In the early fifties, after he started his flying-circuit road show, Franklin became a man of wealth as the Detroit church grew and his national reputation spread. He looked the part of an ecclesiastical grandee, with his silk suits of cream and white, alligator shoes, diamond jewelry, and big Cadillac. The Flame Show Bar, the 20 Grand, the Ebony Room at the Gotham Hotel, the nightlife and good life—it was all as much a part of him as the sanctity of his pulpit. Smokey Robinson, a childhood friend of Cecil Franklin, recounted the time when they first met and were playing in a vacant field in the neighborhood and Cecil asked, “Wanna see my new house?” Cecil pointed to a mansion nearby. “I approach the house hesitantly,” Robinson later wrote. “Once inside, I’m awestruck—oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Franklin was raising five children in that elegant home; four of them—the three girls and Cecil—were his children with his second wife, Barbara Vernice Siggers, who years earlier had left him to return to Buffalo before dying at only thirty-four. There was also in his brood an adopted son, Vaughn, and, apart from the family, a daughter he had fathered with a girl barely in her teens during his Memphis years.
The Man with the Million Dollar Voice, they called C.L. And the Rabbi. And the Learned one. And the High Priest of Soul Preaching. And Black Beauty. His sermons were so well known that when he was on the road the audience would demand to hear one of his greatest hits, most often “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” or “Dry Bones in the Valley” or “Give Me This Mountain.” People knew his sermons not only from previous performances but from radio broadcasts and the record player. His sermons had been recorded and sold as albums first on the JVB label and then by Chess Records in Chicago, with royalties to him of thirty to thirty-five cents a record. On the road, Franklin recalled during an oral interview, “I would preach whatever the [local] deejay had been playing and what was indicated to the deejay that the people liked most. At first I resented those requests. I had the attitude that I would have at the church—that people should be ready to listen to whatever I chose to preach on, but people are not like that. They want to hear what they have been hearing. . . . They usually responded strongly. Some people shouted and some people hollered at me, waved their hands, stand up and point at you. It gave me a thrill to see people react that way, because I felt that in some way it was helpful to them, if nothing more than to raise their spirits.”
The interplay of story and storyteller created the Franklin magic. He was a master at building a homily with tension and expectation and using his voice as instrumental accompaniment. Rev. Nicholas Hood, his contemporary in Detroit, pastor at the more sedate Plymouth Congregational Church, would sometimes slip over to New Bethel Baptist on Sunday nights just to marvel at the theatrics, taking note of what he called “the pickup” in the sermon—“Mmmmhmmm, uuhuuuh”—that he later heard echoes of in Aretha’s gospel-soul style. Franklin’s momentum carried him from speech to hum to song, a style captured evocatively in a theology thesis by John R. Bryant: “The singing usually comes during the conclusion, but before he gets to that point he does what is referred to as ‘tuning up.’ Franklin does this by humming after every phrase. When he finds a comfortable pitch, he begins preaching at the pitch of his hum. At this time he is preaching a set rhythm and his organist will join in with chords of accompaniment. At this time one experiences what might be called black opera. It is without a doubt a spiritual art.”
The pitch of his hum, in a metaphorical sense, was a bit much for many of the other black ministers in Detroit. They admired C.L.’s preaching but were jealous of his immense following and questioned his personal behavior and financial reliability. Even some members of his own parish questioned whether he had misused the urban renewal funds, but when they disclosed their findings and called for a vote of confidence, many hundreds sided with the preacher and only seven against him. Rev. Hood, who came out of New England but had led a church in New Orleans before arriving in Detroit, said his southern experience helped him understand Franklin, and he exempted himself from judging the showy reverend too harshly, even while saying, “Morally he was not up to par; he was very, very loose.” Hood said he felt no direct competition with New Bethel because his own Plymouth Congregational was affiliated more closely with Detroit’s black establishment, stocked with doctors and lawyers and other professionals trained at historically black colleges founded by Congregational missionaries, including Howard University in Washington, Fisk in Nashville, and Dillard in New Orleans. But as Franklin turned toward civil rights activism in the first months of 1963, Hood’s attitude seemed to be an exception. To take a leadership role in the Detroit movement, Franklin would have to overcome doubters and detractors in his own community.
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The cause of civil rights, that mighty stream of righteousness, had many currents in the Detroit of 1963. There was the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the largest affiliate in the nation, with its focus on education and the formal processes of working through the system. There was the United Auto Workers, which, under Walter Reuther and his brothers, Roy and Victor, had made an unequivocal moral and financial commitment to civil rights action and legislation. There was the Trade Union Leadership Council, an African American offshoot of the UAW chartered in 1956 and led by Horace Sheffield and Buddy Battle, with a more concentrated focus on black advancement and leadership in the Detroit labor force. There was a potent group of activist black lawyers, led by George Crockett, Damon Keith, and John Conyers Jr., who were working through the legal system with vigor and fluidity for both moderate and left-leaning civil rights institutions. There was the Michigan Chronicle, with its columnists and editorialists advancing the cause. There was an incipient black nationalist faction led by the Reverend Albert Cleage (rhymes with “vague,” which he most decidedly was not), the outspoken pastor of Central Congregational Church, who also had a family publishing arm with the pamphlet Illustrated News. There was the Baptist Ministerial Alliance, an influential and mostly cautious organization of local black pastors. And there was the city leadership of Mayor Cavanagh and Police Commissioner Edwards, who had taken office committed to improving Detroit’s civil rights record. All of these currents were flowing in the same general direction, but not always smoothly, when Franklin, responding to a plea over the telephone from Mahalia Jackson, decided he should lead a grand action that might bring the passion of the southern civil rights movement to the northern city. Franklin and the famous gospel singer were “like brother and sister,” his daughter Erma later recalled, and when Mahalia urged C.L. to sponsor a fundraising event for the cause, he readily agreed without considering the difficulties that might entail.
The makings of a united front appeared possible at first, when Franklin, at a meeting held in the offices of the Detroit Urban League, was elected general chairman of an as-yet-unnamed local civil rights coalition. The expressed mission of this umbrella group was to sponsor an event in Detroit supporting the most recent civil rights protests in Birmingham led by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, while at the same time calling attention to unmet needs of blacks in Detroit. Only a month earlier, on April 12, King had been arrested in Alabama’s largest city, and while still behind bars four days later, he had written—in the margins of a newspaper and on other scraps of paper—a pivotal statement of purpose, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in response to seven white clergymen who had called his protest activities unwise and untimely. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed,” King wrote. “Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was ‘well-timed’ in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.” Franklin’s plan was to invite King to Detroit to participate in a march and rally with the intention of raising not only conscious
ness but as much as $100,000 for the cause, most of it to go to the SCLC and its direct-action campaign. The leadership of Franklin’s new group, while ostensibly representing a coalition, was dominated by close associates, including James Del Rio, his lawyer; Benjamin McFall, a wealthy funeral home director who was a trustee at New Bethel Baptist; and Thomas H. Shelby Jr., the minister of music at New Bethel, who was asked to assemble an all-city gospel choir for the next mass meeting, which was to be held at the new New Bethel Baptist in the refurbished Oriole Theater on May 17.
The first note of concern came two days before that second meeting, when the activist lawyers Conyers, Keith, and Crockett met at the Lucy Thurman Branch of the YWCA with a different set of pastors, including the two Congregational ministers, the mainstream Hood and more radical Cleage, along with Sheffield and Battle from the black labor group and a few white representatives of the autoworkers union. They too wanted to raise funds for King and the SCLC. Should they align with Franklin? Was he capable of running such a vital political enterprise? Would they be co-opted by him, or should they try to co-opt him? According to a memo written by Joseph E. Coles, who reported to the city’s commission on community relations and was in attendance, they decided to delay answering those questions until after the mass meeting at Franklin’s church. “It was thought if unity could be established by the two groups any drive would be more effective,” Coles wrote.
If defined by numbers and passionate rhetoric, the May 17 meeting seemed to be a rollicking success. On a rainy Friday night, some eight hundred people filed into New Bethel for a long night of speeches, declarations, and organizational decisions. With Franklin presiding from the pulpit, it was decided to name the group the Detroit Council for Human Rights (DCHR), and an early June date was set for a Walk to Freedom down Woodward Avenue, followed by a rally at Cobo Hall, both starring King. The church collection baskets brought in five hundred dollars on the spot, with pledges for thousands more. At the end, the council issued a Declaration of Detroit that echoed King’s Birmingham letter in its sense of urgency and employed some of the formal phraseology of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, from a hundred years earlier: “Comprising nearly 30 percent of the population of this city and 70 percent of us existing in substandard housing; denied after 100 years of Constitutional freedom the full measure of the social contract, we do hereby declare before God and all men this 17th day of May in the Year of our Lord 1963, that we will no longer abide, tolerate or countenance this manifest injustice. . . . Be it also known that where in the past we have been deluded by promises, and made comfortable by small steps of progress, we shall not rest now until our lot is equal to the promises of the Constitution, not only of the United States, but of the State of Michigan, nor shall we slacken our pace while others of our color and kind, wherever they may abide, are denied the full measure of freedom.”
Serious divisions became apparent soon after that meeting, from both ends of the civil rights spectrum. One problem involved the NAACP, which, though split internally, declined to endorse the march formally or join the DCHR, keeping some distance from both Rev. Franklin and Dr. King for different reasons. Another involved Rev. Cleage, who in his speeches and pamphleteering started denouncing all elements of what he considered the complacent old-school leadership, from the NAACP to the Baptist Ministerial Alliance to elements of the labor movement, and at the same time declared that the march and rally should be a decidedly black event, with no leadership role for Walter Reuther or white city officials. Cleage, whose church was in Franklin’s neighborhood, eight blocks up Linwood from New Bethel, did not see Franklin as part of that outdated set but as a populist outsider with whom he could align, at least temporarily, to push a more revolutionary agenda. Although not as outspoken as Cleage, Franklin had expressed his own critique of the black establishment as early as 1956, when he wrote a two-page letter to the Michigan Chronicle saying that when he got his hair cut at the barbershop he could not find anyone who knew what the NAACP was doing.
Franklin’s preemptive bid to seize local leadership revealed, among other things, the vulnerability of the NAACP to a changing mood within the larger struggle. The chapter represented by far the largest and most diverse membership of any civil rights institution, with twenty-nine thousand dues-paying Detroiters. Even Cleage was on the board of directors, and the membership rolls included almost all of the city’s black ministers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, ranging from A. A. Banks at Second Baptist to Berry Gordy Jr. at Motown. When the NAACP staged a major affair, anyone in town who supported the larger cause was expected to be there, the tickets as coveted as those to the annual black-tie Cotillion Ball. In April alone, two NAACP events had been held in the largest ballroom at Cobo Hall, each attracting crowds of more than 1,200 Detroiters, first a hundred-year celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, with entertainment provided by Ziggy Johnson, the emcee at the 20 Grand, and Motown’s Stevie Wonder, and two weeks later an annual “Fight for Freedom” dinner that brought in Dick Gregory, the activist comedian. But going to banquets was one thing, agreeing on politics and methods was quite another, and different factions within the NAACP were angling for control. In the final days of 1962, there had been an intense power struggle over the local presidency that was still reverberating months later. Edward Turner, the incumbent, had been challenged by his chapter’s own nominating committee, which sought to replace him with Ernest Shell, a younger and more activist insurance executive. Turner, while keeping secret the fact that he was suffering from a fatal cancer and would be dead within a half year, was able to hold his position with the support of more conservative black ministers, who on election day turned out busloads of elderly churchgoers to vote for him.
The Detroit chapter’s daily affairs were run by its executive secretary, Arthur L. Johnson, who was more aggressive than Turner but had his own conflicting impulses. Johnson had been friends with King since 1944, when they were in the same freshman class at Morehouse College in Atlanta, King as a mere fifteen-year-old who had gained early admission. They were both sociology majors, in many of the same classes, and were members of the Morehouse chapter of the NAACP. Johnson thought of young King as a quiet fellow, not a leader. He could not see then, he later noted, that “he was marked for greatness.” And now, two decades later, as much as Johnson had come to admire King’s bold actions and soaring rhetoric, he found himself defending the NAACP’s interests against the rising power of King’s SCLC. The two groups were competing not only for prestige but also for money. Franklin’s idea of using the Detroit march and rally exclusively as a fundraiser for King and the SCLC bothered Johnson and others in the NAACP chapter, who were always scraping for funds. After discussing the problem at several internal meetings, they decided to dispatch a delegation led by Rev. Banks to meet with Franklin and his lawyer, James Del Rio, to see if a compromise could be reached that might also allow the NAACP to benefit from the Detroit event and at the same time tamp down criticism from Cleage, Franklin’s newfound firebrand ally.
None of that worked. Franklin insisted that any money collected during the Walk to Freedom not going to the SCLC be kept for the development of the Detroit Council for Human Rights. And once Cleage heard about attempts to constrain him, he grew only more vocal. In public comments, he ridiculed Banks and the Baptist Ministerial Alliance. In the Illustrated News, he attacked the NAACP and “Old Guard Negro Leaders” for conducting “a continuing campaign of harassment” against the Freedom March merely because the money was going to King and the SCLC. But the event was gaining momentum anyway, Cleage wrote, and the old guard was “being left on the side of the road” and “no longer leading the freedom struggle.” At a banquet in his honor at Cobo Hall (tribute banquets seemed to be biweekly rituals in black Detroit then), Cleage was joined on the podium and praised by Paul Zuber, a black attorney from Harlem. Zuber, a registered Republican who was becoming increasingly radicalized like Cleage, had led school desegregation efforts in New Rochelle, Ne
w York; Englewood, New Jersey; Chicago; and other northern outposts, constantly challenging the methodical approach of the NAACP, whose leaders considered him a smooth-talking demagogue. “The Negro revolt is on,” Zuber declared at the Cleage banquet, echoing the words of the honoree. “We must tell our leaders, if you don’t want to do it, get out of the way.”
The combination of Cleage’s assertiveness and Franklin’s relative lack of experience and colorful reputation inspired several attempts in late May and early June to either dethrone Franklin or surround him with steadier hands. As the contretemps continued, there was some talk of trying to cancel the event altogether, but instead the date was pushed back two weeks to June 23, a day with haunting resonance in Detroit: it was a date close to the twentieth anniversary of the violent 1943 race riots. At one point there was an attempt to have Franklin step down from the chairmanship in favor of two men of vastly different backgrounds: John Conyers Jr., who served as counsel for the Trade Union Leadership Council and came from a family background in the UAW, where his father had been a shop steward and organizer; and Dr. Dewitt T. Burton, one of Detroit’s leading black physicians, a pillar of the old-line elite whose debutante daughter’s coming-out party at a lavish Pink Ball at the Sheraton Cadillac’s Crystal Ballroom was covered in Jet magazine. But Franklin was a mountain not easily moved, and Conyers and Burton relented. In his Franklin biography, Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore recounted an encounter Franklin had at a session of the Baptist Ministerial Alliance where he was denied speaking privileges to make his case because it was said he had not paid his dues. When the BMA president, Rev. A. L. Merritt, refused to let Franklin have the floor, Salvatore wrote, “Franklin went after him angrily and was restrained.”
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