Learning About John Hope Franklin: A Preeminent Historian

Well, folks, classes at Northeastern University started up this past Tuesday. I’m trying to get into the groove of things all over again: doing readings, taking notes, keeping all my assignments in order, those sorts of things.

You might recall that I’m a graduate student working on a master’s degree in history, so my classes naturally are mostly about historiography and the work that historians do. One of my courses is about African-American intellectual history, and this weekend I read an essay that provides a broad view of the subject. The article is “The Rise of African American Intellectual History” by Brandon Byrd, if you feel so inclined to look it up.

Conscious of the fact that I needed to think of something to write about for my HistoryMakers blog post this week, I spent some time today watching the interview of one John Hope Franklin, who was mentioned in the article I had to read for class as “the preeminent African American historian.” I hadn’t heard of him before (perhaps because I didn’t major in history during undergrad), but I was able to learn quite a bit about him from the HistoryMakers Digital Archive.

I learned (from Franklin himself) about his illustrious career in academia, which took him to some of the country’s most prestigious universities, to a plethora of foreign countries, and even landed him a whopping 135 honorary degrees as of late 2003. He also, inevitably, offers his takes on the civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and hopes for the future of the African-American community. One thing I thought was particularly interesting was that Franklin hopes that one day African-American history can be “done away with” (my words) as its own distinct field and be completely integrated into general history or American history. While I’m not sure I agree with that statement because I’m not sure how possible it is, I think I can understand where that impulse from Franklin comes from. But I think—and I think Franklin would agree—that this can only happen when we as a society collectively agree to free ourselves from the shackles of racism and are willing to look the racist parts of our history square in the eye. Otherwise—and we can see this now with the right-wing hysteria around “critical race theory” supposedly being taught to fourth graders—Black history will be swept under the rug by people who want to make American history look pretty.

An image of a first edition copy (1947) of John Hope Franklin’s book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes.

Anyway, Franklin’s interview on the Digital Archive is certainly worth a watch, listen, or read. I’ve compiled some of the clips that I found most interesting here.