John Hope Franklin, who died on 25 March, 2009, was an American historian whose documentation of the struggles of black people in his country earned him the USA’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As author of the seminal 1947 text From Slavery to Freedom, which sold over three million copies and charted the history of African-Americans, he shaped thinking on black history. He was also a key figure in breaking down barriers of racial discrimination in academia and contributing to the legal battle for civil rights.

Born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma on 2 January, 1915, he was named after the pioneering African-American educator John Hope. Furthermore his father was the first black judge to sit on a state court and was a witness to the bloody race riot in Tulsa in 1921.

He attended the black university Fisk in Nashville, Tennessee and studied under the tutelage of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis. He graduated in 1935, earned his PhD in 1941, and published his first book in 1943.

Despite his academic prowess, his career was dogged by discrimination – much of his research for From Slavery to Freedom was done in segregated libraries where the white librarians would not help him.

He taught at another predominantly black institution, Howard University, from 1947 to 1956 before being offered the position of chair of the history department at Brooklyn College in New York, making him the first black person to head a major history department.

In the 1950s he was also part of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Legal Defense Fund which fought the landmark Brown v Board of Education case that outlawed racial segregation in American public schools.

In the 1960s he became a professor and then head of his department at the University of Chicago and also marched alongside Martin Luther King . It was this combination of activism and high academic standards that made him such a weighty figure in the battle for equality.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1995. His other honours include giving the Jefferson Lecture in 1976 (the first African-American to do so), several more prestigious university roles, the Kluge Prize for Humanities in 2006, and the naming of three academic centres in recognition of his work.

He died of heart failure at the medical centre of one of his former universities, Duke in Durham, North Carolina, aged 94. He was survived by a son. His wife Aurelia, a college sweetheart whom he married in 1940, died in 1999.