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John Hope Franklin held a very special place in the history of the Southern Historical Association.
He became a member in 1941, seven years into the organization’s existence, while he was a graduate student at Harvard. Over the years, he
served in a variety of capacities, as program participant and committee member, despite the fact that throughout the Jim Crow
era (and as late as 1963 in Asheville), he was often not allowed to stay in the hotels where the Southern met, or to attend the dinners in those
hotels, which were regular parts of the meetings in the early years. In 1971, Franklin served as president of the SHA, the first African
American to so lead any of the major historical associations, though he would go on to become one of very few scholars to serve as president
of the OAH (1975) and the AHA (1979) as well as the SHA. His presidential address before the Southern, made in Houston in November 1971, was entitled
“The Great Confrontation: The South and the Problem of Change.”
Franklin served on the 1955 Program Committee, but chose not to attend the meeting in Memphis that year because of the Peabody Hotel’s
segregated policy, and their refusal, almost up to the time of the meeting, to amend it. In 2004, he was part of a special session held at
the Peabody (where he was an honored guest in their penthouse suite) recalling that momentous 1955 meeting and the racial issues
surrounding it. That opening session was followed by an early celebration of his 90th birthday (which followed in January) and a luncheon
given in his honor by the city of Memphis. In his comments at that 2004 session, Franklin described
the circumstances surrounding his first appearance on an SHA program, in 1949, and those surrounding the 1955 controversy.
In 2005, the Association honored Franklin by naming a new lifetime achievement award for him, the recipient of which should exemplify the qualities
of the award’s namesake – a distinguished scholar of southern history who also “exhibited outstanding qualities of citizenship through which
the knowledge and understanding of southern history were put to the service of the general public.” The first John Hope Franklin Lifetime
Achievement Award was presented to Leon Litwack in 2007 in Atlanta, where John Hope made his last official appearance at an SHA meeting,
and noted that he was pleased to present the award to a former teaching assistant of his.
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