The 2024 OAH Conference on American History begins in New Orleans on 11 April, almost exactly fifteen years after the death of the organization’s first Black president, John Hope Franklin. Franklin’s life embodied the conference theme of “being in service to communities and the nation,” and the annual meeting offers an opportunity to reflect on his extraordinary body of work and how it speaks to the present moment.
Franklin’s seven-decade career defies overstatement. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1941, marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, became the president of the OAH in 1975, was named by President Bill Clinton to lead the Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race in 1997, and, in 2006, won the John Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress for lifetime achievement in the humanities. He published over two dozen books and 100 articles. His influence as a teacher and mentor is incalculable.
Franklin came to prominence in the middle years of the twentieth century, and his work during this period, both inside and outside of the academy, continues to resonate as the history profession confronts right-wing attacks on the teaching and study of Black history. In 1947, he published his third book, From Slavery to Freedom, which placed African Americans at the center of a story so long dominated by white figures. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, and other pioneering Black scholars before him, Franklin emphasized what serious historians came to accept as an essential fact: Black history is American history. From Slavery to Freedom revolutionized the field; as historian Paul Finkelman writes in his essay on Franklin for the American National Biography, the book “[made] it possible for African American history to be taught outside of historically black colleges and universities.” It would go on to sell over three million copies across nine editions and remains in print today.
A year later, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Franklin to serve as an expert witness in the case of Johnson v. Board of Trustees of Kentucky, in which African American student Lyman T. Johnson sought to enter the graduate program in history of the University of Kentucky, which only admitted white students. Franklin, with the help of sympathetic white professors at UK, mined official records and showed that the designated Black school, Kentucky State College, did not offer a comparable education. In 1949, the US District Court ruled that Johnson must be allowed to enter the University of Kentucky. In 1998, the university gave Franklin an honorary doctorate.