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CONTACT:  Russell Guerrero

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July 1, 2009

Trinity Professor Arturo Madrid Receives John Hope Franklin Award

SAN ANTONIO – Arturo Madrid, the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Trinity University, has been honored with the 2009 Dr. John Hope Franklin Award given by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine. Dr. Madrid received the award for “intellectual excellence and integrity in research in scholarship.”  The award is named after leading African-American educator John Hope Franklin, who helped create the field of African-American studies and who wrote the groundbreaking book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans in 1947. An educator for six decades, Dr. Franklin died in March at the age of 94.

This was the fifth time that Diverse has presented the prestigious award.  Past recipients have included The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Dr. Johnnetta Cole, president emeritus of Spelman College; and poet Maya Angelou.

The Franklin Award is the latest honor to be bestowed on Dr. Madrid, who has had a distinguished career in higher education.  He served as the national director of the Ford Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship Program for Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans. He was also the director of the U.S. Education Department’s Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education.

In 1984, he founded the Tomás Rivera Center, the nation’s first institute for policy studies on Latino issues.

Recently, Dr. Madrid was a member of the U.S. Commission on the Future of Higher Education and was a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and National Academy for Public Administration.  He also served on the board of the Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education.

Dr. Madrid has received the Matt Garcia Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Tomás Rivera Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of California, Riverside, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Ford Salute to Education. In addition, he received the Charles Frankel Prize by the National Endowment of the Humanities.

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