[Deathwatch] John Hope Franklin, historian, 94

[Deathwatch Central]

Pioneering historian John Hope Franklin dies at 94

By MARTHA WAGGONER
Wednesday, March 25, 2009

RALEIGH, N.C. -- John Hope Franklin, a towering scholar and pioneer of
African-American studies who wrote the seminal text on the black
experience in the U.S. and worked on the landmark Supreme Court case
that outlawed public school segregation, died Wednesday. He was 94.

David Jarmul, a spokesman at Duke University, where Franklin taught for
a decade and was professor emeritus of history, said he died of
congestive heart failure at the school's hospital in Durham.

Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma where he was
often subjected to humiliating racism, Franklin was later instrumental
in bringing down the legal and historical validations of such a world.

As an author, his book "From Slavery to Freedom" was a landmark
integration of black history into American history that remains
relevant more than 60 years after being published. As a scholar, his
research helped Thurgood Marshall and his team at the NAACP win Brown
v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that barred the doctrine of
"separate but equal" in the nation's public schools.

"It was evident how much the lawyers appreciated what the historians
could offer," Franklin later wrote. "For me, and I suspect the same was
true for the others, it was exhilarating."

Franklin himself broke numerous color barriers. He was the first black
department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn
College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke;
and the first black president of the American Historical Association.

He often regarded his country like an exasperated relative, frustrated
by racism's stubborn power, yet refusing to give up. "I want to be out
there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try
to make this a better world, a better place to live," Franklin told The
Associated Press in 2005.

In November, after Barack Obama broke the ultimate racial barrier in
American politics, Franklin called his ascension to the White House
"one of the most historic moments, if not the most historic moment, in
the history of this country."

"Because of the life John Hope Franklin lived, the public service he
rendered, and the scholarship that was the mark of his distinguished
career, we all have a richer understanding of who we are as Americans
and our journey as a people," Obama said in a statement. "Dr. Franklin
will be deeply missed, but his legacy is one that will surely endure."

Obama's achievement fit with Franklin's mission as a historian, to
document how blacks lived and served alongside whites from the nation's
birth. Black patriots fought at Lexington and Concord, Franklin pointed
out in "From Slavery to Freedom," published in 1947. They crossed the
Delaware with Washington and explored with Lewis and Clark.

The book sold more than 3.5 million copies and remains required reading
in college classrooms. It was based on research Franklin conducted in
libraries and archives that didn't allow him to eat lunch or use the
bathroom because he was black.

"He was working in a profession that more or less banned him at the
outset and ended up its leading practitioner," said Tim Tyson, a
history professor at Duke. "And yet, he always managed to keep his
grace and his sense of humor."

Late in life, Franklin received more than 130 honorary degrees and the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Spingarn
Award. In 1993, President Bill Clinton honored Franklin with the
Charles Frankel Prize, recognizing scholarly contributions that give
"eloquence and meaning ... to our ideas, hopes and dreams as American
citizens."

Clinton awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
nation's highest civilian prize, two years later, and gave him the role
for which he was perhaps best known outside academia, as chairman of
Clinton's Initiative on Race. It was a job of which Franklin said, "I
am not sure this is an honor. It may be a burden."

"John Hope Franklin was one of the most important American historians
of the 20th century and one of the people I most admired," Clinton said
in a statement. "He graced our country with his life, his scholarship,
and his citizenship."

As he aged, Franklin spent more time in the greenhouse behind his home,
where he nursed orchids, than in libraries. He fell in love with the
flowers because "they're full of challenges, mystery" _ the same
reasons he fell in love with history.

In June, Franklin had a small role in the movie based on the book
"Blood Done Signed My Name," about the public slaying of black man in
Oxford in 1970. Tyson, the book's author, said at the time he wanted
Franklin in the movie "because of his dignity and his shining
intelligence."

Franklin attended historically black Fisk University, where he met
Aurelia Whittington, who would be his wife, editor, helpmate and rock
for 58 years, until her death in 1999. He planned to follow his father
into law, but the lively lectures of a white professor, Ted Currier,
convinced him history was his field. Currier borrowed $500 to send
Franklin to Harvard University for graduate studies.

Franklin's doctoral thesis was on free blacks in antebellum North
Carolina. His wife spent part of their honeymoon in Washington, D.C.,
at the Census Bureau, helping him finish. The resulting work, "The Free
Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860," earned Franklin his doctorate and,
in 1943, became his first published book. Four years later, he took a
job at Howard University. It was the same year "From Slavery to
Freedom" was published.

Some of his greatest moments of triumph were marred by bigotry.

His joy at being offered the chair of the Brooklyn College history
department in 1956 was tempered by his difficulty getting a loan to buy
a house in a "white" neighborhood.

When he was to receive the freedom medal, Franklin hosted a party for
some friends at Washington's Cosmos Club, of which he had long been a
member. A white woman walked up to him, handed him a slip of paper and
demanded that he get her coat. He politely told the woman that any of
the uniformed attendants, "and they were all in uniform," would be
happy to assist her.

Franklin was born Jan. 2, 1915, in the all-black town of Rentiesville,
Okla., where his parents moved in the mistaken belief that separation
from whites would mean a better life for their young family. But his
father's law office was burned in the race riots in Tulsa, Okla., in
1921, along with the rest of the black section of town.

His mother, Mollie, a teacher, began taking him to school with her when
he was 3. He could read and write by 5; by 6, he first became aware of
the "racial divide separating me from white America."

Franklin, his mother and sister Anne were ejected from a train when his
mother refused the conductor's orders to move to the overcrowded
"Negro" coach. As they trudged through the woods back to Rentiesville,
young John Hope began to cry.

His mother pulled him aside and told him, "There was not a white person
on that train or anywhere else who was any better than I was. She
admonished me not to waste my energy by fretting but to save it in
order to prove that I was as good as any of them." 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary