[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 58 (Tuesday, April 21, 2009)]
[Senate]
[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.

                          ____________________