“A False Picture of Negro Progress”: John Hope Franklin, Racial Liberalism, and the Political (Mis)uses of Black History during the 1963 Emancipation Centennial

This article scrutinizes public contestations over Black history during 1963’s Emancipation Centennial. Specifically, it investigates how the Kennedy administration censored the historian John Hope Franklin’s drafts for the chief commemorative effort Freedom to the Free , a history of civil rights since 1863. Reflecting the hubris of mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism, these edits excised white supremacy from American history, instead celebrating a confining definition of racial progress that prioritized Black equalization, adjustment, and incorporation into a deracialized liberal nationhood. The censoring of Franklin’s dissident Americanism therefore highlights how racial liberalism simultaneously promoted and suppressed Black history, historians, and public figures more generally.