In memoriam: John Hope Franklin (1915-2009)

John Hope Franklin accomplished a lot in his 94 years, and watched the US change in tremendous ways. His accomplishments are far too many to list in a simple paragraph (although they include serving as the first African American chair of an all white department, the history department of Brooklyn College).

Therefore, I've included a link to his obituary from the Duke University site. Duke is home of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies.

In his tribute to John Hope Franklin, Peter Applebome comments that Dr. Franklin accomplished much "not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry". One of my professors used this quote to remind us that traditional scholarship can be transformative, if not revolutionary.

I disagree. Traditional scholarship only gets us to places we have gone in the past. John Hope Franklin pursued research while libraries were still segregated. He was a black man writing, as he put it "a new kind of Southern history". His position as chairman of the Brooklyn College history department was so non-traditional that he made the front of the New York Times. He was a scholar of the highest intellect. He was anything but traditional.

Traditional scholarship will only get us to places we have already gone. For many communities, that means histories unwritten and scientific experiments that disproved our very humanity. Remember, a southern physician named S. A. Cartwright thought he discovered drapetomania, a disease that caused slaves to feel an insane desire to run away. What we need is new, revolutionary scholarship that connects to activism (because activism needs scholarship, too).