In Memoriam: OAH Past President John Hope Franklin

William H. Chafe

John Hope Franklin passed away on March 25, 2009 after a long battle with congestive heart failure. He was ninety-four years old.

John Hope, as he preferred to be called, was a beloved figure in the academy, as well as in the nation at large. A mentor and friend to generations of colleagues, he was above all a person who exemplified what it means to marry scholarship to a passion for justice.

John Hope lived through the tragedy of racial oppression that ruled America for most of the twentieth century. He witnessed his father’s law office being burned down during the infamous Tulsa race riot of 1921. With his mother, he was forced as a child to move from a clean railroad car in the white section of the train to a dirty, smoke-filled car in the Jim Crow section. When he volunteered to serve his country in World War II as a soldier who could take shorthand, type, and use all the skills of his graduate training, he was told that the only position his country had for him was as a servant. “You’re the wrong color,” the recruitment officer said. Nothing disturbed him more than what happened to his brother, Buck, a school headmaster who was assigned menial kitchen duties when he joined the army in World War II. He came home a broken person, driven to commit suicide shortly after being demobilized.

But whatever his anger, John Hope never allowed resentment toward racism to hobble his determination to move forward. A proud graduate of all-black Fisk University, he moved on to Harvard (like his predecessor W.E.B. DuBois), published books and articles that earned him academic plaudits, and with the appearance of From Slavery to Freedom in 1947, transformed American scholarship by placing the story of African Americans at the heart of the nation’s history. With his beloved wife Aurelia, he moved to teach at St. Augustine’s in Raleigh and then North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. He fell in love with the state, where Aurelia had been born.

After a short time, John Hope Franklin had become a scholar of national and international fame. Moving from Howard University in Washington, to Brooklyn College in New York, and then to the University of Chicago, he broke barriers everywhere he went—the first black person to give a paper at the Southern Historical Association in 1949 (in a wonderful act of collective rebellion with C. Vann Woodward, the program chair, and Howard Beale), then the first black president of the Southern Historical Association, then the first black president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. A pioneer in the growing international field of American Studies, John Hope reveled in traveling abroad with Aurelia, representing the Fulbright program in foreign lands. Yet prejudice was still there. When he and Aurelia took the ocean liner, Ile de France, out of New York in the mid-1950s to LeHavre, they were the first in line for dinner. The maitre d’ took them to a table behind the kitchen door. “No, sir,” John Hope told the maitre d’ with characteristic dignity and pride, “we will take the table in the center of the room.”

I first came to know John Hope Franklin as a friend at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park in 1981, where we were both fellowship recipients. He came to my defense at a seminar when a group of conservative scholars attacked me for my advocacy of affirmative action. I felt rescued and affirmed. How wonderful, then, when Terry Sanford and the Duke history department persuaded this pivotal figure in American history to come to Duke to complete his career. John Hope would return to his beloved Durham, where he could build a large greenhouse for his cherished collection of orchid plants, pursue his teaching and writing, and spend his last decades in the place he really saw as home.

Students loved John Hope. Colleagues cherished his wit and repartee. He started teaching classes at the law school, as well as in history. His course in constitutional law, taught with Walter Dellinger and William E. Leuchtenburg, won universal praise. And the three scholars went to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., playing a major role in helping to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork for the position of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Although then in his eighties, John Hope Franklin never slowed down. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 (even as reminders of an abiding racism persisted when a white woman at the Cosmos Club handed him her receipt from the cloak room and asked him to fetch her coat); President Clinton asked him to chair his National Conversation on Race; and John Hope Franklin embarked on his masterful memoir, Mirror to America, published in 2005.

In 1999, his beloved Aurelia passed away, and John Hope circulated a privately printed celebration of their partnership of fifty-nine years that they had written together entitled, For Better or Worse. Elegant, understated, and loving, it testified to the bedrock relationship of his life.

Still, the new century continued to bring moments of profound insight and gratification to John Hope’s life. From the time he was a child, his mother had told him that whenever anyone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he should say, “the first Negro president of the United States.” John Hope recalled that story on his ninetieth birthday, which coincided with the second inauguration of George W. Bush. Feisty and engaged as ever, John Hope that evening delivered his own “Counter-Inaugural address,” tearing into the Bush administration for its failure to address the ongoing racial divisions of American society. At that moment, he could not imagine that he would live to see the day when America would, in fact, elect a black president—the goal his mother had urged him to aspire to nearly nine decades earlier. Thus, nothing could have been more gratifying than when John Hope Franklin met Barack Obama on the campaign trail, and lived to see him take the presidential oath of office.

I last saw John Hope two days before he went to the hospital. He was physically weak, but intellectually alert. Three of us went to lunch at a downtown restaurant, which we did on a regular basis. John Hope loved such experiences. Often, he would meet strangers on the street who would ask him for his autograph. He always obliged. But he also knew that time was running out. When someone asked him how he was doing at that last lunch, he replied, “I’m in transition.” John Hope was a person at peace at that moment; happy to have lived to witness what he thought never would happen. An extraordinary life. An extraordinary gift to all of us. He is still with us. John Hope Franklin leaves his son John Whittington, his daughter-in-law Karen, and his adopted African son, Bhouna.

William Chafe is Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University and served as president of the OAH in 1998-1999.