Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  While noting that these two issues “challenge our times,” C. L. insisted that “the great question must be settled first.” Whether the issue is democracy, Communism, human rights, or social justice, each must first answer the question “What think ye of Christ?” If one accepts Christ as savior, then “the question of Communism is settled.” Communism is “atheistic and ungodly,” with “no place in it for God.” Certainly, then, C. L. emphasized, “There’s no place in it for me, for I’ll take my stand with God.” That same embrace of Christ determined one’s stance on human rights. In many churches in the United States and throughout the world, racial and class distinctions, enforced by those “that pose as worshippers and followers of Christ,” bar many from the sanctuary. But “if you get straight on Christ, my brothers and sisters, you believe in equality and you believe in the justice of all men.” To follow Christ is to set out “upon the highway of justice . . . the highway of peace . . . the highway of brotherhood,” for Jesus “does not trod any other highway.” As he concluded this sermon, chanting with passion, C. L. depicted contemporary injustices as reenactments of the crucifixion perpetrated by people, church members among them, who “have Jesus shoved / out of your whole week / except on Sundays.” This was indeed the core of Franklin’s political vision, one that integrated personal salvation and social awareness in the symbolic language of a common faith. The arena in which Franklin preached that vision was about to get even larger.55

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FAME

  By the mid-1950s, Paradise Valley hailed C. L. Franklin on the street with the enthusiasm usually accorded a headliner at the Flame Show Bar. As this handsome, charismatic minister strolled down Hastings, consciously extending New Bethel’s sanctuary into that secular space, he gathered people to him for a word, a request, a shared quip, advice. The markers of his local success—the sharp increase in the New Bethel congregation, the ecstatic crowds swaying to his voice over Joe Von Battle’s loudspeakers on Hastings—preceded him, and his expansive smile and focused eyes welcomed even before he spoke.

  Franklin reveled in this adulation, sensing in it a promise for the future that knew no bounds. Nor was he intimidated when certain New Bethel members wagged their heads reproachfully in the church vestibule before services, whispering of the scandal they thought their pastor’s friendship with the Hastings Street prostitutes, gamblers, drug dealers, and club operators brought on the church community. Boldly, with an attitude one younger ministerial colleague later described as “all lion,” C. L. confronted these concerns directly from the pulpit. One who has “found Jesus can see something good in everybody’s life,” he instructed, or at least “can see the potentialities.” “When did you get so good that you can’t be seen in certain districts?” he goaded his critics. “Jesus didn’t declare any district off limit” or declare any group not to “have the opportunity to come to him.” Just the opposite was the case: Jesus “was a friend to sinners.” In another sermon a short time later, C. L. switched perspective as his criticism became even more pointed: “Some folk would make us think that Satan is only in Paradise Valley or that Satan is only on Hastings Street, but we have found that Satan is in any community.” Like the good evangelical that he was, C. L. rejected as false comfort church membership, regular attendance, and other outward signs as predictors of salvation: “Satan is on all the boulevards. Satan is in all of the fashionable communities. Wherever men live, Satan is there.”1

  C. L.’s enthusiasm for his work stemmed in good part from the same compelling need for recognition he accorded the Hastings Street regulars. Mississippi’s scars still marked him, from the faint, if intense, memory of his wraithlike father to his experience of “segregation in the raw,” as he termed it, which fueled his ambitions even decades later. “My greatest personal achievement,” he commented in 1977, “is that I had the guts and the initiative to extricate myself from a life that was a one-way road leading nowhere.” Here was the source of his dual emphasis on faith in God and self, and the corresponding will to act on both. Here, too, in this private cauldron, he tempered his profound affirmation that such wounds would not define his humanity. His fellow Mississippian, Muddy Waters, knew the feeling as well: “I wanted to be a known person. All my life that’s what I worked for.” It was precisely this vulnerability in C. L. and his ability to share occasional hints of it in public that gained for him the desired acclaim.2

  Franklin understood the hurt inside only imperfectly. The crosscurrents of his private tensions created at times a self-doubt that redoubled that need for recognition. A man of large and exuberant appetites, the other needs (he had noted sex, sustenance, and security) were also passionately acknowledged—and indulged. A complex, very human man, on the brink of national fame and celebrity, Franklin increasingly found his public career and personal conduct reflected in the glare of the spotlights that fame generated.3

  Despite his call to integrate sacred and secular commitments into one powerful voice, Franklin had yet to develop a political presence in Detroit. True, he had a lifetime membership in the NAACP branch and undoubtedly applauded the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. Under the direction of NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall, plaintiffs from five school districts filed suit against the Supreme Court’s ruling, delivered in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, that accepted the fiction that “separate but equal” facilities met the constitutional standard of equal opportunity for all citizens. The decision in Brown v. Board of Education, announced on May 17, 1954, unanimously overturned Plessy, toppling this racist premise of American civic life.4 Yet racial tensions in Detroit remained much as they had been. Three weeks before the court’s decision, Richard Henry, a black reporter with the Chronicle, had entered Bankes’ Bar in a white West Side neighborhood to investigate a claim that a black woman had been denied service. Attacked by the white patrons at the bar for his curiosity, Henry pressed assault charges against one man in particular. Two weeks later, a local judge found the accused not guilty and admonished the reporter: “You do not live in that neighborhood. You went into that bar looking for something and got more than you bargained for. I am going to leave it at that!” Three months later, jazz great Lionel Hampton and a party of friends were denied service at a downtown bar. And as C. L. still sought a more public political voice, Mississippi inflicted another painful lesson on black America.5

  In August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, visited relatives in LeFlore County, Mississippi. On a sweltering day late that month, he and a group of other black youngsters traveled three miles from his uncle’s cabin into the little town of Money. There this exuberant teenager, alive with South Side Chicago’s street slang, allegedly violated white Mississippi’s rules of racial etiquette when he entered the small grocery store and flippantly addressed Carolyn Bryant, the white clerk whose husband, Roy, owned the store. A few days later, on Sunday, August 28, at two o’clock in the morning, Roy Bryant, his half-brother J. W. Milam, and possibly a third person banged on the door of Mose Wright’s cabin, demanding his nephew, the “boy” who had so insulted Carolyn Bryant. Three days later, Till’s body, his face all but unrecognizable from the brutal beating he had absorbed, partly surfaced in the Tallahatchie River when it caught on a snag. Around his neck, secured with barbed wire, was a 125-pound cotton-gin fan. So badly had he been tortured before his death that Till at first was identified only by the ring on his finger, a keepsake from his father.6

  As brutal as this murder was, it was not the only one that spring and summer in Mississippi. Three months earlier, “persons unknown” fired three shotgun blasts at Rev. George Lee, killing him instantly as he drove in Belzoni, the seat of Humphreys County, some fifty miles south and west of Money. In a predominately black county, Lee’s public advocacy of voter registration—he was an NAACP activist—had brought repeated threats. But unlike the reaction to Lee’s murder, which remained more local than national, Till’s death mobilized a national pro
test movement that marked a turning point for black Americans. The courage of two of Emmett Till’s relatives played a major role. The decision of Till’s mother, Mamie E. Bradley, to wake her son in an open coffin and to allow photographers from the black magazine, Jet, to publish the pictures, stirred an intense reaction among African Americans nationally. Massive numbers of people moved in slow procession past Till’s coffin in Chicago, and rallies of between ten thousand and fifty thousand protesters took place in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and elsewhere. Individuals previously apolitical were transformed by the news and especially by the pictures; then-youngsters such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Anne Moody, Cleveland Sellers, and Diana Ross were jarred as never before in their young lives. “I began to think of myself as a black person for the first time, not just [as] a person,” Abdul-Jabbar (in 1955 the twelve-year-old Lewis Alcindor) recalled. He, like so many other black youth, “lost my childish innocence” as he viewed the photographic image of Till’s ravaged face. “I will never forget Emmett Till,” Diana Ross stated, assessing years later the impact these events had during her eleventh summer. As Mrs. Bradley intended, the reactions to those photographs ensured that her son’s life had “been sacrificed for something.”7

  The courage of Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, also politicized many. An eyewitness to the abduction, he received numerous death threats warning him not to testify at the trial of Bryant and Milam in Sumner, Tallahatchie County. Nonetheless, on an intensely hot September day, in a packed, tension-filled courtroom where few Mississippi whites ever expected a black to testify against one of them even in a minor civil proceeding, Mose Wright drew up all of his five feet, three inches, pointed what journalist Murray Kempton called “his black, workworn finger” directly at J. W. Milam and exclaimed, “Thar he.” With Milam’s eyes burning like “coals of hatred” at him, Wright then turned and identified Roy Bryant as his nephew’s second abductor. For good measure, when interrogated by the defendants’ attorney, this sixty-four-year-old tenant farmer and circuit preacher pointedly refused to add the honorific, “sir,” when addressing the white man. Mose Wright became a symbol of that deep wellspring of black resistance that was again coming to the surface. As Kempton reported from the trial that September, it was this man, “condemned to bow all his life,” who made the trial even possible, for “he had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was 64.”8

  The acquittal verdict for the two defendants, delivered on September 23 by the all-white, all-male jury after sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, surprised only the willfully innocent. In Detroit, for example, Chronicle reporter Richard Henry asked fellow blacks on the street about the prospects of justice, and none expected “southern justice” to be anything other than just that. Black novelist Chester Himes, speaking as “a Negro in New York” who read of the lynching and trial “in impotent fury,” spoke for many who also awakened to the “real horror [that] comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want to stop [such violence]. If we wanted to, we would.” In a controlled fury, Himes urged Americans to “take the burden of all this guilt from these two pitiful crackers. They are but the guns we hired.” Coming as it did a decade after the successful conclusion of a war for democracy, the murder of Emmett Till became a horrific benchmark of just how far black Americans had yet to travel toward equality.9

  On October 6, 1955, just two weeks after the verdict in the Mississippi trial, C. L. Franklin wrote a public letter to the Detroit NAACP that was published in the Michigan Chronicle. Franklin’s announced recipient was attorney Edward Turner, a former president of the Michigan NAACP, the current president of the Detroit branch, and a southern-born migrant with impeccable, upper-middle-class credentials. The intended audience was far broader. C. L. began by praising as “very impressive” the public rally the organization had held in late September at Bethel A. M. E. Church to protest the verdict in the Till case. An enormous crowd overflowed the large Paradise Valley church, and the address by Medgar Evers, state president of the Mississippi NAACP, stirred all.10 However, despite the crowds, Franklin now suggested, the organization’s impact on black Detroit remained sharply limited. He evoked the image of “a local barber shop,” that central gathering place for black working-class men, where hair was cut and the foibles of white folks and snobbish, “dicty,” elite blacks alike were skewered for hours on a Saturday morning. Franklin explained that the “barber-shop-talk” he heard recently had disturbed him. In a prolonged discussion with more than a dozen men, all “expressed almost complete ignorance of what the NAACP had done, or was doing, for Negroes.” He had rushed to fill the gap, Franklin explained, his subtle sarcasm just barely contained, recalling “to the best of my remembrance, and in chronological order” the organization’s achievements, but to little avail. To these men, working people for whom the Hastings Street neighborhood was home, the activities of the NAACP simply did not affect their lives. The organization “was doing little for racial progress,” they told Franklin. C. L. deftly turned back on itself the anticipated black middle-class reaction to the message of this male, barbershop chorus: “Nothing is to be gained from merely ‘bemoaning’ . . . such un-informed attitudes” in the “very people for whom the N.A.A.C.P. is so dedicated . . . [and] from whom the organization should reasonably expect support.”

  Franklin did offer readers one solution. With feigned innocence, he asked whether it would “be at all possible . . . to compile a single, easy to understand pamphlet for mass distribution” that would convey “the purpose, program and achievements” of the organization. If that were “at all feasible,” he urged it be distributed to all organizations “to which Negroes belong” for “person-to-person distribution.” Churches, he noted, would be particularly helpful in this task, and he ingenuously pledged New Bethel’s help in a mass distribution of “a copy [of the pamphlet] plus sermons on the subject.” Franklin extended to his erstwhile addressee the “kindest personal regards” and, in a summary conclusion of his veiled critique, expressed “best wishes for increased success through a ‘grass roots’ educational program.”11

  Franklin meant his letter to mobilize the pain of Till’s death toward political engagement. This poised, urbane preacher had once been a fourteen-year-old black boy in Mississippi; his own son, Cecil, was but a year older than Till had been. And, of course, Franklin as well as his barbershop companions, like so many southern-raised black Detroiters, must have experienced Till’s death through the tortured memories of childhood violence. Franklin knew that many black Detroiters pressed, however slowly, beyond that fear, and he thought that the people along Hastings Street were ripe for collective action. Annual black-tie dinners celebrating the largest branch in the nation might raise needed funds for the NAACP’s important legal challenges, but these same dinners did little to attract the Hastings Street regulars. Black working people, particularly the majority who were not union members, remained largely an afterthought as the leadership simply assumed that their programs and policies spoke for them. As a lifetime member of the organization, C. L.’s point was not to end such banquets (although he attended infrequently) but rather to expand the organizational vision. If this “grass roots” orientation could emerge, it would be further proof that Emmett Till had not died in vain.12

  Franklin’s letter proclaimed his assumption of a new public role, and in it he offered his ministry at New Bethel as an example for the secular NAACP. Indeed, C. L. projected himself as a proxy for the people he claimed to understand and represent. Whose sermons, after all, would be included in the proposed handout?13

  In this bloodied season of Emmett Till’s death, Franklin aided efforts to raise funds to send Detroit’s first black congressman, Charles Diggs, Jr., to Sumner, Mississippi, to observe and report on the trial. In this same season New Bethel’s Political Action Guild also began its activity. Occasional meetings such as “Kenya Sunday” were important, but C. L. wanted a more continuous effort. To that end
, with the assistance of New Bethel stalwarts Harry Kincaid and Sylvia Penn, he organized the guild in 1955 as one of the recognized departments of the church. The guild sponsored local and national speakers on Sunday afternoons, organized support for sympathetic political candidates, and staffed a voter-registration table in the church foyer before services during election season. The guild also performed another role. When members came to their pastor, complaining about difficulties they encountered with the police, city services, or the schools, “Frank,” as C. L.’s close friends called him in his Detroit days, “would in turn get Kincaid and other folks to look at the complaint and then would carry it” to a conclusion. Set against the impact of C. L.’s sermons, the guild allowed members to organize with others to protest racially discriminatory city services, attempt to elect a responsive candidate, or sponsor talks on national issues. In all of these activities and more, political action made concrete the new thinking encouraged by sermons heard on repeated Sundays.14