The Road from Rentiesville (February/March 2002 | Volume: 53, Issue: 1)

The Road from Rentiesville

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Authors: Leon F. Litwack

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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February/March 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 1

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.”

 
 
“My dad went to Tulsa. . . . he was becoming very successful there when the riot came.”

Like Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, Franklin demonstrated to a skeptical or an indifferent profession that the history of black Americans was a legitimate field for scholarly inquiry and investigation. His first book, published in 1943, broke new ground in exploring the anomalous position of free blacks in the slave South, focusing on North Carolina. His most recent book, cowritten with Loren Schweninger and published in 1999, is Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, the most deeply researched study of a group of men and women whose exploits have often been shrouded in myth or simply ignored. Franklin and Schweninger have helped redeem the rightful place of these “freedom fighters” in the historic struggle for justice and human dignity.

For several generations, for more than three million students and nonstudents alike, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, has been the introduction to African-American history and even to the idea that African-Americans had a history. It remains, in its eighth edition, the definitive history of black Americans, authoritative, comprehensive, eminently readable, and highly influential. Like our best historians, Franklin cares deeply about how to communicate history, about the need to make