John Hope Franklin

Scholar, educator, and activist

• Born: January 2, 1915
• Birthplace: Rentiesville, Oklahoma
• Died: March 25, 2009
• Place of death: Durham, North Carolina

Franklin’s writings helped establish African American history as a serious field of study in American universities. His career was a steady series of firsts for African Americans in the academic world, and Franklin used his scholarship to help end segregation in universities and public schools.

Early Life

John Hope Franklin was born January 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was the schoolteacher in the small, all-African American town. His mother took him with her while she worked, and Franklin taught himself to read and write before he was five years old. After the family moved to Tulsa, he attended segregated Booker T. Washington High School, where he was senior class president and valedictorian in 1931.

Franklin entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, intending to become a lawyer, but switched to the field of history under the influence of white professor Theodore S. Currier, who encouraged him to apply to Harvard University for graduate school. Franklin was the first student from a historically black institution to go directly into the Harvard history program with no conditions imposed. When he lacked enough money to begin attending, Currier borrowed five hundred dollars and loaned it to Franklin.

At Harvard, Franklin was advised by Professor Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr. When Franklin ran short of money in the spring, Harvard provided a three-hundred-dollar loan. After earning his master’s degree, he decided to spend the next year teaching and start paying back his loans, replacing Currier at Fisk for the year. When he returned to Harvard, he was granted the Edwin Austen Fellowship and also received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship. In his second year, Schlesinger encouraged him to submit a paper on Edward Bellamy to The New England Quarterly, which accepted it, making Franklin the first published scholar of his class. To earn money and be near his sources while researching his dissertation topic, free African Americans in North Carolina, Franklin took a job at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh. Completed in 1941, his Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1943 as The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860.

Franklin bitterly resented the indignities imposed on him in the racially segregated South. He was forcibly removed from a train at the age of six for sitting in a “white coach” and had to walk home. He resented the superior facilities offered in white high schools in Tulsa and felt humiliated by having to sit in the segregated section at a Chicago Opera performance. At sixteen, he was addressed in such insulting terms by a white ticket seller in Nashville that thereafter he rarely left the Fisk campus. At nineteen, he was surrounded by a crowd of rural white men who discussed lynching him. When he arrived at Vanderbilt University to take the Graduate Record Exam required for admission to Harvard, the proctor threw his exam on the floor.

Moving North did not end the impact of racism. As a Harvard graduate student, Franklin was refused service at a restaurant while on a date. Even more disturbing was the feeling that he was a “token” African American, that most people had low expectations of his scholarly ability once they saw the color of his skin. Franklin had his first exposure to anti-Semitism when the graduate student history club refused to consider Oscar Handlin (who later won a Pulitzer Prize) for office because he was Jewish.

Life’s Work

As a publishing scholar, Franklin ascended the academic ladder, moving to the North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham in 1941 and to prestigious Howard University in 1947. In continuing his research, Franklin faced the topsy-turvy world of legally or traditionally segregated state archives containing essential manuscript sources. The intervention of a friendly archivist gave him access to the Louisiana State Archives, but only during the days the building was closed in celebration of the end of World War II. Another archivist gave him keys to the stacks containing that state’s collections in order to avoid having white librarians carry manuscript material to him. When white researchers protested that this arrangement gave Franklin special privileges, his key was taken away and he then received the same services as other scholars—in a separate room.

Franklin’s research and study resulted in the publication of several major books. In 1945, Schlesinger recommended that the Alfred A. Knopf publishing firm commission Franklin to write a history of African Americans. Appearing in 1947, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans became the mostly widely used textbook in the emerging field of African American history and attracted general readers and historians desiring accurate information. The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956) used racial violence to illustrate the effects of slavery on the region. Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961) contradicted many accepted ideas about the period. Franklin demonstrated statistically that there was never was “black rule” in the South; his account of white brutality thoroughly refuted ideas of “chivalrous redeemers.” The Emancipation Proclamation (1963) provided a succinct analysis of the origins of the Proclamation and its significance in American history.

During his lifetime, Franklin wrote fourteen books and more than one hundred articles, several of which were translated into German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese. His works earned him many honors, including more than one hundred honorary degrees and numerous prizes and medals. His scholarly career was a steady series of firsts for African Americans. In 1949, Franklin was the first African American to present a paper at a convention of the previously all-white Southern Historical Association (in 1970, he was elected president of the association). In 1956, Franklin became chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, making him the first African American to head a department in a historically white college. After moving to the University of Chicago in 1964, he became the first African American to teach history at a prestigious research university; accepting the chairmanship of the history department in 1967 was yet another first. Franklin served as president of the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and Phi Beta Kappa. After Franklin retired from Chicago in 1982 and moved to Durham, North Carolina, Duke University persuaded him to accept an endowed professorship for the next ten years.

All his achievements and honors did not exempt Franklin from racism. When moving to Brooklyn to chair the college’s history departments, he discovered that real estate agents would not show him houses near the college; when he arranged to buy directly from a white owner, banks and insurance companies would not provide loans. Only the intervention of a friendly board member of the South Brooklyn Savings Bank procured Franklin a mortgage. When he was sixty years old, a white guest in a were chosen hotel told Franklin to carry his luggage. When he was eighty and attending a dinner at a Washington club where he was a member, the day before President Bill Clinton presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a white woman gave him her coat check and ordered him to get her coat.

Franklin proudly put his historical skills at the service of the Civil Rights movement. When Thurgood Marshall recruited him to provide expert testimony in a 1947 lawsuit to open the University of Kentucky graduate program to African Americans, Franklin drew up a careful comparison of the library facilities and qualifications of the teachers in the State College for Negroes with those at the university. To assist Marshall’s brief challenging public schoolsegregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Franklin spent three days a week using his knowledge of Reconstruction source material to gather evidence about what Congress understood the effect the Fourteenth Amendment on school segregation might be. When American historians organized a bus trip on March 21, 1965, to join Martin Luther King, Jr., in marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Franklin enthusiastically enlisted.

Franklin died of congestive heart failure on March 25, 2009, at Duke University’s hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He was ninety-four years old.

Significance

Franklin was not the first to write about African American history. Important research had already been published, often by self-taught scholars, only to be ignored by white historians. African American historians mostly taught in historically black colleges, did not participate in professional societies, and were forced to self-publish if they wanted to present their research findings.

Franklin benefited from publishing his major works just as the Civil Rights movement was taking off, when both the historical profession and the general public were interested in what he had to say. His books and articles were solid history and attracted attention that permitted him to personally integrate college faculties and professional organizations. Franklin did not see himself as studying and recording African American history, although he helped found the field, but rather considered himself a historian of the South, determined to integrate African Americans into southern and national history. Franklin, along with the many younger scholars who joined this quest, succeeded. Accounts of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the twentieth century now describe African Americans as significantly affecting the course of events. Because of their efforts, African American history has been accepted as a reputable field of historical scholarship, deserving representation in all universities.

Bibliography

Finkelman, Paul. “John Hope Franklin.” In Clio’s Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000, edited by Robert Allen Rutland. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. A brief but thorough account of Franklin’s historical writings and ideas by a former graduate student.

Franklin, John Hope. A Mirror for Americans: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Detailed narrative of Franklin’s work and career that describes the impact of racism on his life and writings.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Twenty-seven essays demonstrate the wide range of Franklin’s historical work. Several articles and speeches contain autobiographical information.

Jarrett, Beverly, ed. Tributes to John Hope Franklin: Scholar, Mentor, Father, Friend. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Eleven articles celebrate Franklin’s achievements.

Journal of African American History 74, no. 2 (Summer 2009). The entire issue is devoted to appreciations of Franklin’s work and personality by fellow scholars.