The Charmed Lives of Aurelia Whittington Franklin and John Hope Franklin

A year after the death of John Hope Franklin, a reflection on the ‘Going Home’ Ceremony of the Historian and his wife Aurelia Whittington Franklin.

The Charmed Lives of Aurelia Whittington Franklin and John Hope Franklin

By Mark Anthony Neal

When John Hope Franklin died on March 25, 2009, there were many tributes to his activism and his scholarship. On June 11, 2009 Franklin’s family and friends including some of the Black Social and Intellectual elite and former United State President Bill Clinton, gathered at Duke University’s Chapel for going-home ceremony fitting for a man that long-time friend Vernon Jordan called, quoting former US Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, “one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century.”

According to Franklin’s son, John Wittington Franklin, the day of the celebration was chosen because it marked what would have been the 69th a wedding anniversary of his mother and father. His mother, Aurelia Whittington Franklin died in 1999 and the celebration was as much a celebration of her life as it was a celebration of their life together. As Franklin’s son put it, they were a “powerful team.” Franklin remarked many times in his life, his wife, a librarian by training, was often by his side helping him navigate the library stacks. A charter member of the Triangle Park Chapter of The Links, Inc, Aurelia Franklin’s decades of service to Black communities across the globe, put a fine point on the Franklins’ shared service and quiet activism.

Franklin is, of course, most well known as one of the leading American historians of the 20th century and many of his peers and students were on hand to attest to the power of his intellect including Harvard Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who is the co-author of the recently published 9th edition of Franklin’s classic From Slavery to Freedom, and Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering Lewis who noted that Franklin possessed “perfect historiographic pitch.” Thavolia Glymph, a noted historian in Duke University’s African and African-American Studies Department reflected that Franklin possessed a “moral poise that was as exquisite as his intellectual armor.”

It is on such personal notes, that many of the speakers captured the very reason why so many gathered to celebrate the lives of John Hope and Aurelia Whittington Franklin. Virtually all of the speakers remarked on the couple’s love of entertaining and Franklin’s particular affection for cooking, Louisiana style gumbo being among his favorites. Franklin’s niece, Cynthia Gibbs Wilson, recalled “uncle John’s” unwillingness to divulge the secret ingredient in his corn bread dressing, though he had recently admitted to her that there was no secret ingredient, but that he believed that his dressing simply never tasted as good as his own mother’s.

Noted playwright and longtime Franklin family friend Emily Mann recalled growing up with John Wittington Franklin and being privy to weekly intellectual discussion with Dr. Franklin, her father, the historian Dr. Arthur Mann, her mother and Aurelia Franklin. It was those discussions that informed her later work, including her Tony Award nominated adaptation of The Delaney Sisters’ memoir Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years. Mann’s recollections got one the biggest responses from the standing-room-only audience when she recounted someone asking Franklin where the late United States Senator Jesse Helms was from, and Franklin, without missing a beat, simply said “from hell.” Mann’s story came in the backdrop the North Carolina General Assembly’s resolution last year resolution to honor Helms, a very public opponent of racial integration.

Franklin himself, often joked about many of the sleights directed at him and his family. As a survivor of the Tulsa Race riots, that was of course his right, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t take such sleights to heart. Several speakers recalled the story of the Duke University Professor, who in the 1940s when Franklin was based at HBCU North Carolina Central University, couldn’t understand why Franklin would support integration. According to the Duke professor’s logic, integration would translate into the closing of historically black schools, thus Franklin would be out of a job. Franklin’s response was typical, as he joked that he would simply come after said Professor’s job at Duke. It was that spirit that former President Bill Clinton described Dr. Franklin as a “a genius in being a passionate rationalist, an angry happy man, a happy angry man.” Clinton awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 and later tapped him to head a Presidential initiative on Race in 1997. Though Clinton admitted that the initiative’s impact wasn’t fully realized he took some credit for the multiracial landscape that produced President Barack Obama’s victory.

Clinton comments, capped by a festive morning that featured performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (from the Franklins’ alma mater) and two original compositions from noted black composer and conductor T.J. Anderson, were preceded by his close friend Vernon Jordan. Clinton jokingly suggested that Jordan did everything, “but pass the plate,” during his stirring tribute to Franklin. Much like Franklin, Jordan has spent a career making his mark outside of the public eye and he alluded to Franklin’s influence in that regard. Noting that though he never had a formal classroom experience with Dr. Franklin, the late historian often counseled him over meals, phone calls and one time, over friend chicken at Paschal’s in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. According to Jordan, Franklin was “a teacher who taught us to believe in the shield of justice and the sword of truth.”