John Hope Franklin's contributions remembered at The Root

Who was the first (and only) historian to have an orchid named for him?

It certainly wasn’t his only “first,” but it was his most unusual. Revered historian John Hope Franklin, the author of the seminal work From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, left his mark on, of all things, orchid culture. He and his wife, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, collected and cultivated orchids in their own home greenhouses throughout their 58-year marriage. In 1976 a hybrid orchid was named in his honor, Phalaenopsis John Hope Franklin. In 1999, upon his wife’s passing, a South Carolina greenhouse named one for her as well: Phalaenopsis Aurelia Franklin.

John Hope Franklin would have been 100 years old this year. Born in the all-black town of Rentiesville, Okla., on Jan. 2 in the year of Booker T. Washington’s death, 1915—a half-century after the end of the Civil War—Franklin lived to see and support the candidacy and election of our nation’s first black president. Ironically, much of the research for From Slavery to Freedom (1947), now in its ninth edition (2010) and rewritten by Harvard’s Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, was conducted in segregated libraries where Franklin was prohibited from using the bathroom.

During his career he would author more than 20 books. Franklin fell in love with the study of history at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. After graduating magna cum laude from Fisk in 1935, he was admitted to Harvard University’s graduate history program, the first African American from a historically black institution to enter directly. Although Franklin was a Ph.D. and a published author by 1943, institutional racism remained fierce, and the U.S. War Department refused to hire him as a historian, selecting less-qualified white applicants instead....