Cryer, Thomas Owen; (2025) “Walking the Tightrope”: John Hope Franklin and the Dilemmas of African American History in Action. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis offers the first intellectual biography of the seminal African American historian and activist John Hope Franklin (1915–2009). Across a storied career, Franklin became the pre-eminent late-twentieth-century African American historian, writing the best-selling Black history textbook From Slavery to Freedom (1947) and engaging in historical activism, including providing expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This thesis works chronologically through Franklin’s life to investigate two primary themes: First, I demonstrate how Black intellectuals drove forward the civil rights struggle while simultaneously fighting to enter segregated universities and reshape their disciplines despite censorship, FBI surveillance, and segregated conferences, archives, and libraries. I first examine how Franklin confronted the everyday violences of Jim Crow — from sneaking into Southern archives on VE day to enduring countless death threats when his family first moved to “free” Brooklyn, New York. I then assess how Franklin strategically utilised his reputation as a “non-race-conscious” Black thinker to smuggle critical messages into his public-facing scholarship, particularly when travelling internationally. I argue that Franklin’s public intellectual practice thus represented a “dissident Americanism” that highlighted the hypocrisies of the American project in order to demonstrate African Americans’ centrality within the American polity. Franklin’s history was to be a “sobering force in American life.” Certainly, this politics simultaneously catalysed and contained Franklin’s theorisations of race, ensuring that his scholarship chiefly asserted African Americans’ place within the American nation rather than envisioning alternative political structures or challenging American capitalist primacy in a Cold War world. Yet it also represented a strategic manoeuvre, employing a diplomatic personal style and liberal rhetorics in service, not in spite of dissident intent. Second, this thesis evidences how the racialisation of knowledge and expertise profoundly shaped twentieth-century U.S. higher education. This project seeks to capture the profound duality of history’s role in American public life: as both a mechanism of silencing and dehumanisation and a vehicle through which African Americans have continually confronted their nation’s betrayals. I highlight how public understandings of objectivity and expertise were relentlessly racialised, intertwined with notions of white detachment and neutrality. Franklin’s life offers a unique perspective on the broader dilemmas of living, speaking, and writing as a Black intellectual. I historicise the more insidious, less explicit forces that impeded, suppressed, and silenced Black scholarship once prominent figures including Franklin broke into previously segregated educational spaces and reached mass interracial and international public audiences. My research thus conceptualises activist intellectualism as a social and cultural practice, emphasising how ideas are shaped by lived experiences, institutional backgrounds, and everyday acts of negotiation and contestation, particularly on campus. I thus join a rich vein of recent scholarship in demonstrating how American educational spaces have long served as sites of contestation, resistance, and transformation, revealing how the rhythms, routines, and material structures of campus life shaped the formation and reception of Franklin’s world-changing ideas.

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