TRIBUTES TO JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

Extract

Long before I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance in person, John Hope Franklin's writings were a vital presence in my academic life. His books were some of the earliest sign posts that I encountered when I first ventured into the new and unfamiliar territory of the historian. The Free Negro in North Carolina was critical to the framework of my first research paper in graduate school. The Militant South was required reading in C. Vann Woodward's reading and discussion seminar in Southern history. I turned to Reconstruction: After the Civil War hoping that it would help me put limits to the deepening puzzles of Reconstruction. But perhaps none of these works—important as they are—has influenced the historical imagination as profoundly as what is undoubtedly his most widely read work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, first published in 1947. It kept me company over an anxious winter when I prepared for oral exams. I adopted its fifth edition as required reading in the first course that I taught as a graduate student. Known to general and academic readers alike, From Slavery to Freedom does not recount the progressive unfolding of an emancipatory project, even though its title early named what has become a theme central to analysis of the historical experiences of African Americans in the United States. Instead, it locates the emergence of a distinctively brittle racial regime in the United States within the complex contradictions of modern freedom that were set in motion by Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. “It was forces let loose by the Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution,” he writes, “that created the modern institution of slavery and the slave trade” (Franklin 1947, p. 43; 1980, p. 31). There are thus no postwar echoes of NATO triumphalism in Franklin's conception of Atlantic modernity: