Notes for the History Teller: On the Passing of John Hope Franklin
Posted: Friday, March 27, 2009
by Walter Rhett
Charleston Perlo
I never met John Hope Franklin. But I came to know his warm, affable, slow-moving baritone voice that rippled with life as I read his books and essays, saw him in C-SPAN appearances and interviews, or listened to others describe his ideas and his unassuming personality that welcomed and touched millions. As a student, I marveled in his devotion and level-headed approach to history. Yesterday, by e-mails forwarded along the web, I found out that John Hope Franklin was dead.
Foremost, John Hope Franklin was a scholar, a man whose quiet research and swift pen found a way to create a history that opened a door for a generation of activists and helped change the way the world viewed the African-American lived experience. His work, without fire and rhetoric, challenged the myths that blocked equality and opportunity. He opened doors undisputably by the quiet gathered force of his scholarship.
His book, From Slavery to Freedom , was an encyclopedia of facts about the African presence in America. His book gave slaves names; it assigned merits, described achievements; his book turned what was once a dark era into a source of proud hope. There in the pages that chronicled America's darkest moments was light and purpose, sweat and systemic thought, laughter and relief, love and faith, children to be rocked and taught, a world to be built.
By his quiet hand, I discovered slaves didn't settle or quit; they resisted even when they appeared to give in, they gathered their wits and step by step marked a path that lead to freedom, and that path had a hundred different directions and dimensions and acts.
John Hope Franklin seemed to know them all. At a time when other historians were arguing that cultural memory and higher order thinking was absent from slave life, that these human features had been broken by the Middle Passage and the breaking of the enslaved, John Hope Franklin offered quiet incontrovertable evidence to the contrary. He replaced historical myths with historical realities, one by one. One stone at a time.
John Hope Franklin, his father an Oklahoma lawyer and his mother an elementary school teacher, knew and was friends with the great names of many eras, from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King, Jr.; from Ralph Bunche to Nelson Mandela. He was named for John Hope, a legendary Atlanta educator and President of the institution known today as Morehouse College.
His achievement is made more remarkable by his pioneering role. When he began chronicling history, the benchmarks and standards were missing and the terriotory was uncharted. There was no consensus and little debate about the how the history he studied should be researched, written, interpreted, or weighed. As he wrote and taught, he set the bar in place. In his time, John Hope Franklin was guided only by his inner heart, assessing and weighing truth all alone, spinning history from the character of his own soul. Yet for him this never seemed like a burden and he never seemed alone as he inspired his students in his classroom and beyond, to be guided by the light of inquiry that rose above ideology or blame or shame. He taught by example that history was a force for change and healing, and at its best, brought people together on common ground.
Never a tv pundit or a sound bite fanatic, this quiet man had a lot to say.
And every day, John Hope Franklin informs my work, influences my choices, directs my thinking, and shares my joy of success when I find a new historical discovery whose interpretation is shaped by his quiet passion for using history to restore common sense and to tell the story of those who took mother wit to as a source of courage and faith, and applied its strength to block despair and suffering by the force of a timeless will.
Today, John Hope Franklin is a part of that timeless will, telling the stories of a dimension of time and human experience we call history. His speciality was the American story. His concentration was the South and the African-American experience. Because of his quiet dignity, his peerless eye, his steady voice that arranged human hardships and triumphs in their proper places, his history telling is a part of a million voices and hearts, found in scholars works and children books, in the oral tradition of the porch and the e-mail, bound to the fabric of the country he celebrated and honored by a craft that was earnest and honest and pared down to make plain the complex, inner workings of a system and a region covered in tales that hid the more humane truth his work revealed. From scattered seeds, he grew a compelling harvest guided always by his own heart to set a standard that changed the course of American life. We all owe him much. But God has granted him, no doubt, his greatest wish.
At 94, John Hope Franklin has entered history.
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Top-level comments on this article: (7 total)I had never heard of John Hope Franklin. Thats for sharing this with us.Would you reccomend I read one of his books?Thanks for reading! I'm adding a comment w/ more details and links about Dr. Franklin, his extraordniary career and moral authority. Please learn more about him there.
Walter, I have heard of John Hope Franklin, but had no idea of his extensive work, or, more accurately according to your article, his passion. What a great history lesson.Thanks for reading! I'm adding a comment w/ more details and links about Dr. Franklin, his extraordniary career and moral authority. Please learn more about him there.
Walter,Your writing took my breath away! While I am also unfamiliar with this great man, I know that he would be honored by your words.A beautiful tribute,Thank you,NancyThanks for reading! I'm adding a comment w/ more details and links about Dr. Franklin, his extraordniary career and moral authority. Please learn more about him there.Thanks for reading! I'm adding a comment w/ more details and links about Dr. Franklin, his extraordniary career and moral authority. Please learn more about him there.
Walter, I am wowed! You did an incredible job - what a testimony to his this man's life. You are a journalist at heart, it always shines through when you write historical types of articles. Lord bless you for sharing this. May this man be an example throughout the rest of history. Blessings to you! TeresaThanks for reading! I'm adding a comment w/ more details and links about Dr. Franklin, his extraordniary career and moral authority. Please learn more about him there.
I also have never heard of John Hope Franklin but he seems like a great man.Great article!
Great history lesson. Sounds like he was a remarkable man. Thank you for sharing his story.
Thanks everyone for reading and comments. I had links posted but the system will not let me post links in comments!!!! I will post a link to the Duke page of colondences that have come in from around the world. That way, our comments will be included. Duke has two buildings on campus named for Dr. Franklin.
CSPAN has an excellent interview w/ Dr. Franklin linked on its homepage.CSPAN is an extraordinary site for looking directly at public affairs. The conferences and appearances of public figures are useful for their insights into American public life.Dr. Franklin received over 100 honorary degrees. He earned his Ph. D. from Harvard in 1941, and taught at several historical black colleges, including Howard University, before "breaking the color line" with his appointment at Brooklyn College, an extraordinary leap at the time--not only for his hiring, but his selection as the department head--he was the first black to be selected for a position of academic leadership at a non-black college--all of the other deans, chairs, v-p's, and president follow in his foot steps.Duke University's website has its tribute on the university's homepage,Duke also has a wonderful tribute site w/ quotes, publications, bio, accomplishments, condolences, and other info. I highly recommend this site for a rich overview of Dr. Franklin's immeasurable meaning in American lifeDr. Franklin was so understated and humble that the glaring spotlight of American life usually swept passed him. But the New York Times obituary give his passing a full page, and an editorial, and coverage in the Week in Review.To give you some idea of how special Dr. Franklin was, my daughter immediately e-mailed that he had lectured at Dartmouth while she was there; a friend who works in the Library of Congress emailed me that he met him while during research, and a local reporter friend of mine said he had interviewed him once for the Columbia paper, and marveled that "you could call him at home." Three contacts within my circle of friends--all speaking of his brillance and humility.While academic, his books are acessible, and easy to read. I learned how to write and report history from his master work, From Slavery to Freedom, whch has more than 3 million copies published, in English and other languages. Dr. Franklin was the leading member of a group of young bright intellectuals who produced senimal works and advanced social progress. Among the others were Horace Mann Bond, born in Nashville, 1904 (d.1972)professor, Chair of Atlanta's School Board, Julian Bond, the politican and NAACP chair, father; Dean of the Atlanta School of Education, and President of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (the school's first African-American President), President of Fort Valley State in Georgia, as well. Harvard has an award named after him. His book was The Education of the Nergo in the American Social Order is an overlooked classic of the iinfluences on black student achievement.St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton wrote Black Metropolis, a huge, weighty study of African-American life in Chicago from the immigrant at the turn of the century to the 1940's,, covering the whist clubs (a card game blacks play instead of bridge), penacostal churches, and other details, applying what was the emerging discipline of sociology to their brilliant analyses.The Fourth member of this amazing group of pioneers was E. Franklin Frazier. All of his works, The Black Bourgeoise, The Black Family, The Black Church, were ground-breaking works.Add Dr. Frank Snowden the absolutely magnificent scholar of the Classics, (Havard PH.D.) who wrote Blacks in Classical Antiquity (Snowden knew Latin, Greek, and several other languages from antiquity, including Egyptian hierogyphics!). And Kelly Miller, W.E. B. DuBois, Owen Dobdson, Sterling Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and the Morehouse College class of 1949--the class that included Dr. King, a member of Congress, and several later college presidents--the greatest college class of African-Americans ever to graduate, and you can see there was a wide academic movement that were true trailblazers, now overlooked and underrecognized, that helped America's social progress.But Dr. Franklin is certainly near or at the top of the list!!
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