May 18, 2021 3 min read

Dr. Robert Michael Franklin Jr., president-emeritus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., will be the keynote speaker at Washington & Jefferson College’s 22nd commencement ceremony.

The ceremony will be held Sunday at Wild Things Park in Washington.

Franklin served as president of Morehouse from 2007 to 2012 and is currently a senior adviser to the president of Emory University. He also is the James T. and Berta R. Laney Professor in Moral Leadership at Emory.

He has served as the director of the interfaith religion department at Chautauqua Institution and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He also is presidential fellow for the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership at Morehouse College.

Franklin was the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at Emory University, where he provided leadership for a universitywide initiative titled, “Confronting the Human Condition and the Human Experience,” and was a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the law school.

He provides commentary for the National Public Radio (NPR) program, “All Things Considered,” and weekly commentary for Atlantic Interfaith Broadcasting Television.

Franklin has served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard Divinity School, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School and at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, where he gained a national reputation as director of Black Church Studies. He also has served as program officer in Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation, and as an adviser to the foundation’s president on future funding for religion and public life initiatives. Franklin also was invited by American film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg to prepare an online study guide for the congregational use of “The Prince of Egypt,” a Dreamworks film, in 1999. Franklin also served as an adviser to the History Channel’s presentation, “The Bible.”

In 1997, Franklin assumed the presidency of the interdenominational Theological Center, the graduate theological seminary of the Atlanta University Center consortium, and served until 2002. He served as Theologian in Residence for the 2005 season at the Chautauqua Institution.

Franklin is the author of four books: “Moral Leadership: Integrity, Courage, Imagination”; “Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African-American Communities”; “Another Day’s Journey: Black Churches Confronting the American Crisis”; and “Liberating Vision: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African-American Thought.” He also penned the foreword to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” reprinted by Trinity Forum in 2012.

Franklin worked with three U.S. presidents on various initiatives (President Clinton’s “One America” initiative; President Bush’s “Faith Based Advisory Committee”; and President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative).

Active in a range of organizations, Franklin serves on the boards of the Salvation Army, the CNN Dialogues Advisory Committee, and NASA’s 100-year Starship Project Advisory Board directed by former astronaut, Dr. Mae Jemison.

Franklin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse in 1975 with a degree in political science and religion, and earned a Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School in 1978. He was a 1973 English Speaking Union Scholar at the University of Durham, U.K., and earned a doctorate in ethics and society, and religion and the social sciences from the University of Chicago in 1985.