Category Archives: Franklin Research Center

Eight New Digital Collections on Civil Rights

The Duke University Libraries are proud to announce the completion of the still image digitization for the Duke-held collections of the Content, Context, and Capacity (CCC) Project.

This inter-institutional collaborative project of Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, NC State, and NC Central is digitizing records relating to the Long Civil Rights Movement. The Long Civil Rights Movement is a term used by historians to expand the traditional definition of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s both further into the past and into more recent times. Collections from this project date back to as early as the 1880s and to as late as the first decade of the 2000s.

In total, all four institutions will digitize over 350,000 documents. Duke’s share of that total is approximately 66,000 scans from eight archival collections from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. In addition, during the next (final) year of the project, the CCC staff will transition to the digitization of audio collections. Duke will focus on the digitization of the North Carolina tapes from the Behind the Veil Oral History Collection, which is scheduled for publication in 2014.

Check out the gallery of selected documents digitized as part of the project (click to enlarge) and browse each of the eight collection’s finding aids, now containing the embedded digitized documents, below.

Collection descriptions and links to finding aids (containing digitized materials):

  1. Charles N. Hunter Papers, 1850s-1932 and undated: An educator and reformer ahead of his time, Charles N. Hunter’s papers feature valuable writings and speeches as well as correspondence with many luminaries, including Booker T. Washington.
  2. Asa and Elna Spaulding Papers, 1909-1997 and undated, bulk 1935-1983: Elna Spaulding was a Durham civic leader who served as a County Commissioner and as the present of Women-in-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes. Her papers include correspondence and records of her civic life with many organizations.
  3. Women-In-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes, Inc. (WIAPVC) Durham Chapter records, 1968-1998: Founded by Elna Spaulding in 1968, the WIAPVC is an organization dedicated to community improvement. Its records document both its successful projects and its fund-raising challenges.
  4. Basil Lee Whitener Papers, 1889-1968: Basil Lee Whitener was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1957 to 1968 from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. His papers document his opposition to civil rights legislation as well as his activities as a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
  5. Rencher Nicholas Harris Papers, 1851-1980 and undated, bulk 1926-1965: Rencher Nicholas Harris was Durham’s first African-American city councilman. His papers document a myriad of local issues in the 1950s, including segregated schools, health care, and zoning laws.
  6. Allen Building Takeover Collection, 1969-2002: This collection documents the events and the remembrances of the February 1969 Allen Building Takeover, during which students occupied Duke’s administrative building demanding improvement of African-American life on campus and skirmishes between sympathizers and the police on the quad became violent.
  7. Black Student Alliance Records, 1969-2006: The Black Student Alliance is a Duke African-American student advocacy organization. Its records include evidence of the organization’s projects as well as their publications and compiled scrapbooks illustrating student life.
  8. Department of African and African American Studies Records, 1966-1981: These records trace the development of the Black Studies Program into a full-fledged academic department. In addition, the records contain evidence of radical political thought in the 1970s.

Researchers will find a great deal of material to analyze in these eight collections. The CCC staff encourages you to visit the finding aids of each collection and start exploring the varied perspectives, narratives, and memories that help to comprise the Long Civil Rights Movement.

The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. Funding is provided by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division on the Department of Cultural Resources. For more about Rubenstein Library materials being digitized through the CCC Project, check out previous progress updates posted here at The Devil’s Tale!

Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Graduate Assistant.

Congratulations to this year’s travel grant recipients!

The Rubenstein Library’s three research center annually award travel grants to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars through a competitive application process. Congratulations to this year’s recipients, we look forward to working with all of you!

 

John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture Travel Grant Recipients

Dr. Richard Bell, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park; Project: “Slavery’s Market: A Microhistory.”

Dr. Frederick Carroll, Instructor, Department of History, Norfolk State University; Project: “Race News: How Black Reporters and Readers Shaped the Fight for Racial Injustice, 1910-1978.”

Ms. Mandy Jolly, Undergraduate, Department of History, Lenoir-Ryhne University; Project: “Journalistic Racism from Early Travel/Exploration Logs from the 19th and 20th Century.”

Dr. Phillip Misevich, Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University; Project: “On the Frontier of Freedom: Abolition and the Growth of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, c1790s to 1880s.”

Ms. Marie Stango, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan; Project: “Antislavery and Colonization: African American Women in Nineteenth Century West Africa.”

Dr. Shirley Thompson, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin; Project: “No More Auction Block for Me: African Americans and the Problem of Property.”

Dr. Charlotte Walker-Said, Theodore W. Lentz Fellow in Peace Studies and Human Rights, Webster University; Project: “Traditional Marriage for the Modern Nation: Family Formation and the Politics of Religion in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa.”

Mr. James Wall, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Georgia; Project: “Redefining Success: The Strule for Freedom Rights in Southwest Georgia, 1945-1985”

 

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History Fellowship and Travel Grant Recipients

Zoe Sherman, a Hartman Center grantee, uses the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Records
Zoe Sherman uses the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Records

FOARE Fellowships for Outdoor Advertising Research:

Elizabeth Semler: History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Minnesota, “’Got Milk?’: Dairy Advertising and Scientific Authority in the late 20th Century”

Zoe Sherman: Economics, University of Massachusetts – Amherst, “The Commodification of Audience Attention in the US, 1865-1920”

 

John Furr Fellowships for JWT Research:

Ai Hisano: History, University of Delaware, “A History of Food Color in the United States, 1880s-1970s”

Cristina Sánchez-Blanco: Media Management, University of Navarra (Spain), “Advertising Account Planning in JWT”

Hartman Center Travel Grants:

Francesca Russello Ammon: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “Culture of Clearance: Waging War on the Landscape in Postwar America”

Leslie Anderson: University of California – Merced, “The Politics of Domesticity” (Senior Thesis)

Mary Bridges: International Studies, Yale University, “Global Infrastructure of US Business Activities in the Interwar and World War II Periods”

Jessica Burch: History Department, Vanderbilt University, “Soap and Hope: culture, Capitalism, and Direct Sales in World War II America”

Dr. Andrew Case: Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison, “Dear Friend: Direct Mail Marketing and the Transformation of Buying and Selling in Postwar America”

Kristi Whitfield Johnson: Baton Rouge, LA, “Canning Foods and Selling Modernity: The Canned Food Industry and Consumer Culture, 1898-1945”

Dr. Richard K. Popp: Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, “Direct Marketing, Communication Networks, and the Remaking of consumer Culture, 1960-2000”

 

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture Travel Grant Recipients

Valerie Behrer, English, University of Minnesota, for dissertation research on the connections between girls’ subjectivities, autobiographical practices, and the development of American radical feminism from the late 1960s to the 1970s.

Erin Leigh Durban-Albrecht, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Arizona, for a set of related projects—including a film and her dissertation—that use Kathy Acker’s Kathy Goes to Haiti to explore racialized gender and sexuality, cultural production, and U.S.‐Haiti relations in the 20th and early 21st century.

Dr. Lauren Gutterman, Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School, for a book that will examine the personal experiences and public representation of American wives who desired women, 1945 to 1979.

Monica Miller, English and Women’s & Gender Studies, Louisiana State University, for dissertation research on the use of ugly women as characters that defy the stereotype of the beautiful belle in the work of 20th century Southern women writers.

Michelle Pronovost, Fashion Institute of Technology, for research on the confrontational fashion of riot grrrls in zines from the 1990s.

Dr. Andrea Walton, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, for research supporting an article and book chapter on philanthropist Eleanor Thomas Elliott.

Kelly Weber, History, Rice University, for dissertation research related to the politics of daughterhood in the New South, 1880 to 1920.

Stacy J. Williams, Sociology, University of California, San Diego, for dissertation research on how social movements have affected feminist discourse about cooking, 1874 to 2013.

Dr. Mary Ziegler, St. Louis University, for a book about how abortion providers helped define lay understandings of the constitutional, statutory, and common law concerning abortion in the United States.

 

Eleanore and Harold Jantz Fellowship

The first recipient of the Eleanore and Harold Jantz Fellowship is Chunjie Zhang, Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Davis.  Dr. Zhang is a graduate of Duke (PhD 2010). Her project is “Representations of non-European cultures in the German discourse in the eighteenth century.”

Dr. John Hope Franklin, Honoris Causa

One of the most interesting batch of records I’ve worked with in the ongoing processing of the John Hope Franklin Papers are the Honorary Degrees, a subseries of Franklin’s Honors and Awards. In the course of his life, Franklin collected over 130 honorary degrees from colleges and universities all over the United States. Franklin appeared to cherish these awards, never turning one down unless it conflicted with a pre-existing engagement. By the 1970s and 1980s, Franklin’s weekends in May and June were booked — so booked that he would occasionally receive one degree on a Saturday, and another on a Sunday. Franklin also delivered the commencement addresses at many of these ceremonies, sometimes serving as the school’s first African American commencement speaker.

IMG_0680
Honorary degree recipients John Hope Franklin, Julie Andrews, Edwin Gott, and Logan Wilson with University President Wilson Elkins at the University of Maryland commencement on June 6, 1970.

There is more to this series than a bunch of diplomas (although there are plenty of those, too). The pomp and circumstance occasionally overshadow the tense relationships between historically white university administrations and the growing numbers of African American faculty and students campaigning for civil rights in the United States. For example, before receiving his honorary degree at the University of Maryland (alongside Mary Poppins herself, Julie Andrews), Franklin was contacted by the campus’s Democratic Radical Union of Maryland and informed that the campus was still “effectively segregated” and under “virtual Marshall law.” The group of about 50 faculty urged him “not to help the administration at Maryland legitimize their power by taking part in one of their ceremonies on their terms, but rather to attend and stand with us against the political and racial repression that exists at this university” (telegram, June 3, 1970). Franklin went ahead with the ceremony, much to the frustration of the DRUM. He was the school’s first black honorary degree recipient.

Franklin’s honorary degrees also reveal the wide-sweeping connections he established over the course of his life in scholarship. Many of his early honorary degrees were from historically black colleges, allowing him to further engage with leaders of the civil rights movement. In 1960, Franklin delivered the commencement address at the Morgan State ceremony that honored both him and W.E.B. Du Bois with honorary degrees, shortly before Du Bois moved to Ghana. This was only one of several occasions when the two men interacted with each other. In 1961, Franklin received an honorary degree from Lincoln University at a commencement addressed by Martin Luther King, Jr. He later joined King on the march to Selma.

Franklin's honorary degree from Morgan State College, 1960.
Franklin’s honorary degree from Morgan State College, 1960.

Later degrees attest to the random connections and coincidences of academic life. For example, at the Yale commencement in 1977, Franklin was honored alongside President Gerald Ford and musician B.B. King. He received his 1970 honorary degree from Columbia University with Arthur Burns, an economist and former chairman of the Federal Reserve whose papers are held at Duke. A 1984 ceremony at the University of Connecticut honored him alongside Marian Anderson, celebrated contralto.

Commencement program for Columbia University, June 2, 1970.
Commencement program for Columbia University, June 2, 1970.

I was curious how John Hope Franklin’s 130+ degrees compared to other honorary degree holders — so I did some online searching. Most people come nowhere close to Franklin. Sir David Attenborough, scientist and documentary filmmaker behind the epic Planet Earth series, holds the record in the United Kingdom for the most honorary degrees: 31. Maya Angelou, U.S. Poet Laureate and one of Franklin’s close friends, has also received over 30 honorary degrees. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners come closer to Franklin’s total: the Dalai Lama has received at least 70 honorary degrees, including two last month from the University of Maryland and Maitripa College. Another Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, cannot remember how many honorary degrees he’s received, but reckons they number over 100. But, lest you think we have a record-holder at the Rubenstein, Franklin’s degrees pale in comparison to Daisaku Ikeda, a Buddhist philosopher and educator who has received over 300 honorary degrees and professorships from universities and colleges around the world. One can only imagine what Ikeda’s weekends look like.

Post contributed by Meghan Lyon, Technical Services Archivist.

Digitizing the LCRM Update #10: A Project Milestone and an Iconic Signature

In this month’s Digitizing the Long Civil Rights Movement update, we are happy to announce that initial scanning for all of Duke’s manuscript content in the Content, Context, and Capacity Project is complete. Over 66,000 scans are now either published or are being processed to enable publication as soon as possible. We encourage you to check out the CCC Content Page as a portal for looking at all of Duke’s CCC Collections as well as those digitized by NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC Central. Meanwhile, we are beginning work on digitizing the audio oral histories from North Carolina found in the Behind the Veil Collection, which will be our primary focus during the upcoming third year of the grant.

For our collection highlight this month, we turn to the Charles N. Hunter Papers. Born to enslaved parents in Raleigh in 1851, Hunter would go on to become one of the most prominent African-American educators and advocates in North Carolina. Aside from industrial activism and prolific writings, Hunter served as a teacher and principal at several schools, mostly in the Triangle and its environs. As part of that work, he corresponded with the Tuskegee Institute and its founder, Booker T. Washington.

Letter, Booker T. Washington to Charles N. Hunter, July 7, 1914.  Charles N. Hunter Papers
Letter, Booker T. Washington to Charles N. Hunter, July 7, 1914. Charles N. Hunter Papers, Box 2, Folder 2, Item ID: cnhms02002037. Click to enlarge.

The letter shown here is from Booker T. Washington to Charles N. Hunter. Written in 1914, it concerns a project, led by Hunter, concerned with building rural schools for African-Americans throughout the South. Hunter worked with Washington and the Tuskegee Institute for this project and continued to correspond with the institute after Washington’s death in November 1915. Given Hunter’s work with Washington, it is appropriate that the last school at which he served as a principal was Booker T. Washington School in Johnston County.

The Charles N. Hunter Papers, and other CCC Collections, will be published in the coming months.

For more information on the CCC Project, please visit our website or like us on Facebook.

The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. For more about Rubenstein Library materials being digitized through the CCC Project, check out previous progress updates posted here at The Devil’s Tale!

Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Project Graduate Assistant.

Family “Letter” Donated to the Franklin Research Center

 

Braun Family
Marley and Jason Braun donate Slave Bill of Sale to the Rubenstein Library

Marley Braun recently contacted the Rubenstein Library because she wanted to find a proper home for a very peculiar “letter” that belonged to her great-grandmother, Mrs. Edna Balderston. Perhaps Mrs. Balderston was shocked when she opened the “letter” envelope to find that it actually contained two bills of sale for 3 slaves in Baltimore dated October 11, 1805. The slaves listed in the bills were named Elizabeth, age 20, Harriet (her daughter), 6 months, and Delilah, age 14, for a total of $493.

Bill of Sale, October 11, 1805
Bill of Sale, October 11, 1805

The slave bills stayed in the family for a few generations behind glass until Marley, a former 10-year Duke employee, and her husband Andy, ’92 Duke alum, decided the bill deserved a place where it could not only be cared for but shared with people interested in its history. Marley and her son Jason came to the Rubenstein this past week to donate the bill of sale and view other bills of sale currently held by the Rubenstein in the African American Miscellany Collection. The bills within this collection span from 1757-1863 and this new addition will further help document the experience of African Americans during the era of slavery; thanks to the Braun family, Marley, Andy, Jason, and Hayley for this fascinating addition to our collections.

 

Bill of Sale, Delilah, age 14
Bill of Sale, Delilah, age 14

 

Bill of Sale, Delilah, age 14
Bill of Sale, Delilah, age 14

 

Post contributed by John Gartrell, John Hope Franklin Research Center Director.

Come Visit! We’re Now Taking Applications for Travel Grants

Researchers! The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for our 2013-2014 travel grants.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History will award up to $1,000 per recipient to fund travel and other expenses related to visiting the Rubenstein Library.

The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists who live more than 100 miles from Durham, NC and whose research projects would benefit from access to collections held by one of the centers.

More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website. Applications must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than 5:00 PM EST on March 29, 2013. Recipients will be announced in April 2013.

NC Travel Billboard, "Only a Day's Drive," undated. From the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives.
NC Travel Billboard, “Only a Day’s Drive,” undated. From the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives.

Some of last year’s recipients include:

At the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture:

  • Bridget Collins, a graduate student in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used prescriptive literature held by the Bingham Center as part of her research for her dissertation, “From the Cradle to the Grave: Infectious Disease in the Twentieth Century American Home.”
  • Laura Foxworth, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina, for research for her dissertation, “The Spiritual is Political: How the Southern Baptist Convention Debated Feminism and Found the New Right.” You can read more about her visit here.
  • Jessica Lancia, a graduate student at the University of Florida, conducted research for her dissertation, “Borderless Feminisms: A Transnational History of the U.S. Women’s Movement, 1967-1985.” You can read more about her visit in the Fall 2012 issue of the Bingham Center newsletter.

At the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture:

  • Brooke N. Newman, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, for a study on gender, race, and power in the eighteenth century British Caribbean.
  • Kathryn Banks, Assistant Professor in the History and Political Science Department at Andrews University, for an examination of African-American employment in the Southern textile industry from 1895 to 1945.
  • Max L. Grivno, Associate Professor from the Department of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, for an analysis of slavery in Mississippi, 1690-1865.

At the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History:

  • Anne Schmidt of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, for research for her book about the meaning and importance of emotions in advertising throughout the twentieth century in Germany and ways emotions were a constitutive element of capitalist practices of production and consumption.
  • Marcia Chatelain, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University, conducted research on the ways in which segregation shaped African-American food culture in the South for her book, A Taste of Freedom: African-American Dining Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
  • Rochelle Pereira-Alvares, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Guelph, Canada, exploring how the marketing and advertising initiatives of Hiram Walker and Seagram influenced the way in which consumers purchased and imbibed spirits, and the impact consumers’ changing tastes had on the companies’ marketing and product development decisions, 1950-1990.
  • Bryce C. Lowery, a graduate student in Public Policy at the University of Southern California, for research for his dissertation, “The Consumable Landscapes of Los Angeles: How the Spatial Ecology of Outdoor Advertising Influences the Quality of Life.”

Post contributed by Stephanie Barnwell, Bingham Center intern.

John Hope Franklin’s Grownup School List

We are in the middle of processing the John Hope Franklin Papers, and it has been inspiring to see Franklin’s wide range of intellectual interests and community engagements. He was a very busy man! One recent discovery, mixed in with folded programs and family correspondence, is Franklin’s “Grownup School List,” an all-encompassing list he created of must-reads in African American history. Always a humble scholar, he omitted his own monumental works. We’ve reproduced the Grownup School List here, along with Franklin’s annotations. You can find all of these books, along with Franklin’s own extensive scholarship, online or in the Duke Libraries.

PicMonkey Collage

Post contributed by Meghan Lyon, Technical Services Archivist.  This is the second in a series of posts on interesting documents in our collections to celebrate Black History Month.

“Let Their Names Go Down in the World”

While researching a reference request among the William Mahone Papers, an interesting piece of ephemera was discovered that gives us a peek at the opinions of one African American politician regarding the lingering shadows of the Confederacy almost 15 years after the Civil War ended. On December 20, 1879, a letter was sent to Mahone, who was the recently elected US Senator for the state of Virginia.

Letter in William Mahone Papers 1853-1895, Box 17, folder 1879, Dec. 16-20.
Letter in William Mahone Papers 1853-1895, Box 17, folder 1879, Dec. 16-20.
Portion of clipping attached to above letter, in William Mahone Papers.
Portion of clipping attached to above letter, in William Mahone Papers.

The author of the letter, who decided not to sign their name, seemed to take issue with Mahone and the idea that he had turned his back on the Confederacy. He/she noted, “…you who once so nobly lead the Virginia troops to battle could now turn against them is a shame…The wrath of God is upon you.” What could have stirred up such vitriol from the sender of this brief but contemptuous letter? The answer lies in the article that was attached to the letter.

The clipping, though undated, was likely printed in the same year. The bold call of State Senator Cephas Davis, himself a former slave, for a resolution “prohibiting the use of the words one-legged, two-legged or four-legged Confederate soldier,” was undoubtedly newsworthy. Davis would only serve one year in the VA State Senate, but it is interesting that he not only saw himself a victor in the Civil War, but also an agent to ensure the Confederacy would not be remembered.

Post contributed by John Gartrell, Director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture.  This is the first in a series of posts on interesting documents in our collections to celebrate Black History Month. 

Digitizing the LCRM: Update #5, Getting Out the Vote

With election fever infecting a large part of the country, it is only appropriate that this month’s featured documents from Duke’s CCC Project digitized collections are newspaper advertisements about voter turnout from the Rencher Nicholas Harris Papers.  What makes these documents particularly interesting—and disturbing—is the demographic group that they targeted:  white voters frightened about the perceived usurpation of power by an African-American voting bloc.

Political Advertisement, Undetermined Newspaper, [May 1949?]:
Rencher Nicholas Harris Papers, Box 10, Folder 2.
Political Advertisements, Undetermined Newspaper, [May 1949?]:
Rencher Nicholas Harris Papers, Box 10, Folder 2.
These advertisements likely appeared in one of Durham’s newspapers in the days before the local elections of May 1949.  I determined the probable date by looking at the other materials in the Harris Papers located near these clippings.  Two possible dates emerged—May 1949 and November 1956.  While both dates are plausible, the fact that the advertisements speak specifically to Durham’s leadership rather than a presidential or gubernatorial election makes 1949 more likely.  In addition, the fact that Election Day was a Saturday is another strike against 1956.  We encourage readers of this blog to decipher the exact date of these advertisements as well as their original newspaper(s) and the persons behind the generically-named “Public Spirited Citizens of the Community.”

Beyond determining the provenance of these advertisements, we anticipate that most readers will find these advertisements most interesting for their racial arguments.  The fears that undergirded these advertisements relied on the two-pronged belief that African-American voters would turn out in large numbers and that all of those voters would cast their ballots monolithically.  While the language in the advertisements is clearly prejudiced, its reliance upon believing that African-American leaders were successfully organizing get-out-the-vote efforts is an oddly-backhanded compliment to Harris and his political allies.  The language in these advertisements is ripe for further analysis, so we encourage our readers to dive in and become immersed in the racial and political history of Rencher Nicholas Harris’s time on the Durham City Council.

The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. For more about Rubenstein Library materials being digitized through the CCC Project, check out previous progress updates posted here at The Devil’s Tale

Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Graduate Assistant.

Celebrating the John Hope Franklin Papers

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss edit from Slavery to Freedom
John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss edit a new edition of From Slavery to Freedom in 1986.

We are pleased to announce a major addition to the John Hope Franklin Papers.  This gift includes over 300 boxes of papers and other materials belonging to late historian and Duke professor John Hope Franklin.

Franklin is widely credited with transforming the study of American history through his scholarship, while helping to transform American society through his activism. He is best known for his ground-breaking history From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (1947) and for his leadership on President Clinton’s 1997 National Advisory Board on Race.

Franklin donated a small collection of his personal papers to Duke in 2003. This large addition, donated by Franklin’s son and daughter-in-law John Whittington Franklin and Karen Roberts Franklin, completes the archive of one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished public scholars.

After receiving a doctorate from Harvard in 1941, John Hope Franklin taught at St. Augustine’s University, North Carolina Central University, Howard University, Brooklyn College, University of Chicago, and Duke University—breaking many racial barriers along the way. Deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, he worked with Thurgood Marshall on the Brown v. Board of Education case and joined protestors in the march led by Martin Luther King, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He was the recipient of more than 100 honorary degrees, and President Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1995. He died in Durham, North Carolina, in 2009.

The Franklin Papers include a selection of photographs of John Hope Franklin and his family.

The donation of papers includes diaries, correspondence, manuscripts of writings and speeches, awards and honors, extensive research files, photographs, and video recordings. The collection also includes materials that trace the Franklin family’s personal history, including their long involvement with the civil rights struggle in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Two letters from Thurgood Marshall and Terry Sanford from the John Hope Franklin Papers.

The papers will be held in the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke.  The papers will open for research after conservation review and archival processing are complete. The opening will be announced on the Rubenstein Library’s website.

“John Hope Franklin always wanted his papers to have an academic home where they would get into the hands of students and scholars quickly,” noted John W. Franklin.  “He wanted to make sure that they would be used.  We found such a home for his papers in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the Duke Libraries with a dedicated staff to care for the collection.”

The Duke University Libraries will celebrate the John Hope Franklin papers with a reception on September 14, 2012, at 5:30 p.m. in the Gothic Reading Room of the Rubenstein Library. The event is free and open to the public.