RALEIGH, N.C. — John Hope Franklin, a revered Duke University historian and scholar of life in the South and the African-American experience in the United States, died Wednesday in Durham, said a Duke spokesman. He was 94.
Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma where he was often subjected to humiliating incidents of racism, he was later instrumental in bringing down the legal and historical validations of such a world.
As an author, his book “From Slavery to Freedom” was a landmark integration of black history into American history. As a scholar, his research helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools.
“It was evident how much the lawyers appreciated what the historians could offer,” Franklin later wrote. “For me, and I suspect the same was true for the others, it was exhilarating.”
Franklin broke numerous color barriers. He was the first black department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke University; and the first black president of the American Historical Association.
Above all, he documented how blacks had lived and served alongside whites from the nation’s birth. Black patriots fought at Lexington and Concord, Franklin pointed out in “From Slavery to Freedom,” published in 1947. They crossed the Delaware with Washington and explored with Lewis and Clark. The text remains required reading in college classrooms.
Late in life, Franklin chaired President Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race and received more than 100 honorary degrees, the NAACP’s Spin garn Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
