John Hope Franklin (1908-2009) was an African-American historian and activist. His career was one of exemplary productivity and far-reaching influence. His contributions range across the genres of non-fiction writing, from scholarly monographs to works of history intended for a non-academic public, to a textbook, a biography and an autobiography.
Professor Franklin was a native of Oklahoma and a graduate of Fisk University. He received the A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Harvard University. He taught at a number of institutions, including Fisk University, St. Augustine’s College, North Carolina Central University, and Howard University.
In 1983, Dr. Franklin was appointed the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University.
Dr. Franklin was an early pioneer of the study of the African-American experience. His first book, The Free Negro in North Carolina, appeared in 1943; but, it remains the standard work on its subject and a key reference point for those investigating the status of free African-Americans before the Civil War. At the time he wrote this work, historians were devoting little or no attention to what was then called “Negro history.” Almost no scholarly work existed on antebellum free blacks.
In 1949, he served as an expert witness on behalf of the NAACP in Lyman Johnson v. The University of Kentucky, which successfully challenged that state’s “separate but equal” policy in graduate education. In 1953 he was a member of a team of scholars and attorneys assembled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to research the history of the 14th Amendment in preparation for the argument of Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1965 he traveled with 30 other historians to Alabama to join Martin Luther King Jr. in the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Professor Franklin’s publications include The Emancipation Proclamation, The Militant South, The Free Negro in North Carolina, Reconstruction After the Civil War, and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Ante-Bellum North. Perhaps his best known is From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, now in its eighth edition, and translated into German, Japanese, French, Portuguese, and Chinese.
In 1995, Presidential Clinton awarded Professor Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor.
