John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) was an American historian, educator, and civil-rights activist. He was not only one of its pre-eminent chroniclers of the African-American experience and a leading advocate of social equality.
Born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Franklin was educated at Fisk University and Harvard. He taught at several historically black institutions, joining Howard University in 1947 when he published his survey of the African-American historical experience, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947.)
In 1956, Franklin became chairperson of the department of history at Brooklyn College and published The Militant South. His Reconstruction after the Civil War (1961) laid a sound foundation for a reappraisal of the post-Civil War era from the African-American standpoint. The Emancipation Proclamation appeared in 1963.
Franklin also taught at the University of Chicago 1964–82 and Duke University 1982–85. He also wrote Racial Equality in America (1976) and The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (1993.) He also helped create the legal briefing that led to the momentous Supreme Court judgment banning public school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954.) He was influential in the development of African-American Studies programs at colleges and universities.
Franklin’s autobiography is Mirror to America (2005.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Hope Franklin
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and intruded depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.
—John Hope Franklin
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