By Lee A. Daniels

John and Aurelia Franklin

The lives of John Hope Franklin, long acclaimed as one of America’s greatest historians, and his wife and most important supporter, Aurelia, were celebrated June 11 in a ceremony at Duke University that seemed to match their character: elegant but unpretentious, spare of words but full of substantive implication, buoyed by humanizing humor, and simultaneously majestic and intimate.

John Hope Franklin died March 25. Aurelia Whittington Franklin died in 1999, when they had been married 59 years.

Held in the University’s soaring Gothic chapel, the tribute could have become a kind of formalistic state funeral. After all, the list of speakers for the occasion included one former United States President, Bill Clinton; one Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David Levering Lewis; and one of the nation’s leading public figures, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. Furthermore, in the large throng that filled the spacious cathedral and a nearby university auditorium were numerous prominent scholars and government officials.

Yet, its poignant formality was softened by the hymns sung with crystalline understated emotion by the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers (the Franklins had met as first-year Fisk students in 1931), and by the familial recollections of both Franklins by relatives and close friends. The ceremony had the feel of one of those small, informal dinner parties the Franklins were well-known for – the kind where conversation about current events and scholarly projects mixed easily with reminiscences about family and recipe suggestions for this or that dish.

Indeed, in an interview with TheDefendersOnline.com the day before the ceremony, John Whittington Franklin stressed that the event was not a “memorial service” but a celebration of his parents’ lives. And the choice of the day was deliberate: June 11 was their 69th wedding anniversary.

John Whittington Franklin, son of John Hope Franklin and Aurelia Whittington Franklin

“Dad didn’t want a funeral. He didn’t want a service,” John Whittington Franklin, a historian who is Director of Partnerships and International Programs at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,” said. “And he missed my mother terribly; so he said, ‘honor us both.’”

So those in attendance did, as several of the speakers, longtime friends and Franklin family members celebrated the couple’s generosity of spirit and civic-mindedness. That revealed itself, they said, not only in kindnesses to those close to them, but also in a determined and longtime involvement in the civic life of Durham, a city they had considered their home since moving there in the early 1940s. As the younger Franklin pointed out in his remarks the next day, drawing laughter from the audience, after first moving to Durham, his father and mother subscribed to the Carolina Times all the rest of their lives, even when John Hope Franklin’s teaching stints and fellowships took them elsewhere.

But, of course, those who spoke at the celebration also left no doubt that the reason for John Hope Franklin’s justified worldwide fame and many honors was, as Vernon Jordan put it, “his towering intellect, his fierce commitment to vigorous scholarship, his acute perception, his profound patriotism and his hope that one day America would accept in full the true meaning” of the commitment to equality in the Declaration of Independence.

Those qualities animated Franklin’s direct involvement in the black freedom struggle of the twentieth century – from his aiding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s preparation of the landmark Brown desegregation case, to his later serving on the LDF board, to his chairing in the 1990s of President Clinton’s controversial commission charged with exploring racial issues in America.

President Clinton, concluding the early afternoon ceremony, declared that Franklin was “tough in the trenches of a political struggle. He was a genius in being a passionate rationalist,” the former President said, as many in the audience laughed in appreciation, “an angry happy man and a happy angry man.”

After the formal celebration ended and speakers and audience members lingered in the cathedral and on the greensward of the beautiful Duke campus, David Levering Lewis said to a friend that the event had been “tone perfect. It was just that.”

Which fit with an anecdote John Whittington Franklin had told about his father during our interview the day before.

The son said that to the end of his life, his father, an accomplished cook, had tried to duplicate the exquisite taste of the cornbread his mother, Mollie Parker Franklin, made for him as a child and adolescent. By his own admission, he never could, the younger Franklin said. “But he never stopped. He was always seeking perfection.”

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communication for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.