Franklin, John Hope
1915-2009 · Contribution: 1947-1994
Authored From Slavery to Freedom in 1947, the field-defining survey of African American history that sold more than three million copies, was translated into multiple languages, and became the standard textbook that brought Black history into mainstream American college curricula for the first time
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Impact on the world
Beginning research on From Slavery to Freedom at age 32 on the faculty of what is now North Carolina Central University, with a $500 advance from Alfred A. Knopf, Franklin set out, as he later put it, “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”; the book went through eight editions during his lifetime and became the most commonly assigned text when majority-white colleges began teaching Black history courses in the 1960s. Franklin used his historical expertise directly in the civil rights struggle, spending three days a week gathering Reconstruction-era evidence for Thurgood Marshall's legal team ahead of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and went on to become the first Black scholar to chair a history department at a major university (Brooklyn College, 1956) and the first Black president of the American Historical Association (1979), the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton in 1995 and later chaired Clinton's Advisory Board on Race, while continuing to publish landmark works including Reconstruction After the Civil War and a biography of pioneering Black historian George Washington Williams that took him three decades to complete.
Life & background
Born January 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, and raised in Tulsa in the aftermath of the 1921 Race Massacre, Franklin earned his B.A. from Fisk University in 1935 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University by 1941. He taught at Fisk, St. Augustine's College, North Carolina Central University, Howard University, Brooklyn College, the University of Chicago, and finally Duke University, where he was James B. Duke Professor of History until his death in Durham, North Carolina, on March 25, 2009, at age 94.
Sources
- Encyclopædia Britannica; Duke University John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; National Museum of African American History and Culture
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