March 27, 2009 Dear Friends of the FHI, We deeply mourn the grievous loss of Dr. Franklin whose enduring scholarship and personal example will inspire us for many years to come. Here in the Franklin Center building there is a memorial book for those who wish to leave their remembrances and aspirations. If you stop by you will also find a shelf of Dr. Franklin's scholarship, and photographs of him from the Center's collection. There is also a central Duke University website that contains Dr. Franklin's obituary and statements from public figures about his legacy. The website can also receive condolence messages if you choose to leave them there. At the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, we intend to commemorate Dr. Franklin in the way he would have wanted the most, by advancing his declared mission seeking to feature cutting-edge interdisciplinary and international scholarship through our academic programming. In the next month or so, there will be at least three events connecting us closely with Dr. Franklin's vision for the Institute named after him that I have had the honor to direct since 2003. On April 8th, we will feature a Wednesdays at the Center lunch conversation in the Franklin Center (Room 240) with Prof. Jelani Favors of Morgan State University, one of the FHI’s three faculty fellows from historically black colleges and universities. Prof. Favors will speak about his research on HBCUs as places of idealism and activism in education, a topic that evokes Dr. Franklin in no small measure. Prof. Favors will be introduced by renowned Duke civil rights historian Bill Chafe, a close associate of Dr. Franklin's. Dr. Franklin was especially delighted to meet and advise the inaugural HBCU fellows last Fall. From April 13-22, the FHI will host Justice Yvonne Mokgoro of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in our Distinguished Scholars in Residence program. As the first black woman on South Africa's Constitutional Court, Justice Mokgoro's championing of social and economic rights to rectify historical inequalities in a country scarred by the racial divisions of apartheid makes her a most fitting presence in the light of Dr. Franklin's vision for the interaction of scholarship, policy, and justice. Justice Mokgoro will participate in several events held at the Franklin Center, the Duke School of Law, and the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. On May 1st, all three of our HBCU fellows: Jelani Favors, Fatimah Tuggar, and Dana Williams will participate in a symposium and workshop that includes faculty, students, and administrators drawn from Duke and local area HBCUs to discuss ways in which Dr. Franklin's vision can interconnect scholarly communities focused on the arts and the humanities. As many of you know, Dr. Franklin and his wife Aurelia Franklin were graduates of Fisk University. His teaching career began at Fisk and brought him, in the 1940s, to two local HBCUs, St. Augustine College and North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University). By exploring how we can create institutional collaborations across older historical divisions in the region and beyond, this half-day event will explore how Dr. Franklin's legacy can continue to flourish in the wake of his passing by disseminating common themes that have already been articulated in the ongoing work of our HBCU fellows. While I will step down as FHI Director on June 30th, I am also very pleased to announce that my successor, Professor Ian Baucom, will be planning several academic events that continue to explore the intellectual legacy and mission of Dr. Franklin in the coming year of 2009-10 and beyond. This is a moment of personal bereavement and also intellectual loss for me and many friends and colleagues around me at Duke and elsewhere. For those of us who were lucky enough to know Dr. Franklin socially, we are aware amidst our grief that this loss is much bigger than what we can feel within the institutional confines of the Franklin Humanities Institute and even Duke University. Indeed, his passing has reverberated around the world. While all those who knew him and the very many more who knew of him commemorate him and wish to celebrate his life and achievements, we still urgently need to follow in the giant footsteps left by his scholarly stride. Scholarship was Dr. Franklin's ultimate passion: he felt that the hard-earned conclusions from an analytical investigation of history, society, and culture blazed the way toward creating a better world. Continuing on this scholarly path in the most rigorous way would be the tribute that I know he would most appreciate from the FHI where we proudly bear his name. Srinivas Aravamudan Director, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute