Beyond this, their shared passion for education, for imagining their lives beyond the confines of Mississippi, tied them closer. In Barbara, Clarence found a patient and gifted woman with a level of sophistication that must have been attractive to this yet rough-hewn young man. In Clarence, Barbara found a dynamo whose power and talent, for all the lack of polish, marked him as unusual. Thus, on the rainy evening of June 3, 1936, they married at the home of a deacon of Macedonia Baptist Church. “We had informed the people [in the church] that we wanted to have the ceremony out there,” he recalled, and a number of the congregation were in attendance. Reverend W. M. McKennis officiated. Shortly thereafter, in a fashion that echoed his own experience, C. L. legally adopted young Vaughn as his son.49
Once again, marriage did not alter Franklin’s frenetic pace. While Barbara remained with her family in Shelby, her husband continued both his wide-flung ministry and his efforts to broaden his mind. As he had for a number of years, Benjamin Perkins remained an important, helpful influence. C. L.’s guest appearances in Perkins’s Memphis pulpit attracted attention, and sometime in 1937 or 1938, a Memphis church asked him to add their congregation to his monthly circuit.
Established in 1927, First Baptist Bungalow became the second Afro-Baptist church in the North Memphis neighborhood of Douglass Park, named after the nineteenth-century black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. A very poor neighborhood, it paradoxically contained an unusually high percentage of home owners. (These small, “shotgun” houses of two or three rooms off a central hall—down which one could shoot a gun from front to back door without hitting anything—were originally developed in 1900 as a segregated black enclave.) During the 1920s, the community supported an elementary school with a breakfast program and clothes exchange for the poorest children. In 1931, the Parents-Teachers Association established a welfare committee to raise money and other donations “to see that no child had to stay home due to a lack of clothes.” Six years later, poverty remained widespread in the neighborhood and residents utilized every available sliver of land to nurture and then preserve fruits and vegetables—more than 100,000 jars—for distribution to the neediest in those troubled times. This self-help effort caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, who visited Douglass Park in November 1937, and later praised the community in her nationally syndicated newspaper column.50
While poor, this community possessed an enormous internal cohesion, crafted by men and women of skill and self-confidence, developed in the face of numbing deprivation. For their new preacher, this was a significant turning point. He had gained a foothold in the most dynamic city in the black South and now served a church, albeit for the moment only monthly, that supported the community’s social activism. In time, this experience of bringing religion into the congregation’s daily life would lead Franklin to reimagine the fundamentalist theological positions that had infused his Mississippi ministry. Still, Shelby remained the center of family life, despite the frequent traveling required of the circuit-riding minister. Barbara was there, and one of C. L.’s churches was Mt. Olive, a plantation congregation just “out from Shelby.” While at the church on March 13, 1938, the news reached him that his wife had entered labor with their first child. By the time he got to the house, his daughter, Erma, occupied the rapt attention of both her mother and her brother, Vaughn, who was “looking right down at her” as she nestled in her mother’s arms.51
With all the joy that Erma’s birth brought, it also brought tension. The suggestion of violence that infused the daily exchange of pleasantries between white and black had not lost its power, and the prospect of raising two black children in the heart of the Delta was anything but free of dread and anxiety. As a four-year-old, Vaughn learned that lesson in a fashion that still impressed sixty-one years later. He recalled a Saturday evening, at his Grandmother Siggers’s home in Shelby, when
all of a sudden we heard this here noise. I said Grandma, what’s that, I heard this noise? And she said, be quiet, hush, and her and her sons and her started running around blowing out candles. And I said, what’s wrong? Said shut up, hush, don’t say anything. And they were looking out the windows and all these men on horses, I remember looking out, these men on horses with these white robes were going by the house. And I found out that was the Klan, the Ku Klux Klan, passing by the house, it was on a Saturday night. I’ll never forget that. But I didn’t know what it was all about then.52
The presence of an active Klan organization only reinforced C. L.’s desire to leave the area. His family responsibilities compounded his intent. As Vaughn recalled, his father “was determined by his experiences not to let us [his children] face the same obstacles that he had in order to succeed. He was very rough [adamant] about that.” Nor was Franklin alone in this. His Shelby friend and fellow circuit minister, Joseph H. Kyles, the father of four sons, also decided in 1938 to leave the state for Chicago’s South Side. Their mutual friend and Delta native, Pops Staples, who removed his family to Chicago in 1936, later captured in a haunting stanza the irreducible reality for black Mississippians that all three men vowed not to subject their children to:
They had a hunting season on the rabbit
If you shoot him you go to jail.
The season was always open on me
Nobody needed no bail.53
Within the year the Franklin family followed that well-traveled path carved by thousands of Delta blacks up Highway 61 into Memphis and rented a house at 723 Alston Avenue, in the heart of South Memphis’s black neighborhood. Simultaneously, C. L. accepted a full-time position as pastor at New Salem Baptist Church, but a few blocks from the family residence. His circuit-riding days were over—New Salem could pay a living wage—and the family was now both more secure and in a vibrant city. But C. L. Franklin was not therefore a new man. As Vaughn learned over the years, his father “saw a lot happen in Mississippi, and some of [it] he never forgot.” There was a “bitterness” in him, Vaughn thought, a result of the daily oppressiveness in the Delta, that never fully dissipated. “He might have left Mississippi as an individual,” Vaughn suggested. “But Mississippi never left him inside, deep down.”54
How C. L. Franklin handled these and other potentially volatile emotions would define his future career. Most of his ministerial colleagues, even those equally as talented as this young preacher, never left Mississippi. Those who did, moreover, often found disappointment and failure as they discovered that their eagerness for a sophisticated urban congregation exceeded their talent and ability. Against such odds, relatively few might expect “this little black boy from Mississippi” to succeed. But if he did, Cleo Myles later mused, “don’t you think that [would be] something to talk about?”55
CHAPTER THREE
MOVING ON UP
Memphis, then the blackest major city in the United States, with more than 40 percent of its nearly three hundred thousand people of African descent, moved to rhythms more complex and electric than anything found in the Delta. Beale Street, the heart of the black shopping and entertainment district, was the great crossroads. Working men and women shopped there, and filled the clubs on Saturday evenings. Black professionals maintained their offices on the Street as well, even as many showed only disdain for the blues music that flowed from those clubs onto the sidewalks outside, and street intellectuals and political activists debated solutions for the pervasive segregation that crafted social relations.1
Beale Street pulsated in the minds of many southern blacks as a symbol of the possibilities that did not exist in the rural South. Yet the Street and its city delivered a far tougher reality than that popular promise often imagined. “I love my whiskey and I love my gin,” the Memphis Jug Band sang in its popular “Cocaine Habit Blues” in 1930. “But the way I love my coke is a doggone sin.” The large amounts of cocaine and whiskey that fueled the Street’s excitement inevitably led to violence. “And the business never closes till somebody gets killed,” W. C. Handy sang in his “Beale Street Blues.�
� So renowned was the city’s reputation in the 1930s as the murder capital of the nation that the FBI investigated and confirmed Memphis’s status for fatal violence as well as its regional preeminence as a drug distribution center. “Cocaine could be bought in stores, like aspirin,” one resident remembered. “It came in little flat round containers of wood, known as ‘lids,’ at fifty cents.” With illegal drugs and, until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, illegal liquor came a perfect opportunity for organized crime to build a sales network through local businesses and black street vendors, bribing politicians and police as needed. The profits of this trade rarely enriched black Memphians. Beale Street, the central artery of black Memphis, was a wide-open venue for pleasures of every description. But there also were consequences, in murdered family members, a reported high rate of venereal diseases, and a wrenching poverty that brought people back to the Street every Saturday night in search of some release from the hardness of the week gone by, whatever the cost.2
Scattered among the Beale Street crowds was the city’s diverse ministerial community, their clerical black garb distinctive against the kaleidoscope of colors and designs about them. They, too, shopped, stopped to talk, and gathered in regular meetings to discuss themes for the weekly conversations they initiated with their congregations on Sunday morning. And on the Street ministers could, if they chose, mingle with the folks they rarely saw in their church pews. Almost four decades later, the promise of that potential remained vivid. C. L. recalled, “I guess one of the things that I thought about, I thought that Memphis would expand my mind, my experience, expose me to things that I had never been exposed to in Mississippi.”3
The pulpit C. L. occupied at New Salem Baptist Church, on South Fourth Street just north of Walker Avenue, was at first glance not the most promising. A small congregation in the heart of South Memphis’s expanding black residential district, with the majority of members relatively recent migrants much like himself, the church possessed few financial resources. The plain wooden structure, set on a narrow, densely crowded street, announced as much. When C. L. preached his inaugural sermon in 1939, Memphians already boasted of a distinguished group of Afro-Baptist preachers deeply entrenched in the community. Roy Love, president of the Baptist Pastors’ Alliance, came to Mt. Nebo Baptist in 1926; S. A. Owen, with a master’s degree from Morehouse College, and a leader in the Tennessee Baptist Convention, came to Metropolitan Baptist Church in 1923; T. O. Fuller, a graduate of Shaw University, a major influence among Tennessee Baptists, was the longtime pastor of First Baptist; M. J. Jenkins, a powerful and effective preacher, had sharply increased church membership since arriving at Greater White Stone Baptist in 1924; and W. H. Brewster, the nationally known gospel composer, had been pastor of East Trigg Baptist since 1922. And, of course, Benjamin Perkins, a major figure in the National Baptist Convention, also had his church, which Franklin had visited as a guest. Set against these accomplished and tested preachers, their congregations laced with professional men of means and influence, the young preacher at the small church in South Memphis seemed rather insignificant.4
Yet Franklin remained undaunted. Whatever fears he privately held, however inexperienced he felt, no matter how rustic his mannerisms appeared to sophisticated Memphians, he fervently grasped New Salem’s pulpit. In the intricate labyrinth that was black Memphis’s social order he sensed his relative position, yet he embraced his good fortune. He now looked down Highway 61 into Mississippi, and that changed perspective signaled a major step toward satisfying his old longing.
The origins of Memphis’s future reputation as an open, bawdy city where violence and guile proved more effective than honest ventures lay in its very formation. In 1819, Andrew Jackson, the hero-general of numerous military campaigns against American Indians, together with two business partners, prepared to sell the land atop the fourth and southernmost of the Chickasaw Bluffs, which run along the eastern bank of the Mississippi in Kentucky and Tennessee. Conveniently, the year before, General Jackson had coerced the Chickasaw tribe to cede the lands to him for a pittance. From these strong armed beginnings, the city grew rapidly. During the 1840s, the population grew by almost 400 percent, and it doubled again in the following decade. Of the more than twenty-two thousand residents in 1860, 30 percent were foreign-born, two thirds of them from Ireland; 17 percent were black. Over these years Memphis became a center of commerce and finance at the western edge of a slave-holding state. The Mississippi River provided immediate access to the commercial markets running north and south through the middle of the emerging nation. Even more important were the agricultural lands immediately south of the city. For Memphians, their city defined less Tennessee’s western boundary than it did the northernmost tip of the Mississippi Delta. Money was to be made from the Delta, from the rich, alluvial lands surrounding Memphis and just across the river in Arkansas, from the trade in slaves and the cotton they produced. Plantation owners in turn flocked into the city to conduct business, socialize, and visit the brothels, saloons, and gambling clubs the city was known for even before the Civil War. Many established second homes in the city, and their servants, nannies, valets, mistresses, and laborers sparked the growth of black Memphis.5
But then the Civil War came. The Federal victories throughout the Mississippi valley in the latter years of the war put in motion massive movements of black men and women newly freed by Union armies. Some arrived in Memphis and stayed permanently in the city, despite the persistent racial violence and the ultimate withdrawal of the federal government’s promise of political and civic equality during Reconstruction. By 1870, black Memphians made up 39 percent of the more than 40,000 residents.6
Repeated outbreaks of yellow fever savaged Memphis throughout the 1860s and 1870s. The three episodes in the 1860s were relatively mild. In the worst, in 1867, 550 men and women died of the about 2,500 who were stricken by the fever. The next outbreak, in 1873, devastated the community. Between August and October of that year, yellow fever infected nearly 5,000 Memphians, and approximately 2,000 died. Most of the dead were white residents, as the majority of the city’s 15,000 blacks proved not susceptible. More than half of the whites who perished were among the poorest Irish immigrants who lived in “The Pinch,” a working-class neighborhood near the waterfront, men and women who lacked the economic resources to flee the city as wealthier whites did. Even worse lay ahead. In 1878, 20,000 Memphians contracted the fever, and almost 6,000 died. So vivid were the fearful memories of 1873 that this time, the exodus began immediately following the reports of the first death on August 13. Ultimately more than 25,000 people, again mostly whites, left the city, searching for cooler and safer climates as far north as St. Louis and into the countryside to the east of Memphis. By year’s end, the city’s population had fallen to under 20,000, approximately two-thirds of whom were African American. While some whites returned during 1879, a significant portion never did, and this dramatically altered the face of the city. In the 1880 census an overall decline of 17 percent in the city’s population was noted, but black residents now composed 44 percent of all Memphians. Twenty years later, the city had regained much of its momentum but the immigrant working people had not returned in numbers. In their place, rural southerners, black and white, streamed into the city. In 1900, twenty years since the last epidemic, the city’s population had tripled, while the black portion increased to 48 percent. Only twice between 1880 and 1940 would the city’s blacks slip below 40 percent of the population and then only by a sliver each time. Thus, the postwar migrations and the yellow-fever epidemics restructured the city far beyond their immediate impact. Even during the decades of large European immigration throughout the country, Memphis lacked the diverse enclaves of ethnic whites that marked northern and even some other southern cities, with their commingling of work, entrepreneurship, and leisure, in vivid colors and contrasting tones. Instead, the city’s African American residents evolved a rich and varied culture that gave Memphis its distinctive renown.7
The black world the Franklin family entered in 1939 was relatively youthful—almost 80 percent of black Memphis was younger than forty—and uneducated. The majority of black children under age fourteen attended grade school on average for but six years, and only a small percentage entered one of the two black high schools. The growth of black Memphis during the 1930s—bluesman Leroy Carr exaggerated little when he sang of “All trains going to Memphis town”—had been impressive. Spurred by the hopes of many rural southern blacks to find a paycheck despite the Depression, blacks accounted for 70 percent of the city’s new residents between 1930 and 1940, arriving at a rate nearly three times that of whites. Relatively young, without much formal education, the majority from painfully poor rural backgrounds, these migrants lacked the skills attractive to an urban industrial world, even had segregation allowed them to apply.8
Most black Memphians lived north of Jackson Avenue or south of Poplar Avenue, in the neighborhoods stretching back from the river where the Irish and other white working people had once lived. While some whites remained in these neighborhoods, federal housing policy in the 1930s quickly altered that pattern. The creation of two whites-only housing projects outside the boundaries of black Memphis, along with the concurrent construction of three other blacks-only housing projects near the river and outside a four-block white business and residential preserve, only intensified the white flight to the underdeveloped eastern areas of the city—following a path first blazed by those whites fleeing the fever. The resulting residential design was unique. The narrowed stem of an imagined white funnel nestled gently against the river, stretching east along the corridor framed by Jackson and Poplar. Included within its span were the riverfront promenade, the cotton exchange, major financial institutions, and the homes of numerous whites. Close by on either side was black Memphis. As the stem continued east toward Overton Park, it widened, reducing sharply the contrasting white and black patterns so evident nearer the river. At East Parkway, the northern boundary of Overton Park, the cup of the funnel arched out in a half circle to the eastern limits of the city, enveloping neighborhoods that were ever more the resting place for whites who traveled daily for work and pleasure into the increasingly black core city. By 1940, 77 percent of the growing black population, forced into confined neighborhoods with inadequate, older residences, lived in substandard housing. This pattern of residential segregation, supported as it was by Memphis officials and federal housing policy, required no race-based local zoning laws to maintain.9
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