Features
Finding “Hope” in history
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| John Hope Franklin at Miami Book Fair International in 1990 |
John Hope Franklin, the scholar who helped create the field of African-American history, recently died at the age of 94. Franklin, a prolific writer and the author of more than 15 books, visited Miami Dade College in 1990 as part of Miami Book Fair International.
He wrote about history and he lived it. Franklin worked on the seminal Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case, joined protestors in a 1965 march led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, Ala. and headed President Clinton’s 1997 national advisory board on race.
He was also a determined educator and taught for more than six decades. Franklin once said about education, “You can’t have a high standard of scholarship without having a high standard of integrity, because the essence of scholarship is truth.”
— Katherine Joss