The Foundation for the National Archives today announced that it will award its fourth annual Records of Achievement Award to John Hope Franklin. Professor Franklin has opened new windows of understanding of race relations in the United States through his writing, teaching, lecturing and civil rights activism. The tribute will be awarded Sept. 18 at the Foundation for the National Archives Annual Gala event, sponsored by The Boeing Company.
The Foundation for the National Archives' Records of Achievement Award is an annual tribute, recognizing an individual who has made a significant impact upon the public's understanding of the United States and its history. The awardees' accomplishments reflect the Foundation's mission by highlighting the stories found in the millions of documents, photographs, maps, films and recordings in the National Archives to bring about a fuller understanding of our national experience.
"An esteemed scholar of American history, John Hope Franklin has worked tirelessly to illuminate the history of the United States, especially articulating the African American narrative and issues of race," said Tom Wheeler, president of the Foundation for the National Archives. "His inspired work provokes us to take up the difficult questions of inequality and oppression faced by Americans from the nation's beginnings, and to bring to this task a more complete understanding of our national heritage."
The Gala, sponsored by The Boeing Company for the third year, celebrates the public-private partnership between the National Archives and Records Administration and the Foundation for the National Archives, which was created to support the development of programs, technology, exhibits and educational materials based on the vast holdings of the National Archives.
Franklin has held various posts in academia across the country and abroad, including his current position as the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History. He has lectured and written extensively—and to much critical acclaim—on the African American experience in the context of the larger American historical record. His 1947 book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, now in its eighth edition, is still widely considered the definitive work on the subject.
During the civil rights struggle, he provided invaluable historical research for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal defense team that won the landmark 1965 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. In 1997, he headed President Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race, and included among his many honorary degrees and awards is a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
"The past is perhaps not as great as we regard it, if it can't suggest to us how we are to conduct ourselves in the present and in the future," Franklin once said. "It's terribly important. And the historian's role there is unique, for he has command of so much that has happened. And if he uses it properly has a lot to say about what ought to happen."