2006, he received the John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities in a ceremony at the Library of Congress. In his prepared remarks he said he had long struggled “to understand how it is that we could seek a land of freedom for the people of Europe and, at the very same time, establish a social and economic system that enslaved people who happen not to be from Europe.”
“I have struggled to understand,” he went on, “how it is that we could fight for independence and, at the very same time, use that newly won independence to enslave many who had joined in the fight for independence.
“As a student of history, I have attempted to explain it historically, but that explanation has not been all that satisfactory. That has left me no alternative but to use my knowledge of history, and whatever other knowledge and skills I have, to present the case for change in keeping with the express purpose of attaining the promised goals of equality for all peoples.”
Race Relations Champion Dr John Hope Franklin Dies
wral.com – durham n.c.
Posted: Mar. 25, 2009
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Race relations champion John Hope Franklin dies
Durham, N.C. — Former Duke University historian and scholar John Hope Franklin, who championed better race relations in the U.S. for decades, died Wednesday morning. He was 94.
Franklin died at Duke University Hospital of congestive heart failure, university officials said. He is survived by his son, John Whittington Franklin, and other family members. A memorial service will be held in Duke Chapel on June 11, which would have been his and his late wife’s 69th anniversary.
“John Hope Franklin lived for nearly a century and helped define that century,” Duke President Richard Brodhead said in a statement. “A towering historian, he led the recognition that African-American history and American history are one. With his grasp of the past, he spent a lifetime building a future of inclusiveness, fairness and equality. Duke has lost a great citizen and a great friend.”
Politicians and educators also called Franklin a leading moral figure for North Carolina and the nation and said his insight would be missed.
“John Hope Franklin was a tremendous leader, historian and friend to North Carolina and to the nation.” Gov. Beverly Perdue said in a statement. “He personified giving and his work to advance the understanding of African-American contributions was unmatched by any other. He will be sadly missed.”
Long before former President Bill Clinton named him to lead a national panel on race relations, Franklin was a respected historian whose studies and writings focused on racism and the obstacles to racial equality in America.
“It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda,” he once said. “My challenge 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 story began in the tiny, all-black town of Rentiesville, in eastern Oklahoma, where his father was a lawyer and his mother taught elementary school. They taught him the value of hard work and diligence, but he learned the lessons of racism from the segregated South.
When he was 6, he and his mother were removed from a train because they refused to move to a compartment for blacks. Later, he tried to help a blind, white woman cross a street in Tulsa, Okla.
“Can you imagine being rejected by a blind, white woman in the middle of the street while I was helping her across?” he said. “When she heard that I was black, she told me to take my filthy hands off her.”
When he was 19, he was threatened with lynching in Mississippi because he had the audacity of walking into an ice cream parlor and asking to be served.
Franklin received a bachelor’s degree from all-black Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., in 1935 – he was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma because of his race – and he went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University.
History fascinated him because it provided a chance to confront the past while at the same time creating future opportunities.
“If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present. He must begin with the past,” he said.
While at Fisk, Franklin met Goldsboro native Aurelia Whittington. They married in 1940, and after he finished his studies at Harvard, the couple returned to the South. He taught at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh and the North Carolina College for Negroes, the predecessor to North Carolina Central University, while she worked as a librarian.
Before leaving the Triangle in 1947 to join the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., he published his seminal book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” which has sold millions of copies and been translated into six languages.
While teaching at Howard, Franklin joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team that helped develop the sociological case for the Brown v. Board of Education case that led to landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 that ended the legal segregation of black and white children in public schools.
He also took part in civil rights marches with Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala., in the 1960s.
“I want to be out there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better world, a better place to live,” he said.
Duke historian John Hope Franklin dies
94-year-old scholar revered for ‘his dignity and his shining intelligence’
RALEIGH, N.C. – John Hope Franklin, a revered Duke University historian and scholar of life in the South and the African-American experience in the United States, died Wednesday. He was 94.
Duke spokesman David Jarmul said Franklin died of congestive heart failure at the university’s hospital in Durham.
Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma where he was often subjected to humiliating incidents of racism, he was later instrumental in bringing down the legal and historical validations of such a world.
As an author, his book “From Slavery to Freedom” was a landmark integration of black history into American history. As a scholar, his research helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools.
“It was evident how much the lawyers appreciated what the historians could offer,” Franklin later wrote. “For me, and I suspect the same was true for the others, it was exhilarating.”
Professor and president
Franklin broke numerous color barriers. He was the first black department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke University; and the first black president of the American Historical Association.
Above all, he documented how blacks had lived and served alongside whites from the nation’s birth. Black patriots fought at Lexington and Concord, Franklin pointed out in “From Slavery to Freedom,” published in 1947. They crossed the Delaware with Washington and explored with Lewis and Clark. The text sold million of copies and remains required reading in college classrooms.
Late in life, Franklin chaired President Clinton’s Initiative on Race and received more than 100 honorary degrees, the NAACP’s Spingarn Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
As he aged, Franklin spent more time in the greenhouse behind his home, where he nursed orchids, than in library stacks. He fell in love with the flowers because “they’re full of challenges, mystery” — the same reasons he fell in love with history.
‘Shining intelligence’
In June, Franklin had a small role in the movie based on the book “Blood Done Signed My Name,” about the public slaying of black man in Oxford in 1970. The book’s author, Tim Tyson, said at the time he wanted Franklin in the movie “because of his dignity and his shining intelligence.”
Franklin attended historically black Fisk University, where he met Aurelia Whittington, who would be his wife, editor and rock for 58 years until her death in 1999. He planned to follow his father into law, but the lively lectures of a white professor, Ted Currier, convinced him history was his field. Currier borrowed $500 to send Franklin to Harvard University for graduate studies.
Franklin’s doctoral thesis was on free blacks in antebellum North Carolina, and his wife spent part of their honeymoon in Washington, D.C., at the Census Bureau, helping him finish his research. The resulting work, “The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860,” earned Franklin his doctorate and, in 1943, became his first published book.
Four years later, he completed his seminal work, “From Slavery to Freedom,” and accepted a job at Howard University, beginning his long academic career.
Some of his greatest moments of triumph, though, were marred by bigotry.
CONTINUED : ‘Racial divide separating me’
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