2018 Celebration:
Race Awareness in America
Honoring 2018
Franklin Founder Award winners
Dr. Robert W. Bogle and The Philadelphia Tribune
2018 Photos by Deborah Boardman Photography
The program was presented in memory of William T. Coleman, Jr.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 12, 2018
9-11 AM: Seminar About Race Awareness in America (Free)
Benjamin Franklin Hall, American Philosophical Society, 427 Chestnut Street
Dr. Robert Mason Hauser, Executive Officer, American Philosophical Society, Moderator, What's the Matter with American Schools?
Dr. Jean R. Soderlund, Professor Emeritus, Lehigh University – Brothers No More? Lenapes and Colonists in the Delaware Valley
Dr. Emma Lapsansky, Emeritus Professor of History, Haverford College – Complexity and Nuance: Benjamin Franklin, William T. Coleman and a Serpantine Narrative of Race in America
11:15 AM-12 PM: Public Procession To Franklin’s Grave (Free)
Please join other participants to march with their emblems and flags from Library Hall of the American Philosophical Society to the Christ Church Burial Ground at 5th and Arch Streets.
12-1:45 PM: Luncheon And Presentation Of Franklin Founder Awards (Registration required)
Keynote addresses by Dr. Robert W. Bogle and presentation of the Franklin Founder Awards.
Museum of the American Revolution, 101 S. 3rd Street, Philadelphia
About Dr. Robert Bogle and The Philadelphia Tribune
The Franklin Founder Award will be presented at a luncheon to Dr. Robert W. Bogle, the president and CEO of The Philadelphia Tribune, and to the newspaper itself as the oldest continually publishing African-American newspaper in the country. The Tribune has been the voice of African Americans in the Greater Philadelphia area since 1884.
In addition to his leadership of the newspaper, Dr. Bogle is chairman of the Hospitals and Higher Education Facilities Authority of Philadelphia and serves as a commissioner of the Delaware Valley River Port Authority. And like his fellow newspaperman Dr. Franklin, Dr. Bogle received an honorary degree in Humane Letters for his civic contributions.
About Robert M. Hauser
Robert Mason Hauser is Executive Officer of the American Philosophical Society. From 2010 to 2017, he served as Executive Director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He is Vilas Research Professor and Samuel Stouffer Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been an investigator on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) since 1969 and led the study from 1980 to 2010. The WLS, which began as a study of post-secondary education, has followed the lives of more than 10,000 Wisconsin High School graduates of 1957 for 60 years and has become a national resource for bio-social research on health and retirement. While at the UW-Madison, he directed the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Center for Demography and Ecology. Hauser’s research interests include statistical methodology, trends in social mobility and in educational progression and achievement, the uses of educational assessment as a policy tool, and changes in socioeconomic standing, cognition, health, and well-being across the life course.
About Jean R. Soderlund
Jean R. Solderlund is a professor of history emeritus at Lehigh University whose most recent book Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society before William Penn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) won the Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association. She has published numerous articles and books on the history of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and abolitionism in early Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Her Temple University Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1985 by Princeton University Press as Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit and she co-authored with Gary B. Nash, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath, published by Oxford University Press (1991). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Witnesses: Natives and Colonists in Colonial West New Jersey,” is a social history focusing on personal and political interaction among Native Americans, African Americans, Quakers, Swedes, Finns, and other European colonists.
About Emma J. Lapsansky
Emma Jones Lapsansky is Emeritus Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, PA, where she continues to teach and to consult with students and with scholars who visit Haverford’s Quaker Collections.
After a one-year break in her undergraduate education to work in the Mississippi civil rights movement with the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, she received her BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania, and her doctorate in American Civilization from the same institution. Her research interests include Quaker history, African-American history and especially the intersection between the two, as well as Pennsylvania history, the American West, and various aspects of American social and material-culture history.
Some of her recent publications include Quaker Aesthetics (Univ of Pa Press, 2003, with Anne Verplanck); Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the American Colonization Movement (Penn State University Press,2005, with Margaret Hope Bacon. Pb 2007), and contributed essays to Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World (Yale Univ Press, 2006) and Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth , edited by Randall Miller, William Pencak, et al. (Penn State University Press, 2003). Her article salso include a contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford University Press, 2013); to Quakers and Abolition, edited by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank (University of Illinois Press, 2014) ; and to an anthology edited by Richard Allen and Rosemary Moore on Quakers’ “transition” period after the death of the 17th century founder George Fox, forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press; as well as entries in Darlene Clark Hine, Encyclopedia of African American Women, 2005; Billy G. Smith, ed. Encyclopedia of Colonial America (2003); Margery Post Abbott, et al, Historical Dictionary of Quakerism (2002); Encyclopedia of Violence, (2001); Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture, (2001); and the online Encyclopedia of Philadelphia (2009-), of which she serves on the editorial board.
With Gary Nash and Clayborne Carson, Lapsansky has authored Struggle for Freedom, a college text on African American History, the third edition of which appeared in 2018. She is also a co- author on the Pearson Education high-school American History text.
Lapsansky frequently consults to museums and to pre-collegiate curriculum developers on enriching and enlivening public history and classroom history presentations, as well as to authors seeking editorial and/or research advice. See has been an invited lecturer at Earlham College, Guilford College, and George Fox College, Villanova University, and University of Pennsylvania, among others. She is currently at work on two projects: a history of a Bryn Mawr Quaker family; and a study of a mid-twentieth-century Philadelphia multi-cultural intentional community.
Having been an active member of the Organization of American Historians and of the Friends Historical Association, a Board member of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and a past board member of Friends Central School, she currently teaches Quaker History and First-Year Writing at Haverford College.
Dr. Lapsansky's article, "Franklin and the Vexing Question of Race in America" can be found here.
Sponsored in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation