John Hope Franklin: A Legacy of Excellence

In March 1946, after being recommended by Arthur Schlesinger, one of his mentors at Harvard, John Hope Franklin accepted an offer from Roger Shugg, historian and editor of the College Department at Alfred Knopf, to write a history of the Negro in America. It was not an easy decision. He had, over a four-month period, pondered whether he should take time away from his current research project, a study of the martial South. (The book was later titled The Militant South). Not only that, but he considered himself a historian of the South, not of the Negro; and he felt that the recent publication of his dissertation “The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790 to 1860” was a contribution to Southern history. In addition, there was a question of time and money. Knopf promised a small advance but wanted a manuscript by 1947, preferably in the spring. Professor Franklin was teaching a heavy load of courses in American and European history with more than 100 students each quarter at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham (now North Carolina Central University). His wife of five years, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, held a position as a librarian in the law school at the college. But even with their combined salaries they had little extra cash for research trips, even if he were able get away. It was not as though he was not prepared to undertake the challenge. He had taught courses in Negro history; he had read the works of Carter Woodson, Lorenzo Johnston Green, Luther Porter Jackson, Charles Wesley, Rayford Logan; and only a year before, while perusing the stacks of the College library, he had come across the remarkable two-volume History of the Negro Race in America by George Washington Williams. But how could he find the time and wherewithal to write the 150,000 words that editor Shugg requested?

As was the case many times during his life, it was Aurelia Franklin who suggested a solution to his dilemma. She urged him to take an unpaid leave from the college during the fall quarter, journey to Washington D.C., find a study carrel at the Library of Congress, and spend several months researching and writing. Her salary, combined with a $250 advance from Knopf, could sustain them for this period. Her gift was later referred to as a subvention from the “Aurelia Franklin Foundation.”

Thus Franklin began to write in earnest, sending five chapters off even before classes ended in the spring, writing furiously through the summer and traveling to the Library of Congress in the fall. As he worked, he kept several goals paramount: he would put the history of African Americans in a broad context, not only of United States history but also of African, South American, Caribbean, and North American history; he would use the most up-to-date political, economic, social, and cultural studies to substantiate his arguments; he would show how, in order to understand American history, it was necessary to recognize the importance of race, slavery, segregation, and, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, the “two-ness of black Americans”; and he would write, as he later said, “to be read”—in jargon-free, straightforward prose. Still, he wondered whether he would be able, even with his best efforts, to meet the deadline now set for April 1, 1947. He worked at a frenzied pace—he later recalled it as the busiest thirteen months of his life—and by the winter of 1947 he had completed thirty chapters. The manuscript was now 240,000 words.

This was all the more extraordinary because, as he was finishing the manuscript and readying it for publication, he spent a good deal of time assisting his older brother, Buck Colbert Franklin Jr., who was suffering from depression because of his experiences during World War II under a white sergeant who vowed to make the existence of this “smart Negro” miserable. His brother’s death, a short time after falling from the second storey of a Richmond, Virginia, hotel, was emotionally draining for John Hope. Nonetheless, he was able to...