Oddly, given the number of history blogs I subscribe to, I first heard that John Hope Franklin had died from someone on twitter.  And I thought immediately that I wanted to write something, but I didn’t know what.  Then, too, the tributes and memorials and expressions of gratitude started pouring in everywhere I looked to the extent that it was impossible to keep up — and they take all kinds of forms  wonderful, personal stories about the scholar and friend, traditional memorials listing great accomplishments and writings, and discussions of how his work connects to the events of our time.

His significance is unmistakable; he belongs in that category of scholar who change the way we think about the past, change the questions we ask, and the voices we include.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”  (David Levering Lewis, quoted in the New York Times)

And this is important to us.   When historians break the paradigm they do so in a number of ways, but one of the ways that matters the most is when they find new voices to add to the conversation.  Sometimes those voices are, voices  - like when they are the first person to take the slave narratives, or womens’ diaries  seriously as primary sources.  Sometimes the voices are more metaphorical, when the historian figures out a new way of getting at the past - of counting things, or noticing things, that allow us to get at the experience of those whose voices were silenced.  That’s a big reason why all of the conversations we have about how to preserve and save and collect and protect the stuff of our world and our culture are important.

But it’s not the only thing that is important to us in this story.

For me, the books I read for class were Roll Jordan Roll (1974) or American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) or Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), or The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976)  — all of those came out of the explosion of great scholarship in the 1970’s that made it easy to forget when you went to college in the 1980’s that African American history wasn’t born in that period.  For me, becoming aware of Franklin, and realizing that Franklin’s first book was published in 1943, that he was working on the dissertation that was the foundation for that book before the Depression ended was one of those necessary reminders that the struggles and foment we associate with the 60’s  were part of a long, long fight.

It was the memorials that touched on how that fight touched Franklin’s scholarship, that important, paradigm-shifting scholarship, and just how much he shaped that fight, that got me thinking about posting here.  James Cobb at Cliopatria talked about how hard it was for Franklin to attend professional conferences.   At Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy describes the contrasts in Franklin’s life between professional respect and daily indignities.

And in his own words, delivering the Charles Homer Prize Haskins Lecture in 1988, Franklin talked about the challenges of doing historical research in the segregated South.  “Nothing,” he said, illustrated the “vagaries of policies and practices of racial segregation better than libraries and archives.”

Dealing with this, he says, dealing with libraries and archives required him to be both scholar and activist:

“It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda, as well as one dealing with more general matters, that involved a type of activism.  I discovered this in the spring of 1939 when I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, to do research in the state archives, only to be informed by the director that in planning the building the architects did not anticipate that any Afr0-Americans would be doing research there.”

It’s important that we have libraries and archives, that are open to all, that are open to some that others in the community do not value.  It is important that when people come together to create meaning and knowledge that we don’t accept larger structures that keep some voices home.  It is important that we have stuff in libraries in archives, and that we protect that stuff, and that people can get to that stuff and use it, create with it, enlighten with it.  And it is important that we don’t push the John Hope Franklins of the world into activism; we need to be the activists ourselves.   I think we all know this, but not too long ago we didn’t.  And that made things, hard, important things, harder for the wrong reasons.

Things are still hard.  And it’s not like there are right reasons.  There are reasons that aren’t entirely in our control.  Keeping libraries and archives open is a bigger challenge than we might have expected a few years ago, or at least the challenges are coming from many new directions.  We are going to have to be okay with being activists, I think, on a variety of fronts for quite a while now - and its good to have a reminder of why it all matters so much.