V. P. Franklin

Historian V. P. Franklin was born on October 19, 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Cecilia Smith and Vincent Franklin. He received his B.A. degree in history in 1969 from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, his M.A. degree in teaching in 1970 from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his Ph.D. degree in the history of education in 1975 from the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.

Franklin taught in several Boston, Cambridge, and Philadelphia public schools and colleges before receiving his Ph.D. degree. He then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before being hired as a professor of the history of education at Yale University in 1977. In 1985, Franklin served as a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library before accepting a position as a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. In 1990, Franklin joined the faculty of Drexel University in Philadelphia. He held subsequent faculty positions at Teachers College, Columbia University; Xavier University of Louisiana; Uppsala University; Dillard University; and the University of California, Riverside, from which he retired in 2015 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Education. Franklin directed African American Studies programs at Yale, Arizona State, and Drexel universities. From 2001 to 2018, Franklin served as the editor of The Journal of African American History.

Franklin is the author of five books: The Education of Black Philadelphia (1979), Black Self-Determination (1984), Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths (1996), Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Biography (1998), and The Young Crusaders (2021). He has co-edited six books.

Franklin has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for Outstanding Achievement in African American History from the Association for the Study of African American History in 2002, the Cheikh A. Diop-Ida B. Wells Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies from the National Council of Black Studies in 2011, and the Outstanding Alumnus Award from Penn State University in 2020.

Franklin lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

V. P. Franklin was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on June 16, 2022.