John Hope Franklin proved that a historian could move mountains.
John Hope Franklin (1915-2009) was one of the most important American historians of the 20th century and one of the people I most admired.
I grew up in the segregated South. Black and white Southerners alike wore our nation’s uniform. They fought and died together, but back home, our schools, hotels, restaurants, public pools and movie theaters were segregated. A century after the Civil War, many small towns still marked restrooms and water fountains “white” and “colored.” The poll tax was used to keep blacks from voting.
In From Slavery to Freedom, the first comprehensive history of the African-American experience, and in more than a dozen other books, Dr. Franklin taught us in clear language supported by incontestable documentation how our nation had been conceived in both liberty and slavery; how discrimination had persisted even after the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and Reconstruction; how the struggle for equality continued unfulfilled in the present; and how we could move forward together.
He believed that understanding our past could empower us to eliminate the continuing divides along what he called “the color line” and finally fulfill the promise of America. He was a great scholar and a great teacher, a passionate nationalist who spoke to both our minds and our hearts. All of us who read his books became his students.
I was proud to award Dr. Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, and honored when he agreed to lead the President’s Initiative on Race in 1997. He traveled across the country to listen to people of all races, faiths, cultures and means, and he authored a remarkably insightful report not just on the ways in which we remain divided along color lines, but also about what we could do to erase them. His recommendations were the basis of my final message to Congress in January 2001.
Over the years, we became friends. I wanted to be in his company whenever possible. Dr. Franklin traveled with me so often he had a piece of luggage he called Air Force One. I learned a lot from him about history, politics and life. I was always struck by how modest he was about his own achievements: being the first black chair of a history department at a predominantly white college as a young professor at Brooklyn College, his prominence during his later years at Duke, his many well-deserved honors, his great books. It seemed to me that what mattered most to him were the fundamentals—the love of his wife and family; the respect of his students and colleagues; the progress of ordinary citizens toward the American dream.
He always thought we could do better. He was pleased that during my presidency, America achieved the lowest African-American unemployment rates, the highest home and business ownership rates, and the lowest child poverty rates on record. He thought it was a good thing that we raised the minimum wage, doubled the earned income tax credit, increased college aid by the largest amount since the GI Bill, and moved 100 times as many people out of poverty than during the previous 12 years. But his response was the sweeping “to do” list in the report of the President’s Initiative on Race. For Dr. Franklin, America was always a work in progress. No one could be too proud of his or her accomplishments. There was too much still to be done. That determination kept him going, teaching and pushing into his 90s.
I’m glad Dr. Franklin lived long enough to see our country elect its first African-American president, but I’m sure that if he had had the chance to meet with President Barack Obama, he would have urged him to use his historic opportunity to reduce persistent inequalities in income, education and the criminal justice system. Pushing himself and everyone else to do better was just part of his DNA.
In 2005, after the publication of his memoirs, I led an informal public conversation with Dr. Franklin at the New York Public Library. At the end of the evening, I asked how he wanted his fellow Americans to think about him and his life. He said his life had been one of hard work, discipline, self-reliance and the indulgence of his fellow man; that after 90-plus years, it was the support and generosity of his friends and family cheering him on that made him the man he was.
Dr. Franklin’s disciplined scholarship, life of hard work and unfailing generosity in sharing his many gifts helped make our country the multiracial, multiethnic and multireligious nation it is today. We owe it to him to carry on his legacy, freeing more people from discrimination, guaranteeing more people their own chance to live their dreams. Because of John Hope Franklin’s long good life, we are still becoming the “more perfect union” our Founders envisioned. I wish he had lived another 90 years.
Originally published in the August 2009 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
