TRIBUTES TO JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

Extract

Since meeting him three decades ago, John Hope Franklin has served as my best model for what a professional historian should be. Even as a graduate student, his writings were my beacon—a standard of scholarly excellence and social relevance to which I could aspire. Having never taken a course in African American history before entering graduate school, his authoritative text, From Slavery to Freedom, provided an overview of what I wanted to study as well as a challenging reminder of how much I still needed to learn. W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King, Jr., had helped to remove the racial barriers that had once restricted the opportunities of Black scholars, but for my generation of Black students who entered graduate school in the late 1960s and 1970s, Franklin's writings demonstrated that we could use our training to produce scholarship that not only advanced our understanding of our racial past but also exhibited the highest standards of the historical profession.