A homegrown visionary

Remembering the legacy of John Hope Franklin

It’s a new year, and another opportunity has arisen to convey a piece of Black History in the month we mark to commemorate the same. 

While February being an “honors” month is wildly artificial, it is an occasion to raise up the convulsive, triumphant, sometimes sad, but always electrifying story of the African American sojourn, which informs every page of America's tangled, pan-tribal history, one told through many people.

I'm no fan of the so-called “Great Man theory” of history. I believe our country's journey is crafted one step at a time by thousands, sometimes millions, of individuals. The so-called War of Brothers, or Civil War, was driven by Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, but feverishly carried out by 179,000 black and 2.6 million white Union troops and an estimated 750,000 Confederate combatants. 

The American Civil Rights Movement was engineered by a handful of iconic political, intellectual, artistic, and religious leaders like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ella Baker, William Sloan Coffin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pete Seeger and others. But this ongoing struggle was (and still is) fueled in the day-to-day frisson experienced by thousands of courageous, largely unknown folks who successfully integrated swimming pools, cafés, bus terminals, schools, universities, and governments.

But it is easier to make tangible the contributions of a people and their partisans by highlighting the individuals Martin Luther King, Jr. called “majorettes,” or march leaders: standouts who made stellar contributions in these grand, tumultuous processions.

Once, one of them lived among us here in Tulsa.

John Hope Franklin, a former Oklahoman who was one of the most compelling historians in many a generation, would have been 101 this past month. Dr. Franklin, who passed away in 2009, was an epic scholar, historian, celebrated professor, ground-breaking researcher, prolific writer, and sometimes a powerhouse activist. 

Keen observers like Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin Faust believe Franklin's work revolutionized American historical studies by looking unblinkingly at the monstrous tapestry of oppression, savage social engineering, and economic deprivation that defined the plantation/slave owner society and the every day lives of enchained workers and their families. 

According to Franklin, economists Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and contemporary thinkers like writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, slaves contributed hugely to the still-humongous competitive advantage that allowed America to leapfrog our world peers in the race to industrial superiority. “Free labor” put the U.S. on an epic trajectory that still defines us today. 

Franklin was the first American historian to forcefully place the lives, struggles, and tumult of black people at the hot core of the scholarly discipline of studying American history. 

Franklin, who is honored by name at Tulsa's John Hope Franklin Center For Reconciliation, was also president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. His seminal work, From Slavery to Freedom (originally published in 1947), is a classroom classic and has been continually updated with over three million volumes in circulation. 

In 1995, Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, by President Clinton, who cited Franklin’s writing, critical research for the case of Brown v. Board of Education, and his profound scholarship.

I asked former Tulsa businessman and state legislator Don McCorkell, who is also an amateur historian, to write one of several pieces that the Oklahoma Eagle commissioned for Franklin's 100th birthday. Here is how McCorkell framed Franklin's link to Green Country:
“Franklin was born in Rentiesville in eastern Oklahoma and grew up there and in Tulsa where he graduated from Booker T. Washington High School. His father, Buck, grew up in Indian Territory, starting as a rancher and then turning to law, moving his law practice from Rentiesville to Tulsa in the early years of the twentieth century. Franklin and his mother and sisters remained in Rentiesville waiting for the time they could move to Tulsa, which to them sounded like the promised land. They did get to make that move, but only after the horrendous Tulsa race riot in which the black community was devastated and Buck’s law office burned to the ground. The city doubled down on its racist acts by passing an ordinance to prevent blacks from rebuilding. Franklin’s father was among those who challenged this act successfully in a lawsuit finally resolved in the Oklahoma Supreme Court...”

Drew Gilpin Faust wrote movingly of Franklin's major role in reshaping the understanding of US history this past December in the New York Review of Books:
“...Many Americans in 2015 seem to be undertaking an unprecedentedly clear-eyed look at the nation’s past, at the legacy of slavery and race that has made us anything but a colorblind society. There could be no more fitting tribute to Franklin’s one hundredth birthday than this collective stock-taking, for no one has done more to delineate the contours of that shameful legacy and to insist upon its importance to America’s present and future. And in that effort he has also done something more for history itself: insisting not just upon its relevance, but indeed its preeminence as the indispensable instrument of change and even salvation from legacies that left unexamined will destroy us....”

“Good history,” Franklin remarked in 1989, “is a good foundation for a better present and future.”

For more from Ray, read his series on brain trauma in football.