Honoring the Life of Dr. John Hope Franklin
Throughout his long life, John Hope Franklin wrote prolifically about history – more than 60 years after its publication, one of his books, From Slavery to Freedom, is considered a core text on the African-American experience. Dr. Franklin not only wrote about history, he lived it. Franklin worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, he joined protestors in a 1965 march led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama and he headed President Clinton's 1997 national advisory board on race. Franklin accumulated many honors during his long career, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. He shared the John W. Kluge Award for lifetime achievement in the humanities and a similar honor from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, the nation's two oldest learned societies. He also was revered as a "moral leader" of the historical profession for his engagement in the pressing issues of the day, his unflagging advocacy of civil rights, and his gracious and courtly demeanor.
Dr. John Hope Franklin was described in the Washington Post recently as a man who "lived what he taught." I don't think there are many higher accolades. For those of us who knew him and called him friend, it feels as though collectively we've lost a grandfather – a very wise and generous teacher and mentor. For those who don't know about the contributions of Dr. John Hope Franklin, I wanted to come to the floor tonight to add my voice of appreciation and to highlight some of his contributions that I believe are important.
John Hope Franklin, the grandson of a slave, was born on January 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, a small black community. His parents, Buck Colbert Franklin and Mollie Parker Franklin named their son after John Hope, the President of Atlanta Univiersity. His mother was a school teacher and his father was a community leader and they recognized the importance of education.
The realities of racism hit Franklin at an early age. He said he vividly remembered the humiliating experience of being put off the train with his mother because she refused to move to a segregated compartment for a six-mile trip to the next town. He was six years old. With his parents, he lived through the Tulsa Race Riots in 1921, believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. Later, although an academic star at Booker T. Washington High School and valedictorian of his class, the state would not allow him to study at the University of Oklahoma because he was black. So instead, in 1931 Franklin enrolled at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, intending to study law.
However, a history professor, Theodore Currier, persuaded him to change his mind and his major and he received his bachelor's degree in history in 1935. Currier, who was white, became a close friend and mentor, and when Franklin's money ran out, Currier loaned the young student $500 to attend graduate school at Harvard University, where he received his master's in 1936 and doctorate five years later. He began his career as an instructor at Fisk in 1936 and taught at St. Augustine's and North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), both historically black colleges.
In 1945, Alfred A. Knopf approached him about writing a book on African-American history – originally titled From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes -- and he spent 13 months writing it. Then in 1947, he took a post as professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, where, in the early 1950s, he traveled from campus to Thurgood Marshall's law office to help prepare the brief that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision.
In 1956 he became chairman of the previously all-white history department at Brooklyn College. Despite his position, he had to visit 35 real estate agents before he was able to buy a house for his young family and no New York bank would lend him the money.
Later, while at the University of Chicago, he accompanied the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. in 1965. He spent 16 years at the University of Chicago and then joined the faculty of Duke University in 1982. He retired from Duke's history department in 1985, and then spent seven years as professor of legal history at the Duke Law School. Franklin will be honored with a newly endowed chair at Duke Law School.
Franklin was a prolific writer, with books including The Emancipation Proclamation, The Militant South, The Free Negro in North Carolina, George Washington Williams: A Biography and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. He also edited many works, including a book about his father called My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, with his son, John Whittington Franklin. Franklin completed his autobiography in 2005, which was reviewed favorably in many media outlets across the country.
He received more than 130 honorary degrees and served as president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the American Studies Association, the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association.
Franklin's best-known accomplishment in his later years was in 1997, when he was appointed chairman of the advisory board for President Clinton's One America: The President's Initiative on Race. The seven-member panel was charged with directing a national conversation on race relations. When he was named to the post, Franklin remarked, "I am not sure this is an honor. It may be a burden." The panel did provoke criticism, both from conservatives who pressured the panel to hear from opponents of racial preference and others who said it did not make enough progress. Franklin himself acknowledged in an interview with USA Today in 1997 that the group could not solve the nation's racial problems. But Franklin said the effort was still worth it.
And, in 2001, Duke University opened the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, where scholars, artists and members of the community have the opportunity to engage in public discourse on a variety of issues, including race, social equity and globalization. At the heart of its mission is the Franklin Humanities Institute, which sponsors public events and hosts the Franklin Seminar, a residential fellowship program for Duke faculty and graduate students.
In a statement to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002, Franklin summed up his own career:
"More than 60 years ago, I began the task of trying to write a new kind of Southern History. It would be broad in its reach, tolerant in its judgments of Southerners, and comprehensive in its inclusion of everyone who lived in the region.... the long, tragic history of the continuing black-white conflict compelled me to focus on the struggle that has affected the lives of the vast majority of people in the United States. ... Looking back, I can plead guilty of having provided only a sketch of the work I laid out for myself."
In 2007, John Hope Franklin lent his formidable effort to the issue of reparations for African Americans. Franklin returned to Oklahoma to testify in a hearing urging Congress to pass legislation that would clear the way for survivors of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, one of the nation's worst race riots, to sue for reparations.
For Franklin, who continued his scholarly work and public appearances well into his 90s, the work he began in the 1940s still was not finished. He was interviewed earlier this year, when President Barack Obama was inaugurated, and he noted that he never thought he would live to see the first African American President of the United States, but he was so very glad that he did.
Madam Speaker, I am so very glad that John Hope Franklin shared his life and his work so generously. He taught us about our lost history, and in the process, he set a sterling example of living what he tried to teach that will inspire many generations to come.
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