John Hope Franklin: Fears We Are Regressing on Segregation

Ernie Suggs, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 23, 2004):

Few people alive know the intricacies surrounding the work and process that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision as well as John Hope Franklin.

And it is not because he is one of America's foremost historians, who penned the classic reader "From Slavery to Freedom."

It was because he was there.

"I assisted Thurgood [Marshall] and his staff in trying to bring to life the history of Reconstruction and to understand what those who voted for the 14th Amendment [which guaranteed equal rights to all citizens] had in mind," Franklin said. "Thurgood didn't know from Adam about that."

It was research conducted by Franklin and a team of social scientists and historians that helped Marshall's case and eventually led to the 1954 decision that reversed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld segregation as "separate but equal."

"We knew it was important and we knew that it would be bitterly challenged," said Franklin, adding that they had watched cautiously as higher education institutions across the country slowly became integrated. "But getting somebody into graduate school was different than getting them into elementary schools."...

But 50 years later Franklin told a group of more than 200 at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History that he is seeing regression that is deeper than education and spreads into where people live and work.

"There are people who haven't given up the battle from that day to this, so we are seeing this process of resegregation," he said.

"As long as we have segregation in housing and in the workplace it will be difficult to desegregate the schools," Franklin said. "We are not going to have another Brown; the courts have spoken. What we have to do is fight on the other fronts."

Franklin's personal odyssey through black history is long and storied. Born in Rentiesville, Okla., in 1915, he graduated from Fisk in 1935, before getting his master's and Ph.D. from Harvard.....

"He is an American treasure," said Herman "Skip" Mason, a local historian and archivist at Morehouse College. "And he should not be looked at as an African-American historian. His work helped non-African-Americans understand our experience."