It is with great sadness that I heard the news today that my hero John Hope Franklin has passed away. His life began in Jim Crow Oklahoma and stretched far and wide--to Harvard, the University of Chicago, Duke, and the President's Commission on Race. Along the way he wrote some of the most influential and important historical scholarship of the twentieth century. (His best-known work is From Slavery to Freedom; I think legal academics will really enjoy My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, which gives a great picture of Franklin's father's law practice in Oklahoma in the early years of the twentieth century.)
Dr. Franklin was one of the tireless fighters for the victims of the Tulsa riot of 1921 in their decades-long search to have that riot remembered and to have some form of compensation. Amidst all the tributes that will certainly come, I hope that we recall what a humane and caring man he was--and that he was a catalyst to the changes in the twentieth century, as way a chronicler of them.
He was and forever will be an intellectual giant in the history of African American People. A master teacher and lifelong student of life in the african diaspora. This is a tremendous loss to our family. God Bless Him
Posted by: Khemare | March 31, 2009 at 03:46 PM