Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, a revered historian of life in the South and the African-American experience, has died. He was 94. Duke says Franklin died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at the university’s hospital in Durham.
Born and raised in an all-Black community in Oklahoma and often subjected to humiliating incidents of racism, Franklin broke numerous color barriers during his career.
He was the first Black department chair at a mostly white institution, and the first Black president of the American Historical Association.
Franklin was part of the team of scholars who assisted Thurgood Marshall to win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the “separate but equal” doctrine in the nation’s public schools.
