Although already known for the power of his whoop, C. L.’s placement on the program, J. Pius Barbour understood, was but a small act of encouragement to a still-budding preacher whose reach was yet unknown. Given this, Barbour was stunned and upset when he discovered that C. L. intended to preach on the topic of Immortality. “My heart sank!” Barbour recalled, as he considered Franklin’s relative inexperience. “How could he handle such a theme?” But to Barbour’s astonishment, “The biggest surprise of all was the sermon of C. L. Franklin of Buffalo, New York. . . . He has one of those whoops that comes every fifty years.” In the National Baptist Voice the following month, he offered the only public report of Franklin’s performance:
He almost paralyzed the Convention with logic and history and thought. For twenty minutes he preached as if he were in Harvard Chapel and just as the people were gasping at this profound treatment of the subject, he switched gears and threw on that Mississippi whoop and broke up the Convention. There is no doubt about it. He comes nearer to L. K. Williams [a famous preacher and past president of the Convention] than any man I have heard. He is a perfect mixture of profound thought and emotional power.
Franklin’s expectations soared far above former confines, now propelled by public acclaim as never before, and he searched the distant horizon for new possibilities and their challenges.43
Less than six months after the Detroit sermon, C. L. received a call from a Detroit church. Many members of New Bethel Baptist had heard Franklin at the 1945 convention, and when their pastor resigned suddenly in February 1946, they invited C. L. to deliver a trial sermon. Soon after came the call to the pulpit. The reaction at Friendship was explosive. “We felt terrible. We cried. We couldn’t understand,” congregant Mary Hill remembered. Said E. L. Billups on hearing the news at a church meeting a few days before Franklin left, “It seemed like to me they dropped a bomb.”44
C. L. later suggested that he would have stayed in Buffalo longer, but he envisioned a different setting for his talents: “I felt Buffalo was an old, staid, conservative, frontier-type of town. I wanted to be in a city where there were crossroads of transportation: trains, planes, where people were coming and going, conventions of all kinds, and migrations. A city that is not static in its growth.”45
Brief as C. L.’s time in Buffalo was, the experience remained important. He had led his largest church to that time and had his first sustained interaction with black trade unionists. Their demands for justice, grounded in a common prophetic tradition, quickened thought processes already in motion within him. The young boy in Mississippi’s cotton fields inventing stories about the passengers on the trains and cars hurtling by had grown into a man no longer caged by Mississippi’s strictures or by his own narrowed beliefs. Increasingly, he thought of himself, to the affirming echo of many, as an evolving preacher-prophet with considerable mastery of a complex preaching tradition.
In the short time between June 1943 and September 1945, he had preached at least three commanding sermons: M. J. Jenkins’s eulogy, the yearly “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” and “Immortality.” The power of his spiritual and intellectual offering won him recognition he previously had only hoped for. Now, in moving to Detroit, a city of crossroads and crosscurrents in music, politics, religion, and the people themselves, C. L. eyed with undisguised pleasure that “yonder’s mountain” he had long desired.
CHAPTER FIVE
HASTINGS STREET
On a summer evening in 1943, a lanky, angular, dark-complected young Mississippian jauntily strolled down Hastings Street, the major artery of Detroit’s black neighborhood. This was not the first northern city the twenty-five-year-old had visited, but his nerve endings nonetheless fired at the sensations he took in: the spicy smells of ribs, shrimp, and chicken barbecued over open steel drums on street corners; the fine women with offering eyes working their territory amid the rush of shoppers; the young men, and women too, anticipating the night’s excitement, pockets fuller than ever with war-inflated wages. Enticing, too, were the bars and clubs squeezed between other small businesses in this tight urban enclave. But most thrilling of all was the music, blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues (or jump blues, as some called it), streaming live or from jukeboxes out of the clubs and record stores, mingling with the street scenes and smells to create a magical sense of immediate possibilities. As John Lee Hooker, reared near Clarksdale, Mississippi, tried to absorb it all, he thought of his momma, who had not allowed him as a teen “just to stay out all night long, oh Lord!” But he was a man, now, and this was Detroit, Hastings Street—he would “boogie-woogie anyhow.”1
Hastings was Detroit’s Beale Street, the spine of Paradise Valley, the black commercial and entertainment district. “Oh, that was the street, the street in town,” Hooker declared. “Everything you lookin’ for on that street, everything. Anything you wanted was on that street. Anything you didn’t want was on that street.” In the 1940s, Paradise Valley had elastic boundaries, depending on whom one asked and where one lived. Warren to the north and Woodward on the west were the generally acknowledged limits, while the eastern edge fluctuated between Hastings and the streets further east over to Riopelle. To the south the Valley ran to the Detroit River, but the lower portion, the streets below Vernor Highway, most older residents still called Black Bottom. Within this narrow space, a little more than sixty acres, almost all of the city’s nearly three hundred thousand black residents found homes, schools for their children, and such necessities as food, clothing, and a welcoming church community. Hooker, a budding blues guitarist, knew the neighborhood well. He lived in it, working as a janitor in a series of jobs after 1943, and played rent parties (private dance parties held in individual homes to raise the monthly rent) and the after-hours “blind pigs,” where he honed his considerable talents. Gradually making a name for himself—his feet kept an infectious, driving beat under the distinctive blues chords his fingers teased from his guitar—Hooker began to play the smaller bars and occasionally opened for a major act in the larger clubs. In 1948, a producer for the local Sensation record label “discovered” Hooker, and his first recording, “Boogie Chillen,” became a national rhythm and blues hit. “When I first came to town, people,” Hooker sang,
I was walking down Hastings Street.
I heard everybody talking about
the Henry Swing Club.
I decided to drop in there that night
And when I got there
I said yes people
Yes they were really having a ball!
That the Henry Swing Club was not on Hastings but at the juncture of Orleans and Madison hurt neither Hooker’s success nor the Street’s reputation. As one black Detroit woman recalled of the 1940s, reflecting the tales told by husband and brothers who saw service during World War II, most blacks “thought everybody from Detroit was from Hastings Street or Black Bottom.”2
Hooker was also fortunate to live in the city when its creative musical energy reached a collective peak. More than thirteen new clubs opened in Paradise Valley during the 1940s, and an additional fifteen, also showcasing black musical expression, opened throughout the city, most of them along Woodward or just north of Grand Boulevard and easily accessible to Valley residents. In such clubs as the Flame Show Bar, Sportree’s, and Lee’s Sensation, local talent such as bluesmen Eddie Burns, Bob “Detroit Count” White, and Eddie Kirkland earned a reputation if not necessarily a living, and jazz musicians Yusef Lateef, Sonny Stitt, and Thomas “Dr. Beans” Bowles developed their styles. This music permeated black Detroit and a small sliver of its white residents as well. WJLB-AM, a major radio station, broadcast bebop jazz live beginning in 1946, and gospel, blues, and R&B were regularly heard on the air despite the absence of a paid black disk jockey. In this atmosphere the audience for nationally known performers was intense. In the five years following the war, musicians as diverse as Josh White, Count Basie, Joe Turner, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughn, William “The Lion” Smith, Johnny Otis, T-Bone Walker
, Ruth Brown, Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, Art Tatum, and Lena Horne—to name but a few—made repeated, well-received appearances at Detroit clubs. So accomplished was Detroit’s musical community that visiting regional and national bands recruited its talent repeatedly in the decade after the war. “By 1955 everybody was gone,” one jazzman ruefully observed.3
Interspersed with the bars and clubs, many actually owned by whites, were the small black-owned businesses that provisioned Valley residents and gave black Detroit its vital if contained entrepreneurial group. If Hooker began his walk down Hastings where it intersected Forest, for example, he might have stopped for a drink at the Forest Club, one of the few black-owned bars in the city. A few doors down, Mrs. Vivian Nash ran a beauty school and salon; while at the corner of Canfield, the McFall brothers, Benjamin, George, and James, operated a well-regarded funeral parlor. At one corner of Willis and Hastings, Turner’s grocery store catered to the palates of southern-born migrants. Across the street stood New Bethel Baptist Church, with its interior recently renovated, home to a large and growing congregation. A block farther south, the Cozy Corner welcomed customers, and a few more blocks down, the loudspeakers outside Joe Von Battle’s Record Store propelled a constant stream of blues, R&B, and gospel into the street. Tucked in among these establishments up and down Hastings were barbershops, apparel stores, millinery shops, the professional offices of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and insurance agents, furniture and appliance outlets, printing shops, churches, and so much else. The street pulsated with activity, musical and economic, legal and illegal, business and pleasure, sacred and secular. Sunnie Wilson, a fixture in the Valley since the 1930s as a club manager and owner, and for a time the unofficial “mayor” of Paradise Valley, described the neighborhood as “a closely knit community,” with relatively little serious violence. The community, Wilson remembered, “had organization.” In Erma Franklin’s memory, the Valley was “one long stretch of black businesses, successful black businesses. All blacks supported the black businesses. . . . And we enjoyed doing it. It was like everyone knew each other through socializing, church, whatever, school.”4
Not everyone in black Detroit had as positive memories of Paradise Valley, however. The poet Toi Derrecotte remembered that as a child after the war, her mother and aunt drove with her through the crowded streets on an occasional Saturday night “to laugh at those loud people, to be as close to them as we could allow ourselves, to envy them and to think we were better.” Following the spectacle, this family of middling status within black Detroit’s social hierarchy drove “through the fancy boulevards, the neighborhoods of those [black] people who sometimes invited my aunt and mother to showers and meetings of the bridge club.” Although Berry Gordy, who created Motown Records in 1959, later revised his belief that “all the bad people lived” on the East Side, he retained even as an adult the conviction that as “a place,” the West Side—that is, not Paradise Valley—“gave me a sense of right and wrong, a sense of safety in the family, a sense of love and kinship in a community where being good was actually a good thing to be.”5
The social distinctions Derrecotte and Gordy absorbed as children reflected very real divisions within black Detroit. While the vast majority of black citizens lived in Paradise Valley, selective neighborhoods did exist for the well-to-do. The North End, for example, including Boston Boulevard, Arden Park, and Chicago Boulevard east of Woodward, with capacious homes and well-manicured lawns bordering the wide, tree-lined streets, was one such enclave; so, too, was Conant Gardens, farther northeast. Professional black Detroiters were also clustered to the west of Woodward, especially in the section known as Virginia Park, near Twelfth Street and, farther west, below Tireman (the West Side Gordy referred to). The migration of these wealthier blacks created minimally integrated areas, not unlike the Franklins’ experience in Buffalo—at least until the wealthy white residents, disturbed by the slow but continual trickle of even upper-class blacks, moved to the surrounding suburbs of Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills.
Within black Detroit, residential divisions carried social distinctions as well. While some among these elites might of an evening go “down to the Valley . . . dressed to the nines” to catch the acts at the Flame Show Bar, such clubs were not their primary form of social organization. Instead, these men and women belonged to socially powerful organizations such as the Nacirema Club (American, spelled backward), the Cotillion Club, and the Detroit branch of the NAACP. College-educated men and women had their own particular groups, where the jocular competition over the relative merits of LeMoyne in Memphis, Fisk in Nashville, or Morehouse and Spellman in Atlanta signified their collective remove from the vast majority of black Detroit—indeed, black America. Upper-class women, most of whom did not work, created their own network as well: groups such as the Modern Matrons Social Club, the Casa Blanca Study Club, and The Poinsettias were exclusive, invitation-only organizations dedicated to self-improvement, the occasional charitable event, and maintaining their identities as groups apart. Not surprisingly, these elites sought their own churches, mostly shunning those where the whooped sermon of the preacher and the gospel rhythms of the choir infused services with the tones of the rural South. Robert Bynum Jr. accurately gauged the intense feeling that fueled this social division when he described the attitudes of elite blacks of the Conant Gardens neighborhood in the 1940s toward Valley blacks moving near the neighborhood: “Basically hoodlums—this was the attitude that they had. The blacks that would come here would be beneath them.”6
Thus, the black Detroit C. L. Franklin entered when he accepted the call to New Bethel was anything but monolithic. For the next thirty-three years its vitality and its pain, its aspirations and its contradictions, would engage him fully. Here, he would rise to greatness.
C. L. took the pulpit at New Bethel on the first Sunday of June 1946. He recalled the church, which he had visited months earlier when he gave his trial sermon, as somewhat shabby, “a kind of a storefront,” a converted “old bowling alley.” In contrast, his Buffalo church was larger and “much nicer.” But as he felt “cut off from the onflow of life in this country” in Buffalo, it was decidedly “a step forward to go to Detroit.”7
In truth, however, New Bethel was not as decrepit as C. L.’s memory suggested. The building was not impressive and the congregation was smaller than at Friendship; but the church had made great strides since its founding in the Depression winter of 1932. Then, a small group of southern-born migrants, members of the Helping Hand Society, a self-help group, had gathered at Eliza Butler’s Paradise Valley home to reorganize their religious life. The established Afro-Baptist churches, such as the stately Second Baptist, at 441 Monroe in the heart of Black Bottom, discouraged the emotional tones of rural black working people’s religious expression and frowned as well on the spreading use of gospel hymns, with their praise words set to blues rhythms. But those meeting in the Butler home knew that to abandon their familiar religious expression would threaten their very survival in this harsh and strange land. The chanted sermon and the gospel hymns were linchpins to the experience of their faith, and they could not imagine its powerful balm denied them as they adjusted to this northern, urban clime. By March 1932, the small group had numbered more than one hundred and had called a temporary minister to help organize a church. Reverend H. H. Coleman, whose preaching propelled the young Martin Luther King Jr. to accept conversion a few years later, assumed the pulpit that August and remained for more than two years. Following a 1940 split led by Coleman’s successor, Reverend N. H. Armstrong, New Bethel’s prospects took a new turn when Reverend William E. Ramsey accepted the congregation’s call that same year.8
Like the majority of the church’s members, Ramsey was southern born. The Troy, Alabama, native had “a musical voice” that “stirred the congregation to its depths,” as well as an organizational ability and the “quiet, retiring demeanor” that made him, in the words of J. Piu
s Barbour, “content to remain in the background without any thought of the limelight.” This combination of qualities had revived New Bethel. Ramsey had renovated the interior of the old building, begun a building fund to replace it, and built up the membership well beyond anything seen before. Under Ramsey, the membership incorporated black Detroiters of every status and position; while the majority were working people, professionals such as attorney Charles R. Perkins, surgeon V. G. Tolbert, and mortician and church trustee Benjamin J. McFall dotted the congregation. By 1945, reported membership had grown to over twelve hundred. An assistant pastor, Noah G. Cain, had assumed his duties, particularly with the youth, and the church scribe, Mrs. Lucille Marshall, had reported the building fund at over $17,000. More than twelve clubs and departments had channeled members’ energy toward aiding the poor and sick, organizing a death-
benefit society and numerous self-help clubs, and into the church’s nurses corps, usher boards, and choirs—organizations that were the very backbone of New Bethel’s institutional presence. Yet dissension had again reared its head in February 1946, and Ramsey, with a core of New Bethel members, left to establish a new church, Gospel Temple Baptist.9
C. L. was, to be fair, partly correct in his first impression of New Bethel. When he arrived in June of that year, the church building was inadequate, in need of replacement, and the congregation had been diminished through the schism. But under Ramsey’s administration the church had established itself on a secure footing. And prospects were good: between 1930 and 1950, black Detroit grew sixfold, to more than three hundred thousand people, and in that latter year made up more than 16 percent of all city residents. Continued high migration from the South, coupled with a steady birthrate, propelled blacks well beyond the already densely crowded confines of the Valley. Given an effective preacher with sensitivity to the needs of new and recent migrants, the conditions were ripe for church growth.10
Singing in a Strange Land Page 13