Academic

John Hope Franklin ? In Memoriam

By Charlton Copeland

Yesterday’s news that John Hope Franklin, certainly the most accomplished black historian in American history, had died is one of those moments that we experience too often these days–the passing of an historic figure whose life stands at so many of America’s significant junctures.  Had he been simply an academic historian who committed himself and his towering intellect to unraveling  the historical narrative of the American South, we as academics would owe him a great deal.  We would owe him thanks and appreciation for establishing his intellectual credibility of the study of race (not merely as a problem for the liberal imagination or perversion of an otherwise egalitarian order) and its central role in the shaping of America.  We would owe him thanks for the constancy of his scholarly engagement with his discipline.  He came to history as an “outsider” of sorts and lived to achieve leadership of its most distinguished organizations.  We would owe him a debt of gratitude for refusing to be marginalized by the American academy.  We would owe him thanks for having continued to be a gadfly to the “establishment” even as he earned more than 100 honorary degrees.  But we owe him for so much more.  We owe him for the fact that he placed his awesome intellect in the service of our collective, public, higher aspirations.  His service to the NAACP as a young historian, and to his country in his later years as a distinguished “public intellectual” were all in service of the same end–toward the achievement of an egalitarian order in American life.  John Hope Franklin is far from the first great black academic historian–others are his Howard colleagues Charles Harris Wesley and Rayford Logan, and Benjamin Quarles, who labored with great dedication at historically black colleges and universities and have not gained the recognition that their work deserves–but he is a great historian of America.  For this, and much more, we say thank you.

ShareThis

Full post as published by BlackProf on March 26, 2009 (boomark / email).