In September 1963 the magazine Ebony published the longest edition in its history, a 246-page issue celebrating that year’s centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Reflecting on the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1 January 1863 executive order freeing enslaved persons within the Confederate states, a virtual who’s who of Black intellectuals and activists utilized the issue – eight months in the making – to link nineteenth-century freedom struggles to those ongoing in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Amid the racially conservative and white-dominated Civil War Centennial of 1957 to 1965, commemorating Emancipation offered a profound opportunity to mobilize Black countermemory towards contemporary empowerment and liberation.Footnote 1
Nevertheless, an incumbent Kennedy administration increasingly aware of African Americans’ political power worked systematically to co-opt commemorations, blunting Emancipation’s radical edge by situating it within a broader narrative, typical of postwar liberalism, that celebrated the gradual evolution of a nonracial, inclusive sense of de jure American citizenship. It simultaneously promoted and exploited a growing Black history movement to prematurely celebrate recent racial progress and ignore the continued endurance of white supremacy.Footnote 2 Defending America’s politico-economic structures amid increasingly apparent inequalities, the administration’s commemoration thus disavowed demands for a more radical and sustained assault on racial injustice.
This article highlights the experiences of one historian prominent in Ebony’s special issue – John Hope Franklin, the only history professor Ebony lauded as one of “America’s 100 Most Influential Negroes.”Footnote 3 Perhaps the pre-eminent African American historian of this era, Franklin spent 1962–63 working as the first Black Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge. Ebony accordingly profiled Franklin across three pages that were sumptuously illustrated by photographs of afternoon teas with college masters amid elaborate Elizabethan portraiture. Franklin, however, was “coldly logical” about such firsts.Footnote 4 In an era when the federal government increasingly utilized prominent Black public figures as “participant-symbols” to demonstrate to global audiences the possibility of racial equality, Franklin was keenly aware that his prominence was both exploitable and exculpatory.Footnote 5
Perhaps the starkestt example of such exploitation involved Franklin’s struggles to write a pamphlet for the US Commission on Civil Rights’s centennial commemorations detailing the history of civil rights from 1863 to 1963, later entitled Freedom to the Free. Despite extensively pre-vetting Franklin, the commission – acting largely unbeknownst to Franklin and upon the advice of the white historians he hired as his consultants – recruited a second team of historians that drastically revised Franklin’s drafts. The commission chiefly feared that Franklin’s forensic detailing of the betrayals and backward steps of America’s racial histories, particularly following Reconstruction, would not inspire contemporary national unity. Even Franklin’s ever-diplomatic autobiography recalled,
Of the many instances in which it appeared that I was used by the United States government, this is the clearest, most unequivocal example … there can be no question that the United States, through the Commission on Civil Rights, attempted to make blatant and crude use of me in its effort to present a false picture of “negro progress” for the centennial.Footnote 6
While Robert Cook has briefly summarized the story of Freedom to the Free and examined how the white historians Allan Nevins and Bruce Catton engaged with the centennial, no scholars have extensively examined Franklin’s own centennial interventions.Footnote 7 By instead centring Franklin’s centennial experiences through his personal papers, this article speaks to broader questions concerning how mid-twentieth-century Black public intellectuals struggled and strategized to bring their scholarship to “mainstream,” predominantly white, public audiences, particularly through such prominent government-sponsored channels. Combining rapidly expanding literatures on Black intellectual history and mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism (much of this written since Cook’s 2007 analysis), this article examines two critical and still-ongoing dynamics: the simultaneous promotion and censoring of Black public voices by the federal government, and liberalism’s continued failure to reckon with the historical and contemporary impacts of white supremacy.Footnote 8 Both investigations thereby further recent efforts to uncover the “unstated but crucial” racial reasoning inherent in American liberalism.Footnote 9
The story of Freedom to the Free first underscores the tensions created as the federal government increasingly enlisted select, supposedly moderate, Black figures like Franklin to deflect increasingly prominent global criticism of Jim Crow. While a diverse literature has illustrated the federal utilization of Black public figures, including jazz musicians, as “goodwill ambassadors” to “project vitality and optimism on the part of a country that was deep in crisis,” this scholarship has rarely discussed historians.Footnote 10 Franklin, however, encountered censorship remarkably similar to that which constrained the lives of Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Josephine Baker, among others. Indeed, following Nicholas Grant’s analysis of Robeson, I situate Franklin as an exemplar of a critical mid-twentieth-century tradition of dissident Americanism.Footnote 11 Throughout his historical advocacy, Franklin championed what Grant describes as a patriotism of critique, one that utilized the chastened Americanism that had long characterized Black Emancipation memory to complicate national myths by recognizing the historical impacts of white supremacy. This patriotism worked within state-sponsored efforts, transforming America from the inside. Centring the experiences of Franklin – who had been promoted throughout his career as a supposedly rare, trustworthy, gentlemanly, and ‘non-race-conscious’ Black scholar – evidences the underpaid, undercelebrated, and relentlessly racialized creative labour of even the most prominent mid-twentieth-century Black public figures, whose Blackness was simultaneously celebrated and super-scrutinized for alleged emotionalism and “special pleading.” Figures including Franklin were promoted as Black “indigenous interpreters”: those deemed uniquely able to illuminate for white audiences the latest realities of Black life.Footnote 12 Despite Franklin’s continued assertions that he spoke as a historian without regard to race – as what Ross Posnock calls an “anti-race race man” – Franklin’s drafts of Freedom to the Free were thus critiqued in a consistently racialized manner, justifying edits that simultaneously utilized and neutralized his scholarship by enfolding it within the commission’s broader celebration of recent racial progress.Footnote 13
Second, uncovering this broader message – which emphasized recent de jure equalization over longer histories of white supremacy – problematizes the historical conceits integral to the racial liberal beliefs of the commission and Franklin’s varied critics. Put briefly, I understand racial liberalism as a set of prevailing argumentative tendencies rather than as a cohesive or contemporaneously defined ideology.Footnote 14 As an analytical device, then, racial liberalism is most generative when foregrounding how ideas about race were structured by power, practice, and process, by the naturalizations and normalizations created by the intersecting commercial, intellectual, political, and racial formations of Cold War America. Racial liberalism thus promotes the triangulated and institutionally minded study of ideas in action. Racial liberal beliefs centred around understanding race as an antiquated cultural construct which could be eradicated primarily through individual rather than structural solutions, i.e. through legal equalization, tolerance-centred education, and interracial understanding.Footnote 15 Such solutions rarely necessitated challenging American global leadership or capitalism. We are, however, yet to fully appreciate either history’s critical role within racial liberalism or racial liberalism’s impact within historical writing. This article therefore employs racial liberalism as an analytical heuristic, suggesting that it more precisely identifies the political investments, racialized assumptions, and institutionalized power relations that shaped mid-twentieth-century historical scholarship than the now much-critiqued paradigm of “consensus history.”Footnote 16 This scholarship – and Freedom to the Free – was marked more by fierce contestations, pregnant ambiguities, and segregated political, cultural, and educational spheres than by consensus. As Daniel Geary reminds us, mid-twentieth-century liberalism always contained “diverse and conflicting strands.”Footnote 17
By scrutinizing such conflicts, this article ultimately details how historical writing validated and reinforced liberalism’s broader denial of America’s white-supremacist founding. The broader individualizing and dematerializing tendencies of racial reasoning after Brown v. Board – which often promoted a turn away from history itself – further postponed that reckoning.Footnote 18 Following this precedent, the commission’s report utilized recent, primarily legal achievements in race relations to affirm the essential righteousness of American ideals and the desirability of American citizenship and global leadership. Downplaying Emancipation’s contributions to Black independent, transnational, and anticapitalist empowerment placed Black “adjustment” and “maturation” as the keys to racial equalization and rendered Emancipation a global symbol of American benevolence. Critically, then, Freedom to the Free illustrates how liberal triumphalism was conditioned upon precisely this broader non-reckoning with America’s white-supremacist past. As contemporary educators struggle against tropes of a “post-racial” America, Freedom to the Free reminds us that malignant triumphalism and the occlusion of white supremacy must be understood and challenged as one.Footnote 19
BLACK EMANCIPATION MEMORY AND THE CIVIL WAR CENTENNIAL
Any federal commemoration of Emancipation required welding together Black memories of Emancipation long characterized by dissonance, instability, and class- and gender-inflected tensions.Footnote 20 It required superimposing predominantly white organizational structures over an array of localized commemorations which, amid the rise of Jim Crow, served as crucial occasions for Black legitimation, self-definition, and mobilization. In Geneviève Fabre’s summation, their mood was “subjunctive, the ought and should prevailed over the was.”Footnote 21 Perhaps most profoundly, it required reconciling – ultimately unsuccessfully – the competing commemorative goals of claiming American citizenship and affirming a unique Black heritage. Particularly by the early twentieth century, a flourishing Black public sphere engendered a shift towards educative presentations that utilized Emancipation to demand contemporary educational, economic, and professional advancement.Footnote 22 This also encouraged (albeit far from guaranteed) male commemorative leadership.Footnote 23 Throughout Freedom to the Free’s preparations, this absence of Black women’s voices merits underlining.
In short, Emancipation had long offered a site for the dissident and subjunctive Americanism pursued by Franklin. Throughout the mid-twentieth century’s liberation movements, international actors employed the ambiguities central to Emancipation memory to demand their full liberation.Footnote 24 Scott Sandage has illustrated how protesters at the Lincoln Memorial co-opted the ambiguities of Lincoln’s legacy to demand further political rights, “layering and changing the public meanings of the hero and his shrine.” Emphasizing unfulfilled American values helped to “circumvent opposition, unify coalitions, and legitimate black voices in national politics.”Footnote 25 Many early twentieth-century Black historians of Emancipation shared Franklin’s acute sense of irony and paradox, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson questioning popular reverence for an advocate for colonization who remained hobbled by the racial conservatism of his era.Footnote 26 As argued most prominently in Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), Black historians saw Emancipation as fragile and shortly extinguished by the repressive violence of counter-Reconstruction.Footnote 27 “The slave,” Du Bois argued, “went free; stood a moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.”Footnote 28
Descended from Union veterans and growing up in Oklahoma, a key site of post-Emancipation freedom dreams, Franklin swiftly encountered an Emancipationist countermemory within which Emancipation became “the starting point for measuring the progress of the race as it emerged from the ‘dark night of slavery into freedom.’”Footnote 29 As early as 1927, aged twelve, he gave a speech discussing the proclamation’s anniversary to his Boy Scout troop.Footnote 30 Franklin’s landmark Black history survey From Slavery to Freedom (1947) also lauded the proclamation, which “captured the imagination of working men in many parts of the world, who viewed it as a great humanitarian document.”Footnote 31 Nevertheless, informed by From Slavery to Freedom’s hemispheric scope, Franklin always viewed Emancipation as not only internationally unexceptional but exceptionally overdue.Footnote 32 His The Emancipation Proclamation (1963) opened by surveying nineteenth-century New World emancipations. Only in the American South was slavery defended as a positive good, placing America alongside “rather backward places like Cuba and Brazil and the avowedly ‘uncivilized’ portions of Asia and Africa.”Footnote 33 Franklin even provocatively highlighted how Russia, emancipating its serfs in 1861, “outdistanced the United States in its handling of the problem of human freedom.”Footnote 34
Befitting his dissident Americanism, Franklin therefore viewed the proclamation as a second Declaration of Independence, as yet another opportunity for America to “live up to its loud preachments in favor of freedom.”Footnote 35 Indeed, as the author of Reconstruction: After the Civil War (1961), Franklin was always aware that Emancipation’s victories were all too brief.Footnote 36 This bitter awareness perhaps most differentiated Franklin’s beliefs from those of the commission. Franklin therefore declared in 1956 that he “never had any great enthusiasm” for Emancipation commemorations.Footnote 37 They could only aid the civil rights movement when remembering Emancipation within its context. Reckoning with Emancipation’s failures demanded recognizing African Americans’ continued status between slavery and freedom, legally “freed” yet deprived of first-class citizenship. Indeed, Franklin forcefully argued that the Civil War Centennial failed to provoke this reckoning because it emphasized the war’s military aspects rather than the racial degradation promoted by counter-Reconstruction. Following his appointment to the New York Civil War Centennial Commission, Franklin warned of a “field for distortions, polemics and the like,” criticizing colleagues who were “inclined to simulate and recreate too realistically the events of 1861–1865.”Footnote 38 An ardent pacifist, Franklin had long argued that romanticizing violence, particularly within the South, justified white societal domination.Footnote 39 As the Civil War Centennial approached the centennial of Emancipation, then, Franklin demanded that it “set this nation on the urgent task of completing the work begun by the war.”Footnote 40 Only by transcending its hitherto “circus-like atmosphere” could the centennial aid African Americans trapped “somewhere in the dim, uncharted area between abject slavery and complete freedom.”Footnote 41
Indeed, Franklin’s suspicions of the Civil War Commission, the national body responsible for planning commemorations, were widespread. In April 1961, the New Jersey delegation to the centennial of the Civil War’s opening shots at Fort Sumter demanded this commemoration be moved after their delegate Madaline A. Williams was denied accommodation in segregated Charleston. Franklin urged the New York Commission to join this eventually successful protest, warning that doing otherwise risked “turning the clock back to some antediluvian notions of human relations.”Footnote 42 This scandal led to the appointment of a new commission chairman, Allan Nevins. A Civil War historian and public history advocate, Nevins encouraged a more intellectual celebration oriented towards national reconciliation and rekindling Americans’ regard for their nation’s essential values.Footnote 43 In his 1959 American Historical Association presidential address, Nevins argued that America during the Cold War needed “all the moral fortitude, all the faith in the power of liberty and morality to survive the assaults of tyranny and wrong, that historians of every school can give it.”Footnote 44 This message of national unity continually conflicted with Franklin’s appreciation for paradox, irony, and the still-extant forces of white supremacy. Yet, critically, it also fostered ideological alignment with the incumbent President Kennedy, whom Nevins had previously praised in a laudatory collection of Kennedy’s foreign-policy speeches as the ablest “torchbearer” for dynamic liberalism during a “time for anxiety, for tough thinking, for resolute action.”Footnote 45
While Franklin welcomed Nevins’s appointment, Nevins’s eight-volume Civil War history, Ordeal of the Union (1947–71), starkly illustrates how his reconciliatory narratives obscured the role of racial conflicts within American history in a manner typical of racial liberalism.Footnote 46 Nevins’s preface, for example, noted that “no series of volumes can do justice to the tremendous story of effort, devotion and valor North and South, in the war which finally vindicated national unity.”Footnote 47 For the historian Thomas Pressly, Nevins exemplified a hybridist “new nationalist tradition.” Critical of slavery yet wary of excessive moralism, Nevins chiefly attributed the war to the “unrealities of passion” which prevented sectional compromise.Footnote 48 Conflict was preventable, if only mid-nineteenth-century politicians possessed New Deal liberalism’s technocratic foresight. For Nevins, then, racial issues presented an opportunity for ensuring civilizational adaptation, demonstrating American exceptionalism, and fostering a more homogeneous and consequently more advanced American polity. Emancipation terminated “the inherited anachronism that had so long retarded the nation’s progress, and crippled its pretensions to the leadership of the liberal forces of the globe.”Footnote 49 Nevins therefore exemplifies the process noted by Nina Silber whereby New Dealers disassociated slavery, and Emancipation itself, from issues of race, celebrating Emancipation as the deliverance of the entire American nation and, indeed, the globe.Footnote 50
Altogether, then, Nevins’s liberal evangelism wholly befitted a presidency that increasingly recognized the political value of commemorating Emancipation yet, in order to foster national unity and international goodwill, ignored the continued realities of white supremacy highlighted by a century of Black Emancipation memory. Indeed, administration staffers keenly sensed how commemorating Emancipation could deflect criticism of Kennedy’s inaction on racial issues. Having promised during the 1960 election that discrimination in federal employment and housing could be eliminated through “a stroke of the President’s pen,” once in office Kennedy prioritized quiet, non-obstructive, accommodative progress through behind-the-scenes negotiation and compromise.Footnote 51 For a President elected by a razor-thin margin over Richard Nixon with a historic share of the Black vote, the Centennial offered a felicitous opportunity to demonstrate America’s historical commitment to freedom within a context of Cold War civil rights.Footnote 52
To summarize, even in a period of so-called consensus history interpretations of Reconstruction and Emancipation remained fiercely contested. Racial liberalism’s harmonious narrative of ever-increasing inclusion inevitably conflicted with a dissident and subjunctive Black Emancipation countermemory historically concerned with ongoing betrayals, hypocrisies, and inequalities. Delegating commemorative responsibilities to the Commission on Civil Rights ultimately helped Kennedy and Nevins to sidestep such controversy.Footnote 53 The commission was unenthused – its executive staff director Berl I. Bernhard later recalled that “no one wanted to do it. It was just considered to be a big burden.”Footnote 54 Here, Bernhard was disappointed. In May 1962, Kennedy ordered the commission to produce a history of civil rights since 1863, a project Bernhard would later deem “one of the most aggravating things that ever happened … you try to get any two people to agree about history – they don’t exist.”Footnote 55
Despite these many disagreements, the report’s title – “One Hundred Years of Progress” – starkly illustrates the political expectations placed upon a project that could “prove an important contribution to a national and international understanding of the progress we have made, the factors which have made this possible, and the road we still have to travel.”Footnote 56 Surveying the report’s construction therefore evidences the ever-racialized contestations that emerged as the commission struggled to enfold vastly heterogeneous Emancipation memories – and a quietly dissident historian that it wholly expected to be a trustworthy indigenous interpreter – within this broader triumphal narrative.
DRAFTING FREEDOM TO THE FREE
For ever-nervous government actors, Franklin – a highly respected, prominent historian based at the fiercely anticommunist Brooklyn College – must have appeared the ideal indigenous interpreter. As early as 1956, the Civil War historian Bell Irvin Wiley recommended inviting Franklin to advise on the centennial because he was “one of the most highly respected and most articulate of the Negro scholars.”Footnote 57 Throughout his career, Franklin received opportunities following similar backhanded praise from liberal white scholars, who lauded Franklin as a rare Black historian – in the words of his PhD mentor emblazoned on the cover jacket of Franklin’s most famous work – “without a chip on his shoulder.”Footnote 58 In this case, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a friend of Franklin’s then serving as Kennedy’s “court historian,” assured the commission that Franklin was a “highly trusted, decent, and balanced person who is thoroughly competent and most distinguished.”Footnote 59 Once more evidencing the broader super-scrutinization of Black public figures, however, throughout 1962 Franklin was vetted by a vast FBI inquiry which extended to Albany, Charlotte, Honolulu, Memphis, Milwaukee, New York, and San Francisco. It found Franklin to be a loyal citizen and liberal diplomat who won over his predominantly white Brooklyn neighbourhood.Footnote 60 Lampooning the surveillance of Black intellectuals with which both had become familiar following the Red Scare, the Black historian and Howard University professor Rayford Logan informed Franklin of a visit from “a man in a blue suit,” quipping, “he really has a dossier! He did not know, however, about Australia, Stockholm [Franklin’s recent lecture tours], and the William Pitt Professorship.”Footnote 61
Although neither Franklin nor Bernhard’s papers contain Franklin’s drafts, both the commission’s dogmatic triumphalism and the perpetual racial dynamics Franklin struggled against can be inferred by closely reading the related correspondence. To paraphrase Penny Von Eschen, finding these discontinuities within federal attempts to manage historical time powerfully reveals the hubris of racial liberalism.Footnote 62 From the beginning, the commission favoured signs of racial progress – itself defined abstractly – while perceiving this to be a politically neutral orientation, a stance indicative of precisely such hubris. Inviting Franklin to author the report, Bernhard recognized that “for much of the period in question, there would be very little substantial progress to report and that many of the advances have come only in the past few years.” Bernhard consequently encouraged Franklin to indicate factors that promoted and could further encourage progress. Remarkably, Bernhard reasoned that this would avoid accusations that the report was intended as propaganda.Footnote 63 Franklin, ever mindful of history’s capacity to promote national self-scrutiny via democratic debate, clearly appreciated this opportunity to counter the Civil War Centennial’s neglect of Black memory from the inside, accepting Kennedy’s ambitious deadline. He forever thereafter struggled with this deadline – by June 1962 he was working sixteen-hour days and, paid per day, received pay Bernhard recognized was “rather meagre.”Footnote 64 Shortly after signing the contract on 4 January 1962, Franklin recruited three distinguished historical consultants: Allan Nevins, Rayford Logan, and the Yale-based historian of the South C. Vann Woodward. Selecting these three broadly liberal and highly prestigious public intellectuals once again indicates Franklin’s strategy of working from the inside, utilizing their prestige to provide his quietly dissident scholarship legitimacy and a wider interracial audience than many other Black historical projects.Footnote 65
Nonetheless, viewing Franklin as the liberal establishment’s house scholar obscures both this strategic approach and how Franklin’s Blackness – ever a provocation to federal anxieties – was consistently weaponized to devalue his conclusions. Franklin approached the project gravely aware of its symbolic power. Indicative of both his patriotism of critique and awareness that he was regarded as a safe choice, Franklin consistently challenged triumphal narratives, marshalling Emancipation memory’s subjunctive power to demand further action on racial issues. Such action would at last “fulfil the promise of 1863.”Footnote 66 While staffers adopted the shorthand “Progress Report,” Franklin called his work “Civil Rights – A Theme in United States History.” From the beginning, he emphasized that the history of Reconstruction and of the rise of Jim Crow was “not a pretty picture,” warning that the period from 1863 to 1948 was “a bit distressing and the word ‘progress’ can be applied to it only in the broadest, philosophical terms.”Footnote 67 As Franklin’s first drafts arrived, then, the commissioner and Catholic theologian Theodore Hesburgh declared them “entirely too negative.” If only Franklin had handled this story “of great drama” appropriately, he could have “many good things to show about the struggle upwards from black despair to a rather bright new day full of hope.”Footnote 68 Similarly, Woodward urged Franklin to balance this “history of much perfidy” with “the heroic efforts of the few who have fought the great fight, and a just appraisal of positive accomplishments.”Footnote 69 Both comments encouraged contributionism, the tendency within Black historiography that Russell Rickford suggests “presented the achievements of innocuous black strivers … as the product of industriousness and self-discipline in an increasingly meritocratic society.”Footnote 70 Yet Franklin had historically rejected contributionism, viewing Black history in From Slavery to Freedom as “the story of the strivings of the nameless millions.”Footnote 71
Commentators, including Hesburgh, also persistently criticized Franklin for disproportionately highlighting the “black side of the picture.”Footnote 72 It is especially notable that Woodward encouraged Franklin to further investigate non-Black racial minorities to guard against accusations of “ethnocentrism.”Footnote 73 Such comments – particularly from a historian who had previously lauded Franklin as a “Negro historian for whom it was not necessary to make any apologies or allowances on account of his race” – underscore the disproportionate burdens on Black historians to demonstrate racial neutrality that were engendered by mid-twentieth-century academia’s normative whiteness.Footnote 74 Concomitantly, Nevins implied that ethnocentrism led to overemotionalism, hindering scholarly objectivity.Footnote 75 Instead, Nevins urged an “Olympian” neutrality. In an argument indicating the belief in Black cultural deficiencies that Richard King defines as a consensus view of the mid-twentieth-century white left, Nevins argued that while science had disproven allegations of Black biological inferiority, white Americans still possessed “temporary superiority – a greater cleverness, adaptability, earnestness.”Footnote 76 This would “require time, long educational effort, industry, and patience to overcome.” He understood Franklin’s “feelings” but argued – reflecting tropes of Black pathologism endemic to 1960s liberalism – that “some of the disabilities of the Negro have arisen from their own faults and shortcomings; they cannot all be attributed to white injustice.”Footnote 77 These intertwined charges of ethnocentrism and emotionalism therefore illustrate how Franklin’s Blackness was utilized to invalidate his conclusions. Communicating to Schlesinger, Nevins remarkably claimed, “I wrote him in gentle terms, for he is a sensitive man, and this is a sensitive time for his race.”Footnote 78
Like many mid-twentieth-century racial liberals, then, Nevins’s allusions to Black pathologism presented racial equalization as an issue of acculturation, integration, and then equalization. This was the dilemma of America’s post-Civil War century, with Nevins arguing in Ordeal that, following Emancipation, “many a Northerner looked upon the refugee freedman with a fresh and startled glance; he saw not only a man, but a problem.”Footnote 79 This stance reflected Nevins’s assessment that the first Reconstruction failed because it gave African Americans political rights they were not sufficiently prepared to exercise. Such allegations of post-Emancipation civic immaturity remained widespread in mid-twentieth-century American liberalism – Nick Bryant describes how Kennedy himself “embraced this highly selective southern view of Reconstruction.”Footnote 80 Indeed, Reconstruction was by far the report’s most critiqued chronological section, revealing both its highly contested nature in mid-twentieth-century American memory and how profoundly it provoked white anxieties surrounding decolonization and domestic Black empowerment.Footnote 81 For example, the commissioner and Tennessee-born political scientist Robert Rankin, having recently listened to Hesburgh lecture on the likely failings of newly independent African democracies, noted comparisons to “the condition of the South when rights were given to large groups of the population who really did not know how to make use of them.”Footnote 82 Reconstruction therefore played a critical role in validating conceptions of Black pathology, strikingly evidencing Jason Morgan Ward’s assessment of how this “profoundly pessimistic view of black civic fitness … pervaded the civil rights era and persisted in its wake.”Footnote 83
By August 1962, however, Franklin – now based in Cambridge – rejected Nevins’s critique in a manner evidencing the politics of respectability that Franklin developed while completing his undergraduate education at Fisk.Footnote 84 Franklin noted the “extremely high” standards he expected of his Black colleagues but emphasized that meeting such standards was not a prerequisite for their enjoyment of civil rights.Footnote 85 Shortly thereafter, Nevins again urged comprehensive rewriting to emphasize Black contributions towards American life.Footnote 86 Franklin sternly rejected Nevins’s charge, arguing, “I did not even castigate lynchers and those who burned Negroes at the stake; nor did I take the federal government to task for its numerous derelictions in the area of civil rights.”Footnote 87 He believed that the developments spoke for themselves.
In rejecting white expectations of a contributionist text, critiques of supposed emotionalism and ethnocentrism, and accusations of Black post-Emancipation immaturity, Franklin thus struggled against long-standing racialized dynamics that Jonathan Scott Holloway, among others, considers to have persistently constrained Black-authored scholarship.Footnote 88 These dynamics are remarkably reminiscent of the marginalization of Du Bois’s contributions to An American Dilemma and evidence how these racialized judgements remained ever-present throughout the heyday of mid-twentieth-century liberalism.Footnote 89 Corroborating Holloway’s suggestion that Black knowledge has predominantly been accepted when it echoes the conclusions of prominent white scholars, a day later Nevins – hired by Franklin as his consultant – privately complained that Franklin utilized “inflamed” terminology and offered “too much a history of general outrages, violence, terrorism, and prejudice.”Footnote 90 Evidently perturbed, Bernhard shortly thereafter complained that the report would not inspire progress because it neglected themes of “national concern and infinitesimal progress.”Footnote 91 Franklin refused, however, evidencing his dissident Americanism by writing instead of his hope that “in a country like ours, with its great vigor and its determination to do what is right, a knowledge of the facts would inspire it to correct its injustices and make further progress.”Footnote 92 For Franklin, then, public history projects had a vital role in fostering for both Black and white Americans a truer Americanism alive to the violences of white supremacy. Black historians had to strategically rework American history to prompt that reckoning. Nevins’s remarkable transformation from Franklin’s consultant to editor, however, bespeaks the broader super-scrutinization that Black intellectuals endured when promoting this dissident Americanism through the entrapping niches available to indigenous interpreters within mid-twentieth-century liberalism.
Indeed, on the very day that Franklin promised these revisions, a commission staffer travelled to Central State College, Ohio to discuss revising Franklin’s report with the Black historians Charles Harris Wesley, Paul McStallworth, Jerome Jones, and Prince Wilson.Footnote 93 Franklin soon learned of this from McStallworth, a former colleague. McStallworth’s actions indicate how Black intellectuals formed counternetworks to strategize against their shared experiences of editorial censorship and federal duplicity. As Daniel Matlin notes, by the 1960s several Black public figures found the indigenous interpreter to be an increasingly “demeaning and confining” role.Footnote 94 Indicatively, Franklin soon bemoaned to Logan – whose What the Negro Wants (1944) had similarly been censored by the University of North Carolina Press – that “they wanted some sort of ‘whitewash’ and are disappointed because they got a lesson in history.”Footnote 95
There was a great irony in the commission’s choosing Wesley: in 1946 the publisher Knopf rejected Wesley’s initial manuscript for the Black history survey that Franklin was to write as From Slavery to Freedom, fearing that Wesley’s writing appeared old-fashioned.Footnote 96 Twenty-four years Franklin’s senior and one of Carter G. Woodson’s “Old Boys” who spearheaded the early Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), Wesley became the first ASNLH president following Woodson’s death in 1950.Footnote 97 He was evidently suspicious of Franklin’s postwar generation of scholars, who increasingly left the world of HBCUs and the ASNLH to break into white educational institutions. Rayford Logan noted how, after one American Historical Association meeting, Wesley accused Franklin of “playing up to white people.” Another scholar added that Franklin was a “white man’s n*****,” a comment Wesley explicitly endorsed.Footnote 98 According to McStallworth, however, Wesley was reluctant to rewrite Franklin’s draft, urging the commission to accept it both on being first contacted and having met face-to-face. Wesley’s eventual acceptance – and his extensive efforts organizing the ASNLH’s own Emancipation commemorations – perhaps can be best attributed to the bitter awareness he shared with Franklin that commemorating Emancipation offered a critical opportunity to salvage something from a Civil War Centennial that had hitherto “prevent[ed] any reconstruction of the historical thought which could prove to be a basis for improved human relations and could bring greater unity to North and South.”Footnote 99
Perhaps the greatest benefit for the commission was not who Wesley was, but how an impending deadline and four-person writing team shifted control over the overall argument towards the commission, almost guaranteeing a more politically useful text than might be generated by a sole historian. A new project prospectus entitled “A Study of the March in History of Negro-Americans toward Freedom” evidences this increasingly explicit emphasis on progress, proposing a story of “the development and transition to freedom of Negro-Americans in the United States from the period of slavery to the dawn of full citizenship practices in the 1930s.” Interestingly, one commission figure scribbled out “1930s” for “1960s,” emphasizing racial progress during Kennedy’s presidency.Footnote 100 These political motivations therefore once again corroborate Holloway’s conclusions, revealing both the fragility of Black scholarship that did not follow white expectations and the federal government’s editorial powers.
Thus began the tragicomedy of three parties – the commission, Wesley, and Franklin – revising the same manuscript simultaneously yet separately. Franklin’s final revisions, sent on 19 November 1962, conceded to several commission demands, including a new concluding chapter highlighting recent advancements towards equality. Nevertheless, Franklin evidently suspected that the commission was exploiting his scholarship, pointedly asking what use had been made of his manuscripts.Footnote 101 When the final report arrived in late November, Franklin was once more furious. Having committed to near-impossible deadlines, his acknowledgement consisted of an unelaborated thanks. The final draft was “lacking in style, character, and movement.” Symptomatic of racial liberalism, it failed to recognize the full historical impact of white supremacy, offering only an “elementary recitation of the first two centuries of slavery” and ignoring the antebellum period, intellectual and cultural factors, and private-sector forces which impeded progress. At heart, “much of the writing – in some cases, rewriting – reflected a remarkable innocence of the interrelationships of various historical events and developments, to say nothing of the historical facts themselves.”Footnote 102 That very day, Franklin warned Schlesinger (evidently hoping he would transmit this warning to Kennedy) that the report was “different in almost every important respect from the one that I prepared.”Footnote 103
Once more, then, the report’s technocratic triumphalism severed Emancipation from this broader historical context of white supremacy, jibing against Franklin’s dissident Americanism and drawing critical responses from Black public figures and activists. Rather than being published as a mass-market paperback like the 1968 Kerner report – only five thousand copies were printed for public sale – the commission disseminated Freedom to the Free as a gift to select interracial elites, as well as globally distributing it to Peace Corps training sites.Footnote 104 The report was formally launched with a White House function on Lincoln’s birthday. With approximately 1,100 guests, this was celebrated as the largest buffet reception hitherto held at the White House and offered an expedient occasion for the administration to build relationships with prominent civil rights organizations and “borrow some Lincoln Day thunder” from the Republicans.Footnote 105 Bernhard recalled how guest list decisions continued for days because “this whole civil rights issue was becoming [so] aggravating, controversial that if you missed key people, they were going to be offended … It was rather hilarious.”Footnote 106 Despite this fanfare, Franklin did not know of the report’s release until approached by a Newsweek journalist. Weeks later, it was delivered to his door without even a covering letter.Footnote 107
Many African Americans shared Franklin’s suspicions, arguing that this celebratory reception revealed the broader inattention of the Kennedy administration and white-authored scholarship to America’s ongoing racial inequalities. In a report festooned with glamorous society photographs, the Baltimore Afro-American noted how one Black guest rejected a copy, remarking, “don’t give me that, I don’t have my freedom yet.” The NAACP’s lobbyist to Congress, Clarence Mitchell Jr., refused to attend entirely, demanding Kennedy end the filibuster before sharing “cookies and punch.”Footnote 108 The former incident was picked up by the Black nationalist Robert F. Williams’s Cuba-based Radio Free Dixie, which declared the celebration a “disgrace to the starving, oppressed, jim crowed and terror stricken masses of Afroamericans.”Footnote 109
Black intellectuals echoed Williams’s criticism. The novelist and historian J. Saunders Redding accused the report of exploiting Black history and glossing over violent resistance to recent civil rights legislation.Footnote 110 The editor Ernest Daniel Kaiser and the prominent Afrocentrist historian John Henrik Clarke, book reviewers for the journal Freedomways, described Martin Luther King’s appeal for a new Emancipation Proclamation as “infinitely preferable” to the commission’s report.Footnote 111 Four years later, Kaiser further lambasted an “eternally sanguine, insultingly titled” work that reflected the “mild, liberal, shallow approach” of many white-authored Black history texts.Footnote 112 Like these Black public figures, Franklin was all too aware that his association was being used to legitimize such shallow approaches to racial issues. He swiftly disowned the report, urging Kaiser and Clarke to immediately clarify that he had not authored the text.Footnote 113 Also carefully attuned to these dynamics of ambiguous authorship, Rayford Logan painstakingly discerned how the press avoided saying whether he, Nevins, or Woodward were consultants to Franklin or to the commission.Footnote 114
All in all, Freedom to the Free’s production, publication, and reception all attest to the hubristic narrative of racial progress foundational to racial liberalism and critical to the Kennedy administration’s political aspirations. While taking great caution to recruit a supposedly trustworthy and “non-race-conscious” Black indigenous interpreter, Franklin’s editors censored and impugned his scholarship through an array of implicit but nonetheless relentlessly racialized judgements. For Franklin and his Black correspondents, such judgements were all too familiar. Accusations of emotionalism, ethnocentrism, pathologism, and post-Reconstruction immaturity all justified the fundamental non-reckoning with the historical force of white supremacy promoted by racial liberalism’s individuating, universalizing, and often ahistorical tendencies. Freedom to the Free therefore offers an underrecognized yet no less powerful example of how political, intellectual, and racial factors combined to reiterate racial liberal norms to public audiences. Just as its production starkly illustrates the challenges of voice, authorship, and racialization endured by many mid-twentieth-century Black indigenous interpreters, studying its published form therefore maps the remarkably consistent historical silences within mid-twentieth-century liberalism’s reconciliatory glossing of American history.
ANALYSING THE RECONSTRUCTED FREEDOM TO THE FREE
Freedom to the Free’s published form powerfully illustrates how the federal government simultaneously promoted and sought to domesticate an emerging Black history movement. Demonstrating stark continuities in liberal thought, its argument closely adhered to the frameworks established by Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and echoed in the Kerner report of 1968. To borrow from Malcolm McLaughlin’s wholly applicable description of the latter, Freedom to the Free “rhetorically contained black democratic aspirations within the borders of the United States and established the rights of American citizenship as the only meaningful measure of freedom.”Footnote 115 As McLaughlin suggests of the Kerner report, Freedom to the Free therefore also evidences how 1960s centrist liberalism reimagined itself to tame the demands of the civil rights movement, a dynamic that anticipates Tom Davies’s important analysis of how late 1960s liberalism sought to “engage, modify, and sublimate” the energies of Black Power.Footnote 116
Indicatively, Freedom to the Free frequently utilized the term “American Negro”: a mid-twentieth-century term typical of racial liberalism which implied that African American culture, society, and civic loyalties were primarily determined, and would be determined thereafter, by their status within the United States.Footnote 117 Progress – a recurrent yet forever ill-defined term – thus entailed de jure equalization and social and cultural incorporation into a prospectively deracialized liberal American nationhood, rather than independent Black empowerment. This teleology thereby relegated the severest of racial ills – slavery – to the distant past, as a “curious and archaic word.” As Franklin lamented, the report almost entirely ignored the enslaved’s experiences. Indeed, the introduction remarkably argued that slavery left a “unique record of the indomitability of the human spirit” to both the formerly enslaved and former slaveholders.Footnote 118 While ostensibly celebrating that indomitability, Freedom to the Free underplayed Black radical resistance and antebellum and transnational liberatory strivings, particularly those of Black women. Its cover image exemplified these implications of historic Black passivity, featuring a kneeling Black man, his figure shrouded by scribbles and eyes solemnly fixed downwards, superimposed in front of another Black man with a shirt and tie, sleeves drawn up, and fists clenched defiantly starring into the top-right corner.Footnote 119 Again, the masculinist imagery bears repeating.
The report’s historical sections did recognize “periods of disturbing lack of progress, of retrogression,” particularly between Reconstruction and World War I.Footnote 120 Nevertheless, this contrast only strengthened its central thesis that, since 1945, “progress has accelerated until today, for all the contradictions, all the transitional dislocations, all the temporary setbacks and stalemates, governments at all levels as well as private associations and individuals are pressing determinedly and successfully toward the goal of equality before the law and equal opportunity for all.”Footnote 121 Indeed, of the 169-page historical sections, seventy-seven pages made up the extended chapter “1948–1962: Breakthrough toward Equality.” Reflecting racial liberalism’s tendency to favour legal solutions to racial issues, this chapter persistently attributed this acceleration to victories in court, citing 115 legal cases and emphasizing, particularly since 1945, the contributions of federal agencies, including the FBI.Footnote 122 These interventions only further attested to postwar America’s benevolent global leadership and “sense of responsibility.”Footnote 123 Freedom to the Free also disproportionately emphasized moderate and less direct-action-oriented civil rights organizations; Franklin justly argued that it described the Southern Regional Council more extensively than it did CORE or the SCLC.Footnote 124
These biases transparently reveal what Nikhil Pal Singh has described as US liberal nationalism’s tendency to celebrate formalistic, technocratic, and legalistic politics as “integrationist” while discounting as separatist and irrational Black radical, transnational, and anti-capitalist politics.Footnote 125 Discussing the commission’s formation, Freedom to the Free argued that by 1957 there existed “a definite and discernible tide which was to sweep away the traditional impediments to civil rights legislation.”Footnote 126 Corroborating Ben Keppel’s assessment of how Brown v. Board immediately became a “sacred and redemptive chapter in the history of American democracy,” Freedom to the Free celebrated the decision as the most momentous event in recent racial history, which rendered segregation a “dead letter in every area of public activity.”Footnote 127 Granted, it critiqued Massive Resistance, arguing that “violence will not be tolerated as a means of thwarting court-ordered desegregation … as time passes, the courts will demand something more than token compliance.”Footnote 128 Yet this rhetoric bracketed racial confrontation, particularly lynching, as an un-American rarity. Reading Franklin’s initial submission, Hesburgh argued that lynching had “practically ceased.”Footnote 129 Yet Franklin – anticipating the violence that struck Birmingham, Alabama the following year – argued that this claim was “not only merely optimistic but [also] imposes a narrow definition of lynching.”Footnote 130 The final report’s statement that lynching was “virtually extinct” thus imposed a narrow definition of racial violence that was symptomatic of how racial liberals foregrounded primarily deinstitutionalized, putatively autonomous, and irrational racial violence to occlude the broader constitutive role of white supremacy – and violence – throughout American history.Footnote 131
When recognizing northern inequalities, Freedom to the Free similarly obscured the impact of institutionalized white domination. Reflecting a widespread manoeuvre in liberal modernization theory, it bracketed urban issues as primarily temporary results of occupational dislocation, of adjusting fundamentally benign urban management schemes to new demands on public services.Footnote 132 Focussing on the deprivations of urban life rather than on the structures that created them only further reinforced notions of Black incapacity and pathologism.Footnote 133 Like the Kerner report, Freedom to the Free therefore demanded more intensive liberal technocratic stewardship rather than Black community activism, and individual and predominantly male advancement rather than any subversive or anticapitalist radicalism.Footnote 134
In sum, Freedom to the Free’s “American Negro” terminology and from-slavery-to-civic-inclusion teleology both affirmed an underlying narrative of an ever-the-more-liberal American nationhood and nonviolent, gradualist, and nation-affirming means of attaining de jure parity within that nation. It wholly echoed the Myrdallian contention, as Singh has written, that this ability to harmonize a heterogeneous population fitted America to be “the broker of the world’s security concerns and aspirations for social progress.”Footnote 135 Indeed, the final chapter commenced with Alexis de Tocqueville’s oft-quoted prediction of a world divided between Russia and America. It then noted Tocqueville’s contention that America’s greatest challenge was slavery, an “immovable” force. Contrary to Tocqueville, however, this conclusion argued that Americans abolished slavery without either the white or the Black race’s “extirpation,” demonstrating their ability to interracially collaborate for societal betterment.Footnote 136 It consequently urged Americans to jointly conclude this struggle for equality, attaining for “American Negroes” a fully realized citizenship.
This rhetoric altogether quarantined historical analysis, attempting to blunt the contingencies and complexities of Franklin’s findings. The report’s skeletal historical framework relied greatly on his research, citing From Slavery to Freedom on twenty-two occasions. Yet this history was made less potent by an interpretation in which racial progress – i.e. equalization – involved only temporary conflict, violence, or sacrifice because it ultimately suited both white and Black interests. Ultimately, Franklin’s dissident Americanism was only one of many Black perspectives on American history that continue to be silenced in order to elide white supremacy’s constitutive role in American history; to banalize radical, anticapitalist, and transnational Blackness; and to prematurely celebrate the recent racial progress that, particularly for white audiences, maintains American innocence and thereby makes racial matters communicable, promising, and exculpatory.
CONCLUSION
In summation, Freedom to the Free powerfully evidences American liberalism’s long-standing failure to reckon with America’s white-supremacist past. Just as postwar liberalism’s core promise of equal citizenship within an increasingly liberal, nonracial American nationhood was conditioned on such elisions, liberal narratives of a triumphal and unifying civil rights movement that remain both prevalent and pernicious today were premised upon liberalism’s broader inattention to its complicity in producing racial inequality.Footnote 137 As contemporary Black history movements challenge both malicious triumphalism and legislation that criminalizes teaching the history of white supremacy and critical race theory, this story underscores the historically co-constitutive relationship between these tendencies.
From the first, the commission’s emphasis on progress was remarkably systematized, poorly defined, and explicit. It believed Franklin to be a uniquely moderate, “non-race-conscious” Black scholar, failing to appreciate his dissident Americanism and simultaneously perpetuating an ideal of legitimate Black spokespersonship that prevented more radical thinkers from attaining such opportunities. FBI investigations, contractual stipulations, and Nevins’s subterfuge all suggest how 1960s governmental fact-finding missions increasingly recognized the political expedience of including exceptional Black indigenous interpreters while remaining profoundly cautious regarding the hypocrisy and complexities that even thinkers without a “chip on their shoulder” might emphasize. Franklin’s experiences of censorship, then, were far from unique. His underpaid and unappreciated historical scholarship ballasted Freedom to the Free, yet the commission most extensively altered the introduction and conclusion’s argumentative sections to foreground their broader triumphal message. Following Myrdal and anticipating the Kerner report, Freedom to the Free underscored recent progress while underplaying contemporary inequities, and celebrated Emancipation’s international example while ignoring Reconstruction’s collapse: a collapse attributed not to racialized violence but to Black civic pathology. Even in Kennedy’s “Camelot” – which, for many, epitomizes liberal academic thinking’s influence within the executive office – this interpretation of Reconstruction remained prevalent, premising Black adjustment as the prerequisite to first-class citizenship. This rhetoric – typical of racial liberalism – discounted radical, anticapitalist, and transnational Black empowerment as subversive, and instead presented liberalism and predominantly male individual achievement within a capitalist economy as the solutions to racial injustice. Particularly in urban areas, this technocratic and legalistic rhetoric reinforced discourses of Black pathologism and slighted the many de facto challenges remaining.
For Franklin, the proclamation was not a further feat in the historical ascent of American liberty but, instead, a tragically betrayed attempt to actualize, at last, the professed values of America’s founding. Emancipation and Reconstruction were central to this profoundly ironic, dissident reading of American history, which emphasized unfulfilled promises and the fragility of progress. After 1963, Franklin continued to challenge public understandings of Reconstruction, particularly within the South.Footnote 138 He persistently disputed triumphal accounts of racial progress, later in the 1960s criticizing several “immature, outmoded, and unrealistic” Voice of America broadcasts that celebrated alleged progress to international audiences. These ignored “the impact on Western civilization of more than two centuries of the domination and exploitation of the black man by the white man” and “rip[ped] from the context of worldwide human enslavement the situation in the United States.”Footnote 139 Despite his centennial experiences, however, Franklin continued to work with government, even as he grew increasingly sceptical of America’s rightward turn. Franklin contributed to 1968’s Kerner report and led President Bill Clinton’s ill-fated One America Initiative on Race.Footnote 140 For his critics, particularly those associated with the Black studies movement, these moves evidenced naivety.Footnote 141 Yet they also reflected Frankin’s clear belief that Americans of all races had to be taught the inconvenient realities of history. Working from the inside, through government, offered a constricting yet powerful platform for promoting that education. Indeed, Freedom to the Free suggests that behind Franklin’s moderate public image lay a more critical scholar who obscured his full dissident Americanism to strategically exploit the entrapping niches available to mid-twentieth-century Black public figures wishing to reach mass audiences.Footnote 142
Today, it is perhaps fitting that Franklin’s instruction to tell the “unvarnished truth” are the first words visitors encounter entering the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s History Galleries. Ultimately, Freedom to the Free provides an exceptionally detailed archive of government actors’ attempts to “varnish” Black history to project a misleadingly inclusive image of America. By scrutinizing how racial liberal narratives tended to simultaneously ignore the continued force of white supremacy and banalize popular understandings of Black history, Freedom to the Free historicizes and thus problematizes those “master narratives” of the civil rights movement which continue to contour public understandings of this period. It reminds us that such narratives are historically constructed, and must be challenged as such. Varnishing Black history underwrote liberalism’s promises, silenced its critics, and celebrated – however prematurely – its purported victories. If we are to supersede this strategically blind liberalism, which prevents both our historical and political reckoning with white supremacy’s continued impacts, Freedom to the Free powerfully reminds us of the value of the dissident and unvarnished history pursued by John Hope Franklin within that process.
Open access
