John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 – March 25, 2009) was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Born in Oklahoma, Franklin attended Fisk University and then Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1941. He was a professor at Howard University, and in 1956 was named to head the history department at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. Recruited to the University of Chicago in 1964, he eventually led the history department and was appointed to a named chair. He then moved to Duke University in 1983, as an appointee to a named chair in history. Early life and education Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915 to attorney Buck (Charles) Colbert Franklin and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin. He was named after John Hope, a prominent educator who was the first African-American president of Atlanta University. Franklin's father Buck Colbert Franklin was a civil rights lawyer, aka "Amazing Buck Franklin." He was of African-American and Choctaw ancestry and born in the Chickasaw Nation in western Indian Territory (formerly Pickens County). He was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. David was a former slave, who became a Chickasaw Freedman when emancipated after the American Civil War. Milley was born free before the war and was of one-fourth Choctaw and three-fourths African-American ancestry. Buck Franklin became a lawyer. Buck Franklin is best known for defending African-American survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, in which whites had attacked many blacks and buildings, and burned and destroyed the Greenwood District. This was known at the time as the "Black Wall Street", and was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a center of black commerce and culture. In 2015 Buck Franklin's previously unknown written eyewitness account of the 1921 Greenwood attack, a 10-page typewritten manuscript, was discovered and subsequently obtained by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Franklin and his colleagues also became experts at oil law, representing "blacks and Native Americans in Oklahoma against