American scholar John Hope Franklin dies at 94

Obituary and photos from The New York Times


John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94.

A spokeswoman for Duke University, where Dr. Franklin taught, said he died of congestive heart failure at the university�s hospital.


With Bill Clinton, in 2005

During a career of scholarship, teaching and advocacy that spanned more than 70 years, Dr. Franklin was deeply involved in the painful debates that helped reshape America�s racial identity, working with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall and other major civil rights figures of the 20th century.

�I will always think of John Hope as the historian of the South who grasped the complexity of Southern public life as shaped by the horror of personal slavery,� said Nell Irvin Painter, the Princeton University historian. �Franklin was the first great American historian to reckon the price owed in violence, autocracy and militarism.�

It was a theme Dr. Franklin wrestled with into his last years. In an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 2007, he wrote, �If the American idea was to fight every war from the beginning of colonization to the middle of the 20th century with Jim Crow armed forces, in the belief that this would promote the American idea of justice and equality, then the American idea was an unmitigated disaster and a denial of the very principles that this country claimed as its rightful heritage.�

Dr. Franklin combined idealism with rigorous research, producing such classic works as �From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,� first published in 1947. Considered one of the definitive historical surveys of the American black experience, it has sold more than three million copies and has been translated into Japanese, German, French, Chinese and other languages.

Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, called it �a landmark in the interpretation of American civilization.�