HR0320 96TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

HR0320 LRB096 12316 KXB 25693 r

HOUSE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, The members of the Illinois House of Representatives are saddened to learn of the death of Dr. John Hope Franklin of Duke University; Dr. Franklin was a scholar of African-American History; he passed away on March 25, 2009; and

WHEREAS, He was a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle; 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 Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and other major civil rights figures of the 20th century; and

WHEREAS, 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; the work was considered one of the definitive historical surveys of the American black experience, has sold more than three million copies, and has been translated into Japanese, German, French, Chinese, and other languages; Dr. Franklin also taught at some of the nation's leading institutions, including Harvard and the University of Chicago, in addition to Duke, and as a scholar he personally broke several racial barriers; and

WHEREAS, He often argued that historians have an important role in shaping policy, a position he put into practice when he worked with Thurgood Marshall's team of lawyers in their effort to strike down segregation in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the nation's public schools; Dr. Franklin also participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, with Dr. King; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Franklin's prestige led President Clinton to select him in 1997 to head the Advisory Board to the President's Initiative on Race, which was formed to promote dialogue about the country's race problems; he was the first African-American president of the American Historical Association; the first black department chairman at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke; the first black chairman of the University of Chicago's history department; and the first African-American to present a paper at the segregated Southern Historical Association, one of many groups that later elected him its president; and

WHEREAS, John Hope Franklin was born on January 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, the son of Buck Colbert Franklin, a lawyer, and Molly Parker Franklin, an elementary school teacher; his parents had moved to Rentiesville, an all-black town, after his father was not allowed to practice law in Louisiana; in the 1920s, the family moved to Tulsa, and at age 11 he was taken to hear the great civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom Dr. Franklin later became friends; and

WHEREAS, His youth was marked by frequent brushes with racism; he was forced off an all-white train and made to sit in a segregated section of the Tulsa opera house; he watched black neighborhoods of Tulsa, including the one where his father had his office, being burned during the infamous 1921 race riot, and he was barred from admission to the University of Oklahoma; Dr. Franklin attended historically black Fisk University in Nashville, receiving his B.A. in 1935; there he met Aurelia E. Whittington, who would become his wife, and sometime editor, of almost 60 years; they had one son, John Whittington Franklin, who survives him; and

WHEREAS, Before graduating from Fisk, Dr. Franklin considered following his father into law but was persuaded by a white professor, Ted Currier, to make history his field; Professor Currier was said to have borrowed $500 to help Dr. Franklin pursue graduate studies at Harvard; there, Dr. Franklin later recalled, he felt the isolation of being one of only a handful of blacks on campus; he received his master's degree in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1941; two years later he published his first book, "The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860," which explored slaveholders' hatred and fear of the quarter-million free blacks in the antebellum South; almost 20 other books followed, either written or edited by Dr. Franklin; and

WHEREAS, John Hope Franklin was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the first intercollegiate Greek-letter Fraternity established for African Americans; he was initiated in the Alpha Chi Chapter at Fisk university in 1932, and was an active member for the next 77 years; he was an early beneficiary of the Fraternity's Foundation Publishers, which provides financial support and fellowship for writers addressing African-American issues; and

WHEREAS, Despite his acute awareness of the South's troubled racial history, Dr. Franklin was often angrier about Northern racism and frequently defended his adopted home state, North Carolina; his major biographical project was a 1985 study of George Washington Williams, a self-educated black Civil War veteran and author of a 1,000-page 1882 history of blacks in America from 1619 to 1880; he said he spent nearly 40 years of intermittent research on the project, calling Williams "one of the small heroes of the world;"; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Franklin's first passion was teaching, and he continued to log classroom time despite his increasing prominence; his teaching career began at Fisk in 1936 and continued over the next 20 years at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina, North Carolina College in Durham, and Howard University in Washington; as his first books drew national notice, Dr. Franklin left the world of historically black colleges and went to Brooklyn College, where from 1956 to 1964 he served as chairman of what had been an all-white department; Dr. Franklin later taught at the University of Chicago before returning to North Carolina in 1982 to teach at Duke and at the Duke Law School; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Franklin was also a Fulbright professor in Australia and had teaching stints in China and Zimbabwe; he taught at Cambridge University in England, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Hawaii, the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions; since 1992, he had been James B. Duke professor emeritus of history at Duke; and

WHEREAS, A John Hope Franklin Research Center was established in his honor at Duke; at his home in Durham, Dr. Franklin continued a lifelong hobby of cultivating hundreds of orchids; one species was named for him, the Phalaenopsis John Hope Franklin; his honors, awards, and professional and civic affiliations were so numerous as to fill several single-spaced pages of a long curriculum vitae; he received more than 100 honorary degrees; and in 2006, he received the John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities in a ceremony at the Library of Congress; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we mourn, along with his family, friends, students, and fellow scholars, the passing of Dr. John Hope Franklin; and be it further

RESOLVED, That a suitable copy of this resolution be presented to the family of Dr. John Hope Franklin as a symbol of our sincere sympathy.