Quotations by John Hope Franklin

On being an historian and an activist
"The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation. This means that at the present time there is an urgent need to re-examine our past in terms of our present outlook."
African-American Biography, Vol. 2

"One might argue the historian is the conscience of the nation, if honesty and consistency are factors that nurture the conscience."
Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988

"I think knowing one's history leads one to act in a more enlightened fashion. I can not imagine how knowing one's history would not urge one to be an activist."
Emerge
March 1994

"I want to be out there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better world, a better place to live."
Associated Press
October 2005

On the history of African Americans
"In discussing the history of a people one must distinguish between what has actually happened and what those who have written the history have said has happened. So far as the actual history of the American Negro is concerned, there is nothing particularly new about it. It is an exciting story, a remarkable story. It is the story of slavery and freedom, humanity and inhumanity, democracy and its denial. It is tragedy and triumph, suffering and compassion, sadness and joy."
"The New Negro History," Crisis
February 1977

On scholarship
"The very essence of the life of the mind is the freedom to inquire, to examine, and to criticize. But that freedom has the same restraints abroad that it has at home: to state one's position, if impelled by personal conviction, with clarity, reason, and sobriety, always mindful of the point that the scholar recognizes and tolerates different views that others may hold and that his view is independent, not official."
The American Scholar
1968

"I have never regretted the decision to remain a student and a teacher of history. ...I have been a student and advocate of the view that the exchange of ideas is more healthy and constructive than the exchange of bullets."
Charles Homer Haskins lecture
April 14, 1988

"You can't have a high standard of scholarship without having a high standard of integrity, because the essence of scholarship is truth."
Winston-Salem Journal
Aug. 6, 1989

On Jim Crow
"The merit is not in going back or holding back and becoming and remaining segregated. The merit is in making desegregation work. Making desegregation work. That's where the merit is. We didn't work to do it. We haven't worked to do it—not hard enough. We haven't pressed our government. We haven't pressed our communities. We haven't pressed our educational systems to stand up and do what they're supposed to do. We can't say we're going to run back to our segregated institutions and think that that's going to get us anywhere. I don't think so. I have not lived all these years to want to go back. I want to go forward. I want to improve what we've got. I want to make over what we've got, if necessary. But I don't want to go back to the ghetto. I don't want to go back to segregation. I don't want to go back to Jim Crow."
Stetson Law Review
April 20, 2005

On Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
"Using one's skills to influence public policy seemed to be a satisfactory middle ground between an ivory tower posture of isolation and disengagement and a posture of passionate advocacy that too often deserted the canons of scholarship."
Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988

On building a Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
"I'm just waiting to see if it will happen. I've been disillusioned so many times before. It's 2006, and there's nothing in the nation's capital to show what happened to African-Americans. Nothing."
USA Today
January 2006

On the 'color line'
"The specter of color is apparent even when it goes unmentioned, and it is all too often the unseen force that influences public policy as well as private relationships. There is nothing more remarkable than the ingenuity that the various demarcations of the color line reflect. If only the same creative energy could be used to eradicate the color line; then its days would indeed be numbered."
The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century
1994

On learning abroad
"When we learn that this country and the western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth or of skills and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all."
Charles Homer Haskins lecture
April 14, 1988

On reparations
"People are running around apologizing for slavery. What about that awful period since slavery—Reconstruction, Jim Crow and all the rest? And what about the enormous wealth that was built up by black labor? If I was sitting on a billion dollars that someone had made when I sat on them, I probably would not be slow to apologize, if that's all it takes. I think that's little to pay for the gazillions that black people built up—the wealth of this country—with their labor, and now you're going to say I'm sorry I beat the hell out of you for all these years? That's not enough."
The Independent
April 18, 2007

Franklin became chair of the history department at Brooklyn College in 1956, but faced overt racial discrimination when he attempted to purchase a home.