John Hope Franklin, “a towering scholar and pioneer of African-American studies who wrote the seminal text on the black experience in the U.S.,” died yesterday of congestive heart failure at the Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He was 94. As an Associated Press obituary notes, that seminal book was From Slavery to Freedom, which detailed how “Black patriots fought at Lexington and Concord …. They crossed the Delaware with Washington and explored with Lewis and Clark,” and was “based on research Franklin conducted in libraries and archives that didn’t allow him to eat lunch or use the bathroom because he was black.” It has since sold over 3.5 million copies and is required reading in many schools.

”He was working in a profession that more or less banned him at the outset and ended up its leading practitioner,” said Tim Tyson, who as a colleague of Franklin’s in the history department at Duke.

Franklin was an activist-scholar virtually by dint of his work ethic. As the AP report notes, “As a scholar, his research helped Thurgood Marshall and his team at the NAACP win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that barred the doctrine of ”separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools … He was the first black department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke; and the first black president of the American Historical Association.”

Franklin continued to be active until very near the end of his long life, chairing committees and writing books and conducting research, and last fall he called the election of Barack Obama, ”one of the most historic moments, if not the most historic moment, in the history of this country.”

Yesterday, Obama said, ”Because of the life John Hope Franklin lived, the public service he rendered, and the scholarship that was the mark of his distinguished career, we all have a richer understanding of who we are as Americans and our journey as a people.”

Below, Franklin, at age 93, talks about meeting writer James Weldon Johnson.