[Chronicle]

Oct. 28, 1993
Vol. 13, No. 5

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    Gray, Franklin awarded 1993 Charles Frankel Prize

    Hanna Gray, Professor in History and President Emeritus, and John Hope Franklin, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History, have each been awarded the Charles Frankel Prize for 1993 by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

    Franklin and Gray received their awards from President Bill Clinton at a White House ceremony on Oct. 7.

    The Frankel Prize is awarded each year to five Americans who have made outstanding contributions to the public's understanding of history, literature, philosophy or other subjects in the humanities. The other 1993 recipients are Ricardo Alegria, a noted Puerto Rican historian and anthropologist of Caribbean culture; Andrew Heiskell, founding chairman of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities and former chief executive of Time Inc.; and Laurel Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian.

    In presenting the award to Gray, President Clinton said, "Hanna Holborn Gray has had a truly remarkable career. She served for 15 years as president of the University of Chicago, where she became a highly visible and widely acclaimed advocate for higher education. She has been honored for her scholarship, her words and her work in many ways, especially in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our country's highest civilian award. She deserves greatly the award she receives today."

    In presenting the award to Franklin, President Clinton stated, "In a 50-year career as a writer and a teacher, historian John Hope Franklin has been a leading scholar of African-American studies and an active voice in the social transformation of America. He's won nearly 100 honorary degrees. He's served on the National Council of Humanities. His writings have illuminated his subject for a whole generation after generation of young readers. I was once one of them -- a reader, and young -- reading John Hope Franklin."

    Clinton also added that "one of the great moments of our 1992 campaign was when John Hope Franklin came on one of our bus trips with us, and Al Gore and Tipper and Hillary and I sat and had a chance to visit with him, and really learn something from a man who has mastered the mystery of America."

    The Frankel Prize, which carries a stipend of $5,000 for each honoree, commemorates the late Charles Frankel, whose varied career integrated scholarship and public service, including service as professor of philosophy at Columbia, as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, and as the first director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. This is the fifth year that the Frankel Prize has been awarded. Previous Frankel Prize recipients include the late Allan Bloom, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought.