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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient John Hope Franklin
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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient John Hope Franklin
"Race in the Making of American History" celebrates historian John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin is the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History, and for seven years was Professor of Legal History in the Law School at Duke University. He is a native of Oklahoma and a graduate of Fisk University. He received the A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Harvard University. He has taught at a number of institutions, including Fisk University, St. Augustine's College, North Carolina Central University, and Howard University. In 1956 he went to Brooklyn College as Chairman of the Department of History; and in 1964, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, serving as Chairman of the Department of History from 1967 to 1970. At Chicago, he was the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor from 1969 to 1982, when he became Professor Emeritus.
Professor Franklin's numerous publications include The Emancipation Proclamation , The Militant South , The Free Negro in North Carolina , Reconstruction After the Civil War , and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Ante-bellum North . Perhaps his best known book is From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans , now in its seventh edition. His Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 1976 was published in 1985 and received the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize for that year. In 1990, a collection of essays covering a teaching and writing career of fifty years, was published under the title, Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988 . In 1993, he published The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century . Professor Franklin's most recent book, My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin , is an autobiography of his father that he edited with his son, John Whittington Franklin. His current research deals with "Dissidents on the Plantation: Runaway Slaves."
Professor Franklin has been active in numerous professional and education organizations. For many years he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Negro History . He has also served as President of the following organizations: The American Studies Association (1967), the Southern Historical Association (1970), the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa (1973-76), the Organization of American Historians (1975), and the American Historical Association (1979). He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Fisk University, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.
Professor Franklin has served on many national commissions and delegations, including the National Council on the Humanities, from which he resigned in 1979, when the President appointed him to the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. He has also served on the President's Advisory Commission on Ambassadorial Appointments. In September and October of 1980, he was a United States delegate to the 21st General Conference of UNESCO. Among many other foreign assignments, Dr. Franklin has served as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, Consultant on American Education in the Soviet Union, Fulbright Professor in Australia, and Lecturer in American History in the People's Republic of China. Currently, Professor Franklin serves as chairman of the advisory board for One America: The President's Initiative on Race.
Professor Franklin has been the recipient of many honors. In 1978, Who's Who in America selected Dr. Franklin as one of eight Americans who has made significant contributions to society. In the same year, he was elected to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. He also received the Jefferson Medal for 1984, awarded by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. In 1989, he was the first recipient of the Cleanth Brooks Medal of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and in 1990 received the Encyclopedia Britannica Gold Medal for the Dissemination of Knowledge. In 1993, Dr. Franklin received the Charles Frankel Prize for contributions to the humanities, and in 1994, the Cosmos Club Award and the Trumpet Award from Turner Broadcasting Corporation. In 1995, he received the first W.E.B. DuBois Award from the Fisk University Alumni Association, the Organization of American Historians' Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Alpha Phi Alpha Award of Merit, the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom . In 1996, Professor Franklin was elected to the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Frame and in 1997 he received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. In addition to his many awards, Dr. Franklin has received honorary degrees from more than one hundred colleges and universities.
Professor Franklin has been extensively written about in various articles and books. Most recently he was the subject of the film First Person Singular: John Hope Franklin . Produced by Lives and Legacies Films, the documentary was featured on PBS in June 1997.
Franklin, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Chicago, will join the events, which also will feature Cathy Cohen, Professor in Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University and William Julius Wilson, a former University professor who currently teaches at Harvard University.
"While at Chicago, Franklin carried out groundbreaking research on the history of African Americans and the American South," said Kathleen Conzen, Chairwoman of the Department of History. "He also was determined that scholarship in these fields should not be isolated from the larger American historical experience or from the social science and humanities disciplines. Franklin cultivated in his students an abiding respect for documentary evidence and rigorous historical method."
A seminal scholar of African-American history, Franklin published From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans , widely considered the definitive work on the subject, in 1947. The book is in its eighth edition and has been translated into Indian, Japanese, German, French, Portuguese and Chinese. He also wrote Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988 (1990), and The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century (1993); and most recently, Franklin and his son edited My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin , an autobiography of Franklin's father.
For his scholarship and service, Franklin received the 1995 Presidential Medal of Freedom , the nation's highest civilian honor, and he also was appointed chair of the President's Initiative on Race in 1997."
The plenary session begins with the presentation of "Mexican Americans, Civil Rights and the Problem of the Color Line," presented by Neil Foley, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, and will be followed by the presentation "The New Economy and Racial Inequality," by William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser university professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Franklin was a faculty member in History from 1964 to 1982, and served as Chairman of History from 1967 to 1970. In 1982, he accepted an appointment at Duke University, where he now is the James B. Duke professor emeritus. In 2000, Duke University opened the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies in his honor.
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Medal History
