John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin was born in Oklahoma, Franklin attended Fisk University and then Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1941. He was a professor at Howard University, and in 1956 was named to head the history department at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. Recruited to the University of Chicago in 1964, he eventually led the history department and was appointed to a named chair. He then moved to Duke University in 1983, as an appointee to a named chair in history. He was a president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, and the Southern Historical Association. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

John Hope Franklin studied at Duke University, Dillard University and Booker T. Washington High School. The recorded working language is English. Residence is recorded at Oklahoma and Tulsa. Employment is recorded with Brooklyn College, University of Chicago and Duke University. Works named in the authority record are The Free Negro in North Carolina and From Slavery to Freedom. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Lincoln Prize, National Humanities Medal and St.

• Name — John Hope Franklin • Born — 2 January 1915 • Birthplace — Rentiesville, Oklahoma, United States • Died — 25 March 2009 • Place of death — Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, United States • Education — * Fisk University (B.A., 1935); • Harvard University (M.A., 1936; Ph.D., 1941) • Occupation — Scholar, historian, author, professor • Spouse — Aurelia Whittington Franklin (m. 1940; d. 1999) • Children — John Whittington Franklin • Honors — * John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences (2006) • 100 Greatest African Americans (2002) • Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995) • Manly Distinguished Service Professor, at the University of Chicago (1969) • James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke (1983) • Jefferson Lecturer (1976) John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 – March 25, 2009) was an American historian who focused on the history of the United States. He is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947 and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. Born in Oklahoma, Franklin attended Fisk University and then Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1941. He was a professor at Howard University, and in 1956 was named to head the history department at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. Recruited to the University of Chicago in 1964, he eventually led the history department and was appointed to a named chair. He then moved to Duke University in 1983, as an appointee to a named chair in history. He was a president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, and the Southern Historical Association. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, in 1915 to attorney Buck (Charles) Colbert Franklin and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin. He was named after John Hope, a prominent educator who was the first African-American president of Atlanta University. Franklin graduated from Booker T. Washington High School (then segregated) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated in 1935 from Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, then earned a master's degree in 1936 and a doctorate in history in 1941 from Harvard University. Two fellowships (1937 and 1938) from the Rosenwald Fund enabled him to study for his PhD at Harvard.

Buck Colbert Franklin was a civil rights lawyer, also known as "Amazing Buck Franklin," of African-American and Choctaw ancestry, born in the Chickasaw Nation in western Indian Territory (formerly Pickens County). He was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. David was a former slave, who became a Chickasaw Freedman when emancipated after the American Civil War. Milley was born free before the war and was of one-fourth Choctaw and three-fourths African-American ancestry. Buck Franklin is best known for defending African-American survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, in which whites had attacked many blacks and buildings, and burned and destroyed the Greenwood District. This was known at the time as the "Black Wall Street," and was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a center of black commerce and culture. In 2015, Buck Franklin's previously unknown written eyewitness account of the 1921 Greenwood attack, a 10-page typewritten manuscript, was discovered and subsequently obtained by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Franklin and his colleagues also became experts at oil law, representing "blacks and Native Americans in Oklahoma against white lawyers representing oil barons." His career demonstrated a strong professional black life in the West, at a time when such accomplishments would have been more difficult to achieve in the Deep South.

"My challenge," Franklin said, "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." In his autobiography, Franklin has described a series of formative incidents in which he confronted racism while seeking to volunteer his services at the beginning of the Second World War. He responded to the navy's search for qualified clerical workers, but after he presented his extensive qualifications, the navy recruiter told him that he was the wrong color for the position. He was similarly unsuccessful in finding a position with a War Department historical project. When he went to have a blood test, as required for the draft, the doctor initially refused to allow him into his office. Afterward, Franklin took steps to avoid the draft, on the basis that the country did not respect him or have an interest in his well-being, because of his color. In the early 1950s, Franklin served on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team led by Thurgood Marshall, and helped develop the sociological case for Brown v. Board of Education. This case, challenging de jure segregated education in the South, was taken to the United States Supreme Court. It ruled in 1954 that the legal segregation of black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional, leading to integration of schools.

Racial Equality in America is the published lecture series that Franklin presented in 1976 for the Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for Humanities. The book is composed of three lectures, given in three different cities, in which Franklin chronicled the history of race in the United States from revolutionary times to 1976. These lectures explore the differences between some of the beliefs related to race with the reality documented in various historical and government texts, as well as data gathered from census, property, and literary sources. The first lecture is titled "The Dream Deferred" and discusses the period from the Revolution to 1820. The second lecture is titled "The Old Order Changeth Not" and discusses the rest of the 19th century. The third lecture is titled "Equality Indivisible" and discusses the 20th century.

In 2005, at the age of 90, Franklin published and lectured on his new autobiography, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. In 2006, Mirror to America received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award, which is given annually to honor authors "whose writing, in illuminating past or present injustice, acts as a beacon towards a more just society." In 2006, he also received the John W. Kluge Prize and as the recipient lectured on the successes and failures of race relations in America in Where do We Go from Here? In 2008, Franklin endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama. Franklin died at Duke University Medical Center on the morning of March 25, 2009.

Franklin married Aurelia Whittington on June 11, 1940. She was a librarian. Their only child, John Whittington Franklin, was born August 24, 1952. Their marriage lasted 59 years, until January 27, 1999, when Aurelia succumbed to a long illness. The Franklins were avid orchid collectors and cultivators, and each had types of orchids named after them: Phalaenopsis John Hope Franklin and Phalaenopsis Aurelia Franklin.

• The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943, 1995. • The Diary of James T. Ayers, Civil War Recruiter ed., with introd., by John Franklin. Springfield; State of Illinois, 1947. • From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 1st edn New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947. Last updated by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 9th edn. McGraw-Hill Education, 2010, • The Militant South, 1800–1861. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956; 1st Illinois pbk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. • Reconstruction: after the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. • The Emancipation Proclamation. 1st edn. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963; 2nd edn. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1993. • Land of the Free; A History of the United States, by John W. Caughey, John Hope Franklin and Ernest R. May. Educational advisers: Richard M. Clowes and Alfred T. Clark Jr. Rev. New York: Benziger Bros., 1966. • The Negro in Twentieth Century America: A Reader on the Struggle for Civil Rights, by John Hope Franklin & Isidore Starr. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. • Color and Race, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. • The Historian and Public Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago, Center for Policy Study, c1974. • Racial Equality in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1976. • A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1976. • Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1982. • George Washington Williams: a Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; Reprint, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. • Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1989. • The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, edited by Eric Anderson & Alfred A. Moss Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1991. • The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, c1993. • Racial Equality in America, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. • My Life and an Era: the Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, edited by John Hope Franklin and John Whittington Franklin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1997, 2000. • Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, John Hope Franklin, Loren Schweninger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. • Mirror to America. The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005,