John Hope Franklin's life stretched across an amazing period of change in American history, from the days when blacks were bullied into the background to these days when the first black president and his family have become our standard-bearers. Franklin's pioneering work in black history helped effect that change by showing blacks and whites that our history -- and our destiny -- are irrevocably tied.
Franklin, a nationally-acclaimed professor emeritus of history at Duke University, died Wednesday at the age of 94 in the university's hospital. It's appropriate that his middle name was "Hope," as the columnist William Raspberry suggested in a 1997 column. After experiencing the pain of racism, Franklin saw the promise this country had to offer. His love for this land was clear-eyed and unflinching, a love that demanded the best it could offer.
He was the son of an Oklahoma lawyer. But no amount of status or money spared blacks from hatred at the dawn of the last century. His father's office was burned in the Tulsa race riots. He and his mother and sister were once ousted from a train because they entered the white coach. The prejudice, albeit more subtle, would continue throughout Franklin's life.
His 1947 book, From Slavery to Freedom, has long been considered the definitive work on the history of blacks in the United States. Franklin quickly worked his way up through the ranks of academia. He did exhaustive research in a time when that alone was an act of defiance for a black.
At one archive in North Carolina, The Associated Press once reported, he got his own vault key so the white clerks wouldn't have to serve him. The unintended result may have been that Franklin got greater access to records than white researchers. If so, that wouldn't have been the first time that Franklin beat a system designed to keep him down.
He had so much grace and dignity that he would later be nicknamed "The Prince" by younger black historians. He was a provocative prince. During a visit in 1965 to what's now Winston-Salem State University, Franklin told students that "The American Negro has no identification with Africa … Almost all you know is American and European … If you don't believe this, try wandering around in the Congo trying to find your forefathers."
Franklin knew the story of blacks in Africa was just as important as their story in America. "The Negro has been the invisible man, the phantom of the republic," he said that day in Winston-Salem.
He wrote history and he made history. He did the historical research for Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that tore down the walls of public-school segregation. Franklin was at the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Raspberry noted in his column in 1997.
That year, President Clinton tapped Franklin to chair his initiative on race relations. In that role, and in countless interviews with reporters, Franklin dispensed wisdom that was often counterintuitive. Earlier, in 1989, he told Chris Geis, then a Journal reporter, that in one respect the South was actually faring better than the North in regard to race relations. "The South seems to have faced the changes better," he said. "It recognizes the distances it has had to travel."
Franklin clearly recognized the distance he had to travel. He made his journey with courage, brilliance and compassion. And he brought much of the country along with him.
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