[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 9321]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     REMEMBERING JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

 Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, today I honor the life of a great 
American, John Hope Franklin, who died last week at the age of 94. Dr. 
Franklin was a witness, participant and documentarian of the struggle 
of African Americans for civil rights and the fight to have this 
country fulfill its promise to become a more perfect union for all of 
its citizens.
  Dr. Franklin once said, ``I want to be out there on the firing line, 
helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better 
world, a better place to live.'' In his life, Dr. Franklin did just 
that through his work with W. E. B. Du Bois, his efforts on Brown v 
Board of Education with Thurgood Marshall and by marching from Selma to 
Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. How wonderful that this 
great fighter for civil rights was able to witness the election of 
Barack Obama as President of the United States.
  As a historian and a teacher, Dr. Franklin enriched this Nation by 
educating us all about race issues. He began his teaching career in 
1936 at Fisk and continued teaching over the next six decades, at 
schools such as Howard University, the University of Chicago, Cambridge 
University in England, Harvard, Cornell, the University of California 
Berkeley, Duke, and other institutions. He had a passion for teaching, 
and I was fortunate enough to sit in on Dr. Franklin's classes at 
Brooklyn College in the 1960s. Having him there was like having a real 
star in our midst, and students who were lucky enough to get into his 
class bragged about him from morning until night.
  Dr. Franklin was the author of nearly 20 books, beginning with ``The 
Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860,'' which explored slaveholders' 
hatred and fear of the quarter-million free blacks in the antebellum 
South. His 1947 ``From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-
Americans,'' remains a classic and one of the most definitive 
explorations of the American Black experience. Dr. Franklin once said, 
``One might argue that the historian is the conscience of the nation, 
if honesty and consistency are factors that nurture the conscience.'' 
While many of these studies may have been of the past, they inevitably 
shed light on the struggles we continue to face as a nation.
  Dr. Franklin led a life of firsts, and President Clinton awarded him 
the Medal of Freedom, the Nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995 for 
his life's work. Today, I honor his life and ask that all Americans 
join me in remembering this truly great visionary who never stopped 
working for change.

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