No one needed to convert John Hope Franklin to racial consciousness or to social activism. For most of his life, as a scholar and teacher, as a public servant and activist, he has considered his personal commitment to social justice no less than a moral imperative. His ongoing and extraordinary career has broken and challenged many a racial barrier, from his student activities at Fisk University to his role as a historical adviser to Thurgood Marshall in assembling materials for Brown v. Board of Education, from his efforts to conduct historical research in a segregated South to his appointment to chair the advisory board for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.

In his writing, as in his teaching, John Hope Franklin, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History and Professor of Legal History at Duke University Law School, has defied traditional categories. He is an African-American historian, a Southern historian, an American historian. Just as he broke the color line in Southern archives as a graduate student, so he broke that same color line in Southern studies as a writer and teacher, moving from the largely segregated field of Negro history (as it was then called) to Southern history, an exclusively white domain. It was never easy. “The world of the Negro scholar is indescribably lonely,” he wrote in 1963, “and he must, somehow, pursue truth down that lonely path while, at the same time, making certain that his conclusions are sanctioned by universal standards developed and maintained by those who frequently do not even recognize him.”

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