The greatest historian of black America, the author of From Slavery to Freedom, was 94 years old.
Franklin was deeply involved in civil rights issues from the time when he lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma as a young boy. His father's law office was burned down during the Tulsa race riots.
After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Franklin was at first barred from doing historical research in the archives of the State of North Carolina. No black person had ever worked in the archives. He worked with Thurgood Marshall on Brown vs. Board of Education, and with civil rights figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. DuBois. He marched at Selma.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995 by President Bill Clinton. New York Times:
Yet even on so august an occasion, Dr. Franklin could not escape the legacy of discrimination. In a talk he gave in North Carolina 10 years later, he recalled that on the evening before he received the medal at the White House, a woman at a Washington club asked him to fetch her coat, mistaking him for an attendant, and that a man at his hotel had handed him car keys and told him to get his car.
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