John Hope Franklin and Hope

John Hope Franklin and Hope for the African-American Cause Colleges across the country today have African-American Studies Departments. And many other colleges teach African-American history and culture within other disciplines such as History, American Studies, and other interdisciplinary curriculums. Who should we thank for the prevalence of African-American Studies across our nation today? Obviously, trying to prepare a list of those who have made this possible would be tiresome and most certainly exhaust one since the list would be too long.

However, there are a few names that shine among others and their names can never be buried among those of others who have also helped build the African-American Studies program. If one is to list a few names that were instrumental in the development of African-American Studies, the list would certainly include the name of John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). Franklin was many things. He was a scholar of history and critical legal studies. He pioneered chairing departments in America's leading universities as the first African-American to do so.

He was a philanthropist and civil rights leader who helped to bring the issues related to African-Americans into the forefront of public and scholarly debate. He can be rightly considered a founding father of African-American Studies in the United States. He was also an inspiring and amazing human being, a husband, a father, a leader of those who have suffered under the shackles of racism and discrimination. Franklin was born in the all-black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma, on January 2, 1915.

His parents had moved to the area with the hope that living separate from whites would make their lives easier -- an assumption which turned out to be a mistaken one. Franklin's father was an attorney and his mother was a teacher who began to take young John to school at the age of three. Within two years, he was able to read and write. At six, Franklin later recalled, he was aware of the "racial divide separating me from white America" ("Historian John Hope Franklin Dies at age 94").

Soon after, he found himself, his sister, and his mother ejected from a train for refusing to follow the conductor's order to move to the "Negro" coach that was overcrowded. From that moment, Franklin's struggle against racism and discrimination began. At the age of eleven, he had a chance to listen to a speech by W.E.B. Dubois with whom Franklin later built lasting friendship. During his adolescent years, he witnessed horrific instances of racism. He witnessed the 1921 race riots that burned down black neighborhoods in Tulsa.

He was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma because he was black. Franklin therefore attended black Fisk University in Nashville. He received his B.A. from there in 1935. At Fisk, he met his future wife Aurelia E. Whittington and the couple later had a son named John Whittington Franklin. After getting his undergraduate degree, Franklin for a moment considered following in the footsteps of his father and become a lawyer, but one of his white Professors, Ted Currier, encouraged Franklin to become a historian.

Currier was kind enough to borrow $500 to send young Franklin to graduate studies at Harvard University. At Harvard, Franklin suffered from isolation as one of a few black students on campus, in a predominantly white university. He received his master's degree in history in 1936 and his PhD in 1941 from Harvard (Yarrow). Franklin was a prolific writer and an outspoken orator.

After graduating from Harvard, he went on to publish numerous books and scholarly articles and delivered speeches all across the country, championing the rights of racial minorities and dispelling myths about African-Americans concocted by biased white historians. He taught at America's leading universities. Franklin became the first African-American president of the American Historical Association. He was the first African-American who chaired history departments of predominantly white institutions such as the Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago.

He became the first African-American to hold an endowed chair at Duke University and the first black scholar to present at the segregated Southern Historical Association. In 1976, he became the first African-American who was elected by the National Endowment for Humanities to deliver the Jefferson Lecture on the bi-centennial of the American Declaration of Independence. Franklin's first significant publication was his book titled From Slavery to Freedom: a History of American Negroes (1947).

In that book, Franklin provided an overview of African-American history, dating it from the time of ancient Egyptians, all the way to present through Atlantic slave trade, colonial era, the War of Independence, and the Civil War. Franklin challenged traditional history of America written by white historians. He argued that the history had neglected the role of racial minorities in the development of the nation. For instance, he argued that there were black soldiers who helped early Americans win the revolutionary war against Great Britain. Robert W.

Fogel, a Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago, described the book as "a landmark in the interpretation of American civilization," and the book was republished many times and translated into many languages, selling in total more than three million copies (Yarrow). In 1976, Franklin delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on the celebration of the bi-centennial of the American Revolution. Those lectures then became a book and published as Racial Equality in America (1976). This was perhaps the most important of Franklin's books.

In the lectures, Franklin exposed the dark history of racism and discrimination and extended his critique to the quasi-egalitarian views of Thomas Jefferson, other founding fathers, and the nineteenth-century abolitionists. Franklin argued that America as a nation had failed to live up to its revolutionary ideals in its treatment of African-Americans. In his first lecture, Franklin actually argued that the Revolution was not about equality at all.

He concluded that "for all its emphasis on natural equality and human liberty, the ideology of the American Revolution was not really egalitarian" and that "the colonists could not bring themselves to incorporate the principles of human freedom into their struggle for political independence" (Franklin, Racial Equality in America, 15, 22). In his second lecture, Franklin criticized abolitionists whose views, he said, were little distinguishable from those of southern slaveholders.

"A wide variety of Americans -- abolitionists, scientists, clergy, and slaveholders, Southern and Northern -- subscribed to a doctrine of racial differences that justified slavery and precluded equal treatment," he said. And even the era following the abolition of slavery was "marked by half-hearted, light-hearted, inconclusive steps taken. To introduce a semblance of racial equality in America" (52, 57). And finally, in his third lecture, Franklin discussed race relations in the twentieth century, arguing that equality could not be granted to one group but denied to others.

Franklin also argued that the Civil Rights Movement was the right step in addressing America's race problems. Franklin continued to champion the rights of racial minorities until his heart stopped at the age of 94. He headed the Advisory Board to the President's Initiative on Race under President Clinton and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet despite his achievements and impeccable reputation among historians, lawyers, and public officials, Franklin was never able to escape the ugly face of racism. In his autobiography published in 2005, titled Mirror to America: The Autobiography.