John Hope Franklin: A Life of Firsts and Flowers - The Root
Revered historian John Hope Franklin , the author of the seminal work From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, left his mark on, of all things, orchid culture. He and his wife, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, collected and cultivated orchids in their own home greenhouses throughout their 58-year marriage. In 1976 a hybrid orchid was named in his honor, Phalaenopsis John Hope Franklin. John Hope Franklin would have been 100 years old this year. 2 in the year of Booker T. Washington’s death, 1915—a half-century after the end of the Civil War—Franklin lived to see and support the candidacy and election of our nation’s first black president. After graduating magna cum laude from Fisk in 1935, he was admitted to Harvard University’s graduate history program, the first African American from a historically black institution to enter directly. Although Franklin was a Ph. D. and a published author by 1943, institutional racism remained fierce, and the U. S. War Department refused to hire him as a historian, selecting less-qualified white applicants instead. A professor at several historically black colleges between 1936 and 1956, Franklin refused every offer he received to become dean or president of academic institutions. Source: www.theroot.com
