This talk provides an accessible overview of the author’s first monograph project, an intellectual biography of the historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). Perhaps the pre-eminent African American historian working in the late-twentieth-century United States, Franklin penned the best-selling Black history survey From Slavery to Freedom (1947) and engaged in tireless historical activism, supporting the NAACP on the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board (1954) and spearheading President Clinton’s One America Race Initiative. Across some 24 books, 29 chapters, and 91 journal articles, his scholarship reshaped how millions of Americans understood their past, tirelessly highlighting the paradoxes, hypocrisies, and contradictions of American history, particularly on questions of race.
By exploring Franklin’s scholarship, activism, and life, this talk demonstrates how Black historians drove forward the civil rights struggle while simultaneously reshaping the academic discipline amid censorship, FBI surveillance, and the segregation of archives, libraries, and universities. It reveals how American campuses became key sites of societal contestation, protest, and transformations, and captures the profound duality of history’s role in American public life: as both a mechanism of silencing and a vehicle through which dissenting voices have always written back, confronting their nation’s betrayals and urging the actualisation of its most tantalising promises. As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the lessons of Franklin’s pioneering life could not be more urgent.
This event will be online on Zoom. Details to register here.
