John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, on the second of January 1915, the son of a lawyer who had survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He took his undergraduate degree at Fisk University in 1935 and his doctorate in history at Harvard in 1941 — at twenty-six, among the youngest Black scholars of his generation to complete a Harvard PhD.

His 1947 textbook From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans was the first comprehensive single-volume scholarly survey of African American history written by a Black historian. It has remained continuously in print for seventy-seven years across nine successive editions, has sold over three and a half million copies, and is taught in every major American university history department and across the secondary-school curriculum.

He served as chair of the History Department at Brooklyn College (1956) — the first African American to chair a department at a historically white American university. He chaired the History Department at the University of Chicago from 1967, held the James B. Duke Chair at Duke University from 1985, and was named Professor Emeritus of Legal History at Duke in 1992.

He served as research consultant on the legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, chaired President Bill Clinton's One America: The President's Initiative on Race in 1997, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. He was elected president of the American Historical Association in 1979 — the first African American to lead the discipline's national professional organization.

He died in Durham, North Carolina, on the twenty-fifth of March 2009, age ninety-four.

He is honored here as the historian whose single textbook shaped how five generations learned African American history.