Dr. John Hope Franklin passed in the morning of March 25, 2009. The word seem to ring out instantly that he had made his transition. We have John W., Karen and the entire Franklin family in our prayers.

In this picture I am together with Brother John, the Dean of Historians of the African American experience, in New Orleans some 20 years ago. We were attending the Southern Historical Association’s annual meeting. I was in graduate school and just beginning to see myself as a member of the historical “profession.” It was great to meet the grand master of the game. A few years later when I was in my first full-time teaching appointment as Benjamin Banneker Honors Instructor of History at Prairie View A&M University I co-authored a grant with Dr. Jewel Prestage to bring him to Texas to speak to our students. The grant was funded and the next year we brought him to campus. He gave a brilliant speech, but in the Q&A afterwards one of the students (who had studied with me and my colleague Dr. Imari Obadele) asked him about the historical argument for black reparations. He was negative and dismissive of the matter in that way he can do so sternly. A decade later, however, I saw Dr. Franklin for the last time in Tulsa, OK, not long after his last book Mirror to America had come out. By that time he was a champion for the fight for reparations for living descendants of the Tulsa (Black Wall Street) Holocaust of 1921 that wiped out his own father’s law practice and claimed so many other lives and property. It showed me his capacity to revise his thinking and develop his political horizons. Nuff Rispek Dr. Franklin — may your spirit continue to inspire us all and future generations in the struggle “from slavery to freedom.”