Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8368/

John Hope Franklin's Moral and Intellectual Poise

By David Levering Lewis
Archives - Dates and Topics 2009 online April 1 – 30, 2009 click here for related stories: democracy matters

4-09-09, 9:12 am



Historian John Hope Franklin.

Additional resources:
Political Affairs #96 - Cultural pluralism and the left in historical context
Original source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

In "A Life of Learning," an address to the American Council of Learned Societies 20 years ago, John Hope Franklin recalled the 100th-birthday wisdom of the ragtime composer Eubie Blake, who said that had he known he would live so long, "I'd have taken better care of myself." John Hope Franklin not only took good care of himself until his death last month at 94, but he also took great care of the memory and self-concept of the American people.

A cautionary truth about the life of John Hope Franklin is that, in that time long ago before he became John Hope Franklin, author of From Slavery to Freedom (the book, originally published in 1947 and now in its best-selling eighth edition, virtually created the industry of African-American studies) and 11 other monographs; or the first African-American to be chairman of an academic department in a historically white institution; or the first person of color elected to the presidencies of Phi Beta Kappa (1973-76), the Southern Historical Association (1969-70), the Organization of American Historians (1974-75), and the American Historical Association (1978-79); or holder of the Guinness Book of Records distinction for an unsurpassed number of honorary degrees; and John Hope Franklin, cultivator of orchids of incomparable beauty — what must not be forgotten in the glow of celebration is the truth that, long before there was John Hope Franklin the Institution, there was a Rentiesville, Okla., boy born black in a place where, and growing to adolescence in a time when, failing to take extremely good care of oneself could be fatal.

Although blessed with caring parents and the modest advantages of his father's law practice, "the quality of life in Rentiesville was as low as one can imagine ... no parks, playgrounds, libraries, or newspapers," Franklin wrote stoically about those early years. As the Franklin family prepared in 1921 to move from Rentiesville to Tulsa, Okla., with its thriving black business community, that community was destroyed by one of the worst race riots in American history. My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin (1997), the senior Franklin's memoir edited and published by John Hope and his son John Whittington Franklin, is a remarkable account of those separate-but-very-unequal times.

Fisk University, where Franklin matriculated in 1931 at age 16, and where he met his future wife, Aurelia Whittington, was something of an oasis in the Jim Crow South. Like so many gifted actors in search of a script, Franklin came to his vocation by chance. A Yankee history professor from Maine, Theodore Shirley Currier, turned the student away from law and on to history. Ted Currier was the last of the best of the Mr. Chips breed — a spellbinding lecturer with total-recall memory and a quicksilver mind. He became Franklin's mentor and a lifetime friend, and when his favorite student came up short of tuition money for Harvard University's graduate school, Currier guaranteed a $500 bank loan.

Twenty years later, Currier's classroom charisma influenced my own career path: history at Columbia University, sustained by Franklin's example, instead of law at the University of Michigan, blessed by satisfied parents. At Fisk, one heard a great deal of W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Harris Wesley, illustrious alumni historians, but Franklin's achievement, nearer in time and regularly updated by Currier, seemed professionally more meaningful to a number of us — in my case, decisively so. I had the privilege of meeting Franklin in his Brooklyn College office, in 1958. The man and the legend merged wonderfully for me that day. Fifty years of professional counsel and enriching family friendship followed.

In the course of his research on North Carolina's free Negro population, his Harvard doctoral dissertation under Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Franklin boldly went where few African-American scholars had gone before, much to the consternation of red-faced custodians of Southern archival collections. The state archivist at Raleigh, N.C., had never imagined that he would receive a petition for access to his institution's records in the summer of 1939 from a young black scholar. Franklin's perseverance was to pay off spectacularly. The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (1943) placed North Carolina's slaves without their masters in a context of unsuspected socioeconomic leverage and interconnectedness with their white neighbors and superiors.

From Slavery to Freedom became the benchmark for a field that had waited a quarter-century, since Carter G. Woodson's serviceable The Negro in Our History (1922), for synoptic treatment. Accessibly written, Franklin's great contribution traversed 400 years from the background in Africa to the era of the GI Bill, presenting the antebellum struggles of slaves and free Negroes and the politics of Reconstruction in a manner altogether startling to a mainstream public weaned on Negrophobic historiography.

Franklin's next offering was similarly venturesome. The Militant South, 1800-1860 (1956) was among the earliest works presaging an interpretive shift to a political-culture paradigm in which economic and political forces were focused through the lens of hegemonic belief systems. Taking the American journalist Wilbur J. Cash's apothegm that the antebellum white man "did not think, he felt," Franklin elevated the South's pandemic violence into the organizing principle of its society. Preoccupations such as tariffs, states' rights, and sectional rivalry as causes of the Civil War were given secondary play to the insight that the South's peculiar institution had locked it into a culture in which commerce, profit motive, and, indeed, Lockean liberalism were repeatedly short-circuited. A detail of more than incidental relevance is that the manuscript escaped rejection by Harvard University Press despite one distinguished outside reader's question as to why an African-American's views on the subject were of interest.

Franklin's Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961) led the final charge against the retreating apologists of the Dunning school that had held sway during most of the century. The monograph buttressed W.E.B. Du Bois's contention that claims of black misrule in the South were largely historical agitprop and demonstrated that Reconstruction governments accomplished positive educational and criminal-justice reforms. The book also returned to the role of Southern white violence in overthrowing Reconstruction — not merely as an episodic and limited factor but one that was indispensable.

Teaching was always as important in Franklin's career as research and writing. He taught many of the best and brightest African-American students at North Carolina's St. Augustine's College and at Howard University before assuming the history chairmanships at Brooklyn College (1956) and the University of Chicago (1967), where he presided over a period of exceptional student recruitment and faculty productivity. In his second career as James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University, Franklin sustained a remarkable level of scholarship and public activity. Runaway Slaves (1999), written with Loren Schweninger in Franklin's final decade, is a pioneering contribution to the history of slavery.

Franklin was also that rarest of academics who placed his knowledge in the service of immediate social transformation. Invited to assist Thurgood Marshall in preparing answers to the U.S. Supreme Court's questions about Congressional intent in the drafting of the 14th Amendment — as part of the landmark 1954 school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education — Franklin gave intensely of his time, writing historical essays, coordinating the work of researchers, and participating in what he called "the seminars that the lawyers regularly held." In the final analysis, the Warren court found the argument Franklin and others made, that the original intent of the Constitution was to abolish segregation, "at best inconclusive." But it may still be said that the NAACP lawyers in the case had been helped by historical analysis. The next year, C. Vann Woodward made a similar argument in his profoundly influential book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Because racial segregation was a recent juridical construct dating from the 1890s, Woodward argued, in agreement with Franklin, that stateways had changed folkways — and consequently the "all deliberate speed" ordered by the court should be speedier and more deliberate.

Looking back over Franklin's career, one espies a trajectory arcing in the later years out of history into law and public policy and, finally, into the privilege of prophecy. His provocative meditation, The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (1993), enjoined us "to confront our past and see it for what it is ... so that we can avoid doing what we have done for so long." President Clinton called upon him to serve as chair of the Race Initiative Advisory Board and awarded Franklin the Medal of Freedom, a fitting recompense for the historian's superlative service to his country.

The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies, recently established at Duke University, reifies in brick and mortar this singular American's lifetime mission to apply the lessons of the past to the immense potential for learning and justice in the future. In Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986), Woodward paid tribute to his old friend as one who "combined perfect intellectual and moral poise with inexhaustible good humor," attributes abundantly displayed in Franklin's luminous autobiography, Mirror to America (2005).

In writing an appreciation of my great friend's illustrious career for the John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences not long ago, I ventured that the award's criteria comported with such singular goodness of fit to John's remarkable accomplishments that the prize seemed virtually designed as a tribute to him. John Hope Franklin, a model to generations of scholars, students, and activists, of prodigious generosity to friends and of prudent counsel to the powerful, had few peers. We shall not soon see his like again.

--David Levering Lewis is a professor of history at New York University.


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