[Pages S4500-S4501]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

TRIBUTE TO JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

Mr. WEBB. Madam President, I would like to take some time today and
talk a little bit about an individual for whom I have great admiration
who passed away without much comment from this body last month, John
Hope Franklin, I think perhaps the most eminent Black historian in
America. Even that does not do justice to John Hope Franklin, one of
the most eminent historians in our country, who happened to be of
African-American descent.
I make these comments as someone who spent a good deal of my life as
a writer and dedicated to examining American history, and also I make
them in the spirit that our Attorney General offered when he said:
Maybe we should have a little more courage when we are talking about
issues like race in America.
It is interesting to take a look at the paper this morning and see
the Pulitzer Prizes that were awarded this year, the Pulitzer Prize for
history being awarded to Annette Gordon-Reed for a book entitled ``The
Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,'' which ties into the
continuing saga of Thomas Jefferson; and for general nonfiction, a book
entitled ``Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
Americans From the Civil War To World War II,'' by Douglas A. Blackmon,
which is another examination of the situation of Black America in the
American South.
Those are both important contributions to our understanding of
American history. When I look at John Hope Franklin, who died at the
age of 94 last month, and the contributions he made and the environment
in which he grew up and basically conquered through his success, I look
at an individual who had a lot of impact on me when I was a young man
trying to put the history of the American South into some context
because John Hope Franklin had the courage to not only address Black
history but to place it into the context of American history, not to
deal with it as a separate issue.
There is a very fine obituary that was written in the Economist April
4 edition which outlined a lot of the high points and the challenges of
John Hope Franklin's life. I ask unanimous consent this obituary be
printed at the end of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. WEBB. I am going to hit a couple of points in this obituary, then
I want to talk about the American South as John Hope Franklin
understood it and where we are today, White and Black.
John Hope Franklin grew up in Oklahoma. His father moved to Oklahoma
when he was 6 years old to practice law. He had his own challenges in
that environment during the Jim Crow laws. He then went to Fisk
University, was an outstanding scholar, got a doctorate at Harvard. He
became the first African American to lead an all-White history
department at Brooklyn College.
He later taught at the University of Chicago, and as the Economist
pointed out:

Unlike many after him, he did not see ``black history'' as
an independent discipline and never taught a formal course on
it. What he was doing was revising American history as a
whole. His books, especially ``From Slavery to Freedom''
which was first published in 1947, offered Americans their
first complete view of themselves.

When I was at Georgetown Law Center, after I left the Marine Corps,
and was studying on my own stead, sort of an avocation, of ethnic
settlement patterns in America, I was being confronted with a lot of
rhetoric that had come out of people who did not understand the
American South, who did not really understand that, in truth, the
American South has never been White against Black, even during its
worst times. It was more a three-tiered than a two-tiered society. It
was a small veneer of White aristocrats in many ways manipulating White
against Black.
White and Black in the majority of the American South economically
differed very little at all. I started reading John Hope Franklin's
classic book, ``From Slavery to Freedom.'' I saw that he was an
intellectually honest observer, a passionate observer of true history,
and he commented in this book on that in 1860, at the height of slavery
right before the Civil War began.
Region-wide, less than 5 percent of the Whites in the South owned
slaves. If you think about what the American perception is on the issue
of South versus slavery, you will realize what an astounding statistic
that happens to be. He also went on to say:

Fully three-fourths of the white people of the South had
neither had slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the
maintenance of slavery or the plantation system.

So contrary to a lot of rhetoric today and a lot of misunderstanding,
John Hope Franklin was giving an actual context that in the South,
fully 75 percent of the Whites living alongside Blacks during the Civil
War and afterwards had never benefitted from slavery or had never
participated in it as an economic institution.
The aftermath of the Civil War was a very difficult time for the
American South, White and Black. As I wrote in my book ``Born
Fighting,'' between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World
War II, the South was basically an owned place. It was a colonized
place and, in fact, it was colonized doubly. It was colonized from the
outside, an entire region owned from the outside in its basic
infrastructure, its banking systems, its schools not properly funded,
and it was also colonized from the inside.
This is the area that we see so many historians commenting on even
today; that is, the planters society, early, before the Civil War,
became, in many ways, this aristocracy that kept White and Black down
at the same time, and it has taken us a very long time to get past
that.
In 1933, President Roosevelt published probably the most
comprehensive document on the economic conditions of the American South
that has ever been written. He pointed out in this document in 1933,
the educational base of the South has been decimated, White and Black.
Illiteracy in the South was five times as high in the North Central
States and more than double the rate in New England than the Middle
Atlantic States.
The total endowments of all of the colleges and universities in the
South were less than the combined endowments of Harvard and Yale alone.
The South was being required to educate one-third of the Nation's
children with one-sixth of the Nation's school revenues. The richest
State in the South in 1933 ranked lower in per-capita income than the
poorest State outside the region.
In 1933, the average annual income in the South was only $314, while
the rest of the country averaged more than $600. This report pointed
out, importantly, using the terms of the time:

Whites and Negroes have suffered alike. Of the 1.8 million
tenant families in the region, about 66 percent are white
[the South's population at this time was 71 percent white] .
. . half of the sharecroppers are white, living under
conditions almost identical with those of Negro
sharecroppers.

The region had 28 percent of the country's population. In 1937 it had
11 percent of the Nation's bank deposits.

[[Page S4501]]

So this was a region, all the way into World War II, where you had
legal separation, which we were able to overcome through the Civil
Rights Movement and through a lot of very courageous people, John Hope
Franklin among them.
But once you get past the legal restrictions, the economic conditions
among a preponderance of the population were basically the same. But
this has provided downstream implications for both African Americans
and people of European descent in the American South.
When I was in law school in 1974, the National Opinion Research
Center at the University of Chicago did a study on White ethnic groups,
broke them down by 17 different criteria. White Baptists, which
basically are a population that has descended out of the American South
through the Scotch-Irish migration--of which I wrote in ``Born
Fighting''--averaged 10.7 years of education. Blacks nationwide
averaged 10.6 years of education. So the point to be made is that for
both of these groups with a very common heritage, once we set aside, as
we have, the legal disparities that tormented the South for so long,
have very similar challenges in terms of breaking down generational
cycles.
In the obituary from the Economist that was written about John Hope
Franklin, this point was made:

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a
historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he
hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, he loved it.
His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted
Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given
him $500 to see him through Harvard.

I would say, as we remember this truly brilliant American, that he
not only loved the South, he understood it.

Exhibit 1

[From the Economist, Apr. 4, 2009]

John Hope Franklin

His chief pleasures were contemplative and patient. With
watering can and clippers, he would potter in his greenhouse
among hundreds of varieties of orchids. Or, standing in a
river, he would wait for hours until a fish tickled his line.
These were, one could say, typical historian's amusements;
very close, in rhythm and character, to the painstaking,
careful accumulation of tiny pieces of fact.
And yet what John Hope Franklin collected, over a lifetime
of scholarship, were scraps of horror. Five dollars for the
cost of a branding iron. A deed of sale, in Virginia in 1829,
for a male slave ``of a yellow colour'' who ``is not in the
habit of running away''. Or the testimony from 1860 of Edward
Johnson, a black child apprentice:
``I was tacon and plased with a rope a round my rists my
back intiarly naked and swong up then and there Each of [the
men] tuck a cow hide one on Either side and beet me in such a
manner when they let me down I fanted and lay on the ground 2
hours.''
To these Mr Franklin could add from his own experience. The
train journey to Checotah, Oklahoma, when he was six, that
ended when his mother refused to move from the whites-only
carriage. His father's small law office in Tulsa, reduced to
rubble after a race riot in 1921. The day he was told by a
white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that
he should take his ``filthy hands'' off her. And the warm
evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi--
a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in
his glasses--only to find as he left the store that a semi-
circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit,
silently implying that he should not try to break through
their line.
Academia offered no shelter. He excelled from high school
onwards, eventually earning a doctorate at Harvard and
becoming, in 1956, the first black head of an all-white
history department at a mostly white university, Brooklyn
College. Later, the University of Chicago recruited him. But
in Montgomery, Louisiana, the archivist called him a
``Harvard nigger'' to his face. In the state archives in
Raleigh, North Carolina, he was confined to a tiny separate
room and allowed free run of the stacks because the white
assistants would not serve him. At Duke in 1943, a university
to which he returned 40 years later as a teaching professor,
he could not use the library cafeteria or the washrooms.
Whites, he noted, had no qualms about ``undervaluing an
entire race''. Blacks were excluded both from their
histories, and from their understanding of how America had
been made. Mr Franklin's intention was to weave the black
experience back into the national story. Unlike many after
him, he did not see ``black history'' as an independent
discipline, and never taught a formal course in it. What
he was doing was revising American history as a whole. His
books, especially ``From Slavery to Freedom'' (1947),
offered Americans their first complete view of themselves.

Thomas Jefferson's wine

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a
historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he
hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved
it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted
Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given
him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the
dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He
longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the
Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania
Avenue had held a slave market, ``right by where the
Smithsonian is''. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks
had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French
wines: they had also underpinned America's banks, its
economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The
exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had
``never got over''.
Nor had America got over it, despite the march from Selma,
in which Mr Franklin led a posse of historians, and Brown v
Board of Education, where he lent his scholarship to help
prove that the Framers had not meant to impose segregation on
the public schools. The ``colour line'', as he called it,
remained ``the most tragic and persistent social problem''
the country faced. His own many black firsts--president of
the American Historical Association and the Southern
Historical Association, membership of Washington's Cosmos
Club--had not necessarily opened the door to others. The
night before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
1995, a woman at the Cosmos Club asked him to fetch her coat.
He was overjoyed by Barack Obama's election, but could not
forget the poor, immobile blacks revealed by Hurricane
Katrina.
He yearned to improve things, but wondered how Financial
reparations he was doubtful about; apologies seemed trifling.
Only time, in historical quantities, seemed likely to make a
difference. For some months he was chairman of Bill Clinton's
Initiative on Race, a disorganized effort that ended by
recommending ``community co-operation''. Hostile letters
poured in, mostly from people who did not think the subject
worth talking about. Mr Franklin took them in his stride. He
would go and work on his next book, or retire to the
greenhouse, implements in hand; and practise patience.

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