UChicago Alumni Invited to the 2021 John Hope Franklin Lectures

Please join University faculty, students, alumni, and staff for this year’s John Hope Franklin Lectures. Organized by the Department of History, the series honors the legacy of John Hope Franklin (1915–2009), a monumental scholar of US history, a pioneer in the field of African-American history, and a member of the University of Chicago faculty from 1964-82.

Professor Franklin authored many groundbreaking books, including From Slavery to Freedom (1947), which became the longest continuously published survey text used in American history courses. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall asked Professor Franklin to serve as a legal historian focusing on the Reconstruction period in preparation for the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case on segregation. He was also a civil rights advocate and participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Professor Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 1997, he was appointed to lead the Advisory Board to President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.

During this year’s event, noted historian and legal scholar Elizabeth K. Hinton, Yale University, and Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan – each a leading scholar of slavery and its afterlives  – will lecture on their research.

Wednesday, October 27 | 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. CT
The Fire This Time: Police Violence and Urban Uprisings from the 1960s to George Floyd
Elizabeth K. Hinton

Thursday, October 28 | 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. Central
The Burdens of History: Policing, Prisons, and the Dizzying Power of the Past on the Present
Heather Ann Thompson

Registration is available here. Please note that in-person capacity is limited, and registering currently confirms attendance by Zoom. If space permits, you will receive further details on in-person availability. If you are interested in attending the Friday discussion panel in addition to both lectures, please note that on the registration form.

The inaugural John Hope Franklin Lectures, given in 2019 by Jennifer Morgan, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, are available here.

The University of Chicago has also launched an endowment campaign to support this annual John Hope Franklin Lecture Series.