A giant in the field of Asian American studies passed away last week:  Franklin Odo.  He was a founder of Asian American studies in the early 1970s; he co-edited the ur-textbook out of UCLA, ROOTS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN READER (1971) and was a champion, teacher, mentor, public historian, and activist. He held a PhD in Japanese and Asian history from Princeton and taught ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii and taught Asian American studies during the 1990s on the East Coast, at Hunter College, Penn, University of Maryland, and most recently at Amherst College.  He was visiting professor at Columbia from 1995-97 (during the time of the ethnic studies strike) and the first to offer Asian American studies classes at Columbia.  He was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Asian American Studies Center in 1997, where he served until 2010. He authored No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawaii during World War II (2004); edited the Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (2004), and Voices from the Canefields, on the folksongs of Japanese immigrants working on Hawaii sugar plantations (2012).  He also was the Principal Investigator of an oral history project on Japanese Americans for Butler’s oral history collection.

Beyond all his accomplishments and contributions, we remember Franklin as a warm and generous teacher and mentor; a principled and committed activist, who was soft-spoken but never afraid to speak truth to power; a fine builder of relationships, networks, and institutions.  Rest in power, Franklin, rest in peace.

Read more about his accomplishments throughout his life here.