By John Payton

John Hope Franklin’s service to scholarship, to the black freedom struggle and the expansion of opportunity in the United States, and to America as a whole is profound, perhaps even incalculable.

Franklin was an historian of the first rank whose books on Southern history and the history of African Americans brought to light facts and perspectives that help fill in many of the missing spaces in the conventional telling of American history. And he was a patriot of the first rank as well, who refused to believe that the American nation was condemned to endlessly recycle the sins of its past.

Beginning in the late 1940s, John Hope Franklin brought both those exquisite qualities to bear on the work of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helping LDF attorneys understand the intellectual ramifications of racism and discrimination, and testifying as an “expert witness” for LDF in case after case including, of course, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

In his foreword to the authoritative history of LDF, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Bank of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution, by Jack Greenberg, Franklin offers a succinct, compelling description of that small, dedicated corps that Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had gathered from the 1930s to the 1960s. With typical self-effacement, he downplays his own importance within that group. But John Hope Franklin’s contribution to this institution and to the cause of freedom in America cannot be obscured. It will be celebrated as long as freedom itself exists.

John Payton is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.