Franklin, John Hope (1915-2009), an American historian, wrote many books about African Americans. His book From Slavery to Freedom (1947) is a widely praised account of blacks in the United States. Franklin was part of the team of scholars who helped Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), win Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The case was a 1954 ruling in which the Supreme Court of the United States declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.
Franklin was born on Jan. 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Fisk University, and master’s and doctor’s degrees at Harvard University. Franklin taught at colleges in North Carolina from 1939 to 1947, and then at Howard University until 1956. He was a professor at Brooklyn College from 1956 to 1964, at the University of Chicago from 1964 to 1982, and at Duke University from 1982 to 1985. In 1995, Franklin was awarded the Spingarn Medal for his achievement in the field of history. The medal is awarded annually by the NAACP to an outstanding African American. That year, Franklin was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.
Franklin’s books include The Free Negro in North Carolina (1943), The Militant South (1956), Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961), The Emancipation Proclamation (1963), Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988 (1990), and The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century (1993). He co-wrote a junior high school textbook, Land of the Free (1966). Franklin also wrote an autobiography, Mirror to America (2005). He died on March 25, 2009.
