Further Tributes to John Hope Franklin

I will always think of [John Hope Franklin] as the historian of the South who grasped the complexity of southern public life as shaped by the horror of personal slavery. Franklin was the first great American historian to reckon the price owed in violence, autocracy, and militarism. He has my thanks for daring to write out loud what was for decades unspeakable. From Slavery to Freedom represents a remarkable, original contribution to American history. But everything that John Hope Franklin has written, from the 1940s right up to this very moment, addresses the larger, deeper troths about American democracy -- as distorted by the least equitable of human power relations and as vindicated by the faith in that democracy's promise in the hearts of the most subaltern. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of John Hope Franklin's masterpiece From Slavery to Freedom. In celebration of this remarkable scholarship, for the last issue of JBHE we asked some of America's leading historians of the Civil War and of the American South to comment on the importance of From Slavery to Freedom and on the career of John Hope Franklin. We received replies from a host of major historians. After we went to press, several other historians responded. We include their responses below.