(Her play, Throw Thunder At This House, was about the first Black undergraduate to attend UT, and was performed at Skidmore College in 1979).

At college she had taken courses on short-story writing, but she developed an interest in theater after witnessing Barbara Ann Teer and James Anderson perform live on stage in Rosalyn Drexler's Obie Award-winning one-act musical Home Movies in 1964 at the Judson Poet's Theatre, in the Church's main Meeting Room.

She was asked by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to work with Fannie Lou Hamer to help the voter registration drive as part of Freedom Summer.

She printed out copies of the play, which the students held in their hands and used as their reading material (it included lines they had contributed).

On the advice of her agent, Jim Bohan,[10] Franklin sent her work out to theaters using just her initials, J.e., and not her name, Jennie Elizabeth, because "They didn't want women.

From 1967 to 1968 she worked as an analyst at the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. Franklin first heard the term "institutional white racism" from the Kerner Commission in 1968.

"[7] Franklin moved back to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild, which had been founded by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore, and Walter Christmas as a response to the exclusion they had experienced from the white literary world of New York.

Franklin later changed the title of the play at the behest of her agent (it was eventually called Miss Honey's Young'uns (1994)).

"[3] It was finished in 1969, but Bass complained that she had written a play for the stage, not for the camera, and it was too long (one hour and thirty minutes) for the time slot for television.

She cut the teleplay script to fifty-seven and a half minutes including the one-minute "teaser" she had to write to introduce the television audience to the central conflict of the play.

One critic, who had only read the script, wrote in his review "The danger lies in reducing a subtle and complicated story involving many strong characters into a Cinderella with Prince Charming looking like a college education.

However, Woodie King Jr., who had given Franklin her start in New York theatre years beforehand with The In-Crowd, was interested in staging the play.

The company received funding from a small grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and from the Henry Street Settlement.

The King and I went to one of her works which was playing then at the Negro Ensemble Company [Rosalee Pritchett, by Barbara Molette and Carlton Mollette], and we both knew that she was the one.

It played first at the original location of the New Federal Theatre in the St. Augustine's Church (Manhattan) basement on Henry Street.

[1] The production was then moved to the Off-Broadway Theatre de Lys,[15] on the west of Greenwich Village, where, starting on June 16, 1971, it played for a record six-month run of 247 performances.

[20] A few months after the play opened Off-Broadway, another producer offered a road contract to tour four major cities: Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Detroit.

Franklin was invited to speak at public events, including Barbara Ann Teer's Sunday Symposium Series at the National Black Theatre.

In 1986, The McGinn-Cazale Second Stage Theater in New York City had a revival of Black Girl as part of its series on American Classics, directed by Glenda Dickerson and starring a young Angela Bassett as Billie Jean, as well as Ernestine Jackson as Mama Rosie.

(Other members of the cast included Louise Stubbs Gloria Edwards, and Loretta Greene, who reprised their roles from the play).

While she managed to get them to hire Peggy Pettitt, rather than "a light-bright-damned-near-white actress",[10] to play Billie Jean, against her wishes they cast Claudia McNeil, who had been in A Raisin in the Sun, as Mu'Dear.

[10] Franklin tried to remove a scene where the young female character of Billie Jean disrobes in front of the camera; it stayed in the film, albeit without nudity.

The poster for the film "showed a blow-up of Norma Faye's face, teeth snarling in mad-dog fashion, threatening Billie Jean with a knife.

"[10] After Franklin threatened to register her disapproval at every newspaper or television interview and speaking engagement, "In the next few days the illustration appeared without the knife.

[28] The film received mixed reviews, with the mainstream New York Times critic describing it as "a poor movie that makes it look as if there never had been a good play.

Miss Honey's Young'Uns, a revised version of May-Mau Room, was published in Black Drama in America: An Anthology, edited by Darwin T. Turner (Howard University Press, 1994).

Other plays of Franklin include Cut Out the Lights And Call the Law (1972), CrUSAde for Justice (1975), Another Morning Rising (1976), and The Hand-Me-Downs (1978).

From 1982 to 1989, she was the resident playwright at Brown University, where she worked with George Houston Bass and Rhett Jones, co-founders of Rites and Reason Theatre.

A graduate student in her script analysis course, Tisch Jones, the daughter of Geneva Handy Southall, asked to stage her work for the Playwrights Festival as part of her degree.

In April 2021, during the pandemic, she joined a class, "African American Plays from Stage to Screen" at Middlebury College remotely to talk about her career and to "provide advice for the next generation of creative minds.