Title
Honoring and Recognizing the Life and Accomplishments of Historian and Scholar John Hope Franklin.
Body
WHEREAS, John Hope Franklin was born January 2, 1915, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma; and
WHEREAS, Franklin, who died Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at age 94, was a prodigious historian and author of several renowned works including, "From Slavery to Freedom", published in 1947, a landmark integration of Black history into American history that has sold more than 3.5 million copies and remains relevant more than 60 years after being published; and
WHEREAS, His research helped Thurgood Marshall and his team at the NAACP win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that barred the doctrine of, "Separate but Equal", in the nation's public schools; and
WHEREAS, Franklin, who was raised in an all-Black community in Oklahoma and often subjected to humiliating racism, was later instrumental in bringing down the legal and historical validations for racial segregation in America; and
WHEREAS, His mother, Mollie, a teacher, began taking him to school with her when he was 3 and taught him to read by age 5; and
WHEREAS, At the age of 6, he first became aware of what he described as the, "racial divide separating me from white America,"; and
WHEREAS, During his youth, Franklin, his mother and sister Anne were ejected from a train when his mother refused the conductor's orders to move to the "Negro" coach; and
WHEREAS, He recalled his mother telling him that, "There was not a white person on that train or anywhere else who was any better than I was. She admonished me not to waste my energy by fretting but to save it in order to prove that I was as good as any of them,"; and
WHEREAS, Franklin himself broke numerous color barriers including becoming the first African-American department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first African-American professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke University; and the first African-American pres...
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