Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  As many of the reform-minded ministers were also civil rights activists, Jackson planned a convention program that gave them public prominence in an effort to win their support in his 1957 reelection. To this end, Jackson arranged for a series of ministers to speak on civil rights, sponsored a symposium on the issue of gradualism in demanding full rights, and invited Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP, and Howard Thurman, the liberal theologian, to address the convention. The crowning moment in Jackson’s effort to reposition himself came when he escorted the young leader of the Montgomery movement to the podium. King’s speech, not surprisingly, electrified the delegates. But King was so effective that Jackson now feared that this young minister less than half his age stole not only the day but perhaps the convention itself. From this moment, Jackson resolved to contain King and the activist ministers drawn to him. The first step in that struggle would be to retain his office at the 1957 meeting in Louisville, Kentucky.42

  Intense organizing and bitter acrimony filled the year between conventions. Jackson’s opponents, led by William Holmes Borders of Atlanta, gathered in St. Louis in December 1956 to develop strategy and draft a form letter to fellow ministers. A month later, the convention’s board of directors, meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas, passed a resolution, seconded by King Sr., to declare the St. Louis delegates “an independent organization with rights and privileges of their own” and, therefore, no claim on the membership or resources of the National Baptist Convention. C. L. Franklin, present at the meeting, did not dissent from this first step toward expulsion. Privately, the tension rose even higher. Reports surfaced that H. H. Humes, the extremely conservative leader of the Mississippi State Convention and a staunch Jackson supporter, had accepted funds from white segregationists to be “the paid stool pigeon of Senator Eastland and his gang.” Gardner C. Taylor, pastor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, told a black reporter a month before the 1957 convention that a lifetime president in command of the reins of power could never be “cooperative” and thus never work to mobilize the political consciousness essential to furthering the civil rights movement. From the opposite position, W. H. Brewster wrote Jackson in August 1957 to assure him that he had already prepared “a special group to serve as our cheering squad in Louisville.” He also arranged for a “behind closed doors” meeting place for Jackson forces before the convention opened, to ensure “perfect coordination in our on-the-spot action.”43

  The tensions accompanying these plots and counterplots grew to a fury that shook the Louisville convention. At a prearranged moment, Brewster’s “special . . . cheering squad” burst onto the convention floor, shouting slogans and waving banners. In the chaos that followed, Jackson supporters suspended the rules and reelected Mt. Olivet’s pastor to a fifth consecutive term. Quickly, ministerial tempers erupted, fistfights broke out on the floor, the Louisville police occupied the building and arrested four delegates, and the convention’s printed program became irrelevant. Jackson supporters won election to every position, and the president immediately dismissed J. Pius Barbour—a critic—as editor of the National Baptist Voice. Legal challenges to the election soon were filed, charging that Jackson unconstitutionally “usurped” the office of the presidency.44

  Given Franklin’s national fame and influence, both sides desired his support. Reformers were disappointed when he supported Jackson publicly, and some questioned his recent commitment to political action. But C. L. understood the dispute differently. For him, the National Baptist Convention was the most important organization in black America, a vehicle for both individual and collective advance. To run the risk of damaging it by a schism (when Jackson held the majority of the delegates) was inconceivable. C. L. did not then interpret the tension as primarily concerned with the organization’s stance toward the civil rights movement. King Sr., of course, had remained as strong a public advocate of J. H. Jackson’s reelection as had Franklin. Instead, hoping that the decisions reached in Louisville resolved the tension, Franklin turned again toward his burgeoning public career.

  Franklin was now a star, and although he did not sacrifice his sacred artistry, this status brought with it new possibilities and challenges. Wealthier than ever before, Franklin faced the demands of family and career, New Bethel’s desire for a pastor and the call of the road, additional business opportunities, and political involvements, all vying for his attention. A very human man, whose expressed needs at times reflected but dimly the hurts in his soul, discovered that people whom he had never met discussed his personal life in intimate detail. It was a heady time and one fraught with tension, as Franklin learned there was a price to be paid for this fame.

  C. L.’s distinctive presence was not a role he stepped into each Sunday. His was a performance, to be sure, but even in its sacred dimension it was a performance that reflected openly, boldly, with joy and at times with pain, Franklin the man. His sermons, alternately exuberant and inclusive and, in turn, direct or even abrasive, flowed from the core of his intense, complex personality. His preaching revealed his persistent intellectual hunger, his deep delight in and involvement with music, musicians, and their world, and a need for affirmation—divine as well as human—that was so profoundly a part of his spirit. Predictably, he welcomed the attention national renown brought and approached it in a manner distinctly his own.

  The first thing that struck an audience was C. L.’s sartorial style. Long discarded were the torn, worn, and outdated suits, accented with those “yellow-type shoes, the kind sold at dry goods stores,” which had draped his solid frame when he arrived in Memphis in 1939. He now preferred expensive wool and silk suits, in shades of gray, brown, cream, and white, as well as the more traditional dark blue. Alligator-skin shoes, diamond stickpins, flashy rings, watches, and ministerial crosses complemented his colorful neckties. While he occasionally bought clothes on the road, his regular haberdasher was a downtown Detroit firm, Kosins. He was, New Bethel member Carolyn King thought, “a snazzy dresser.” Even on an ordinary weekday, “He always was matching from head to toe.” By the mid-1950s, his sense of style and fashion was well known. Mahalia Jackson, no insignificant figure herself, once kept C. L. waiting to leave for a Christmas party as she “finished dressing with care. Can’t look just anyway going to a party with Rev. C. L.—man has 35 suits.”45

  C. L.’s fashionable appearance and obvious material success reflected a broader cultural transformation. In 1950, religious traditionalists had banned the Ward Singers from a National Baptist Convention meeting with objections to “their flamboyant dress and mannerisms.” They were overruled—the group had a runaway national gospel hit, “Surely God Is Able,” at that time—but resistance to the presentation of the sacred in a more secular fashion continued. Franklin’s public style and demeanor irritated some, even as it opened new vistas for others. His example “took the preachers out of the . . . white Panama hat, the high-top shoes, and the blue suede suits,” Claud Young thought. As preachers imitated his voice, or tried to, so did they follow “his dress, his mannerisms,” S. L. Jones recalled. “I mean, C. L. Franklin was heard and seen and felt in preachers everywhere.”46

  If C. L.’s clothes, jewelry, and penchant for top-of-the-line Cadillacs caused traditionalists concern as they struggled against a broader transformation of religious culture in postwar America, it was a rather simple change in his hairstyle that truly scandalized many more. Sometime before 1954, Franklin exchanged his close-cropped, natural hairstyle for processed hair, known on the street corners of black America as the “conk.” The process itself was rather simple, if at times painful: a barber or a beautician used various chemicals, including lye, to straighten the naturally curly hair of the client and then proceeded to form the hair into any one of a number of styles. The process took much longer than the traditional haircut, cost significantly more, and lasted perhaps a few weeks or a month before a return to the barber was needed—but none of these factors caused the intense reaction to the conk. R
ather, in black men particularly, the conk projected a cultural meaning that traditionalists found offensive in church members, to say nothing of ministers.47

  To have a process suggested a man sympathetic to if not a participant in the black entertainment world, where blues and jazz musicians mingled with gamblers, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes, racketeers, and other members of what some called the demimonde, or the sporting life. Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Nat “King” Cole, and boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson, as well as large numbers of young black men in Paradise Valley, all sported variants of the look: the “New Yorker,” with its wave undulating across the head, or perhaps the “Tony Curtis” where, with a curl over the forehead, the processed hair on the front and sides was swept back into a “DA” (literally, an approximation of a duck’s ass) at the back of the head. Otis Williams, a Detroit teenager in the 1950s who would soon form the singing group the Temptations, captured well the significance of the style: “As I got more serious about my singing group, I became more interested in perfecting my image. I had to be cool, and back in the mid-fifties that required a process.” A decade earlier Malcolm Little, later famous as Malcolm X, and B. B. King both wore the conk out of a similar desire “to be cool.” This phenomenon disturbed many. In a four-part series in the Michigan Chronicle in 1958, a concerned Ofield Dukes argued that the conk reflected poorly on black Americans. While he thought the chemical process required to straighten hair, especially the lye, was particularly dangerous, he underscored a more worrisome cultural danger. He attributed the popularity of the style to “psychological factor[s]—those of identification and association” and implied that the conk reflected blacks’ desire to mimic white characteristics. However, like Charles Wartman’s earlier writing on politics in the same paper, Dukes understood only a portion of a more complex phenomenon. As the novelist Albert Murray suggested, for “most Negroes . . . the process goes with certain manners in clothes, speech, music, and even movement, which are anything but ofay [i.e., white] orientated.” For some, the conk was a statement of youthful rebellion, a critique of the more reserved, middle-class cultural norms offered as the singular model of proper behavior for all African Americans by elite blacks such as Dukes, a newspaper editor and leader in the Detroit branch of the NAACP.48

  C. L. Franklin, with his modified New Yorker process—a series of discrete waves rippling back across his head—distilled through his public style the essence of this larger cultural tension. He was a respected preacher who dressed well, if a bit too flashily for some, and who lived among the black elite, first on Boston Boulevard and then, in the late 1950s, on the even more exclusive LaSalle Boulevard, west of Woodward and north of Grand Boulevard. His sermons proclaimed such virtues as self-help, self-respect, individual initiative, and political engagement which, in themselves, would have been warmly received at NAACP meetings—if only offered by someone else. But the image C. L. presented increasingly offended secular elites and religious conservatives alike. It was disturbing enough that a preacher of his standing frequently reminded audiences that church membership in itself meant little (“I see mean, evil, lowdown people in the church,” he told New Bethel one Sunday), that before God there was no essential difference between the churched and the denizens of Hastings Street. But the conk, that symbol of the street hustler making his way in a shady, sinful, and usually illegal subculture, especially grated.49

  Some traditionalists wondered, given C. L.’s flaunting of their sense of the sacred, whether he had not slipped off the thin-edged boundary where he defined his faith. The eleventh anniversary celebration of his leadership of New Bethel was a case in point. Such celebrations were common among Afro-Baptist congregations, as church members honored their pastor and offered a monetary gift, a new car, and sometimes both, to express that appreciation. A week of evening services, sermons, and singing by visiting clergy and choirs from near and far marked the occasion, which usually culminated with a banquet in the church dining room prepared by the women of the congregation. C. L.’s 1957 celebration followed this pattern, but only to a point. Various Baptist ministers led the services during the week of July 7, but C. L. also asked his friend, Bishop Theodoshia Hooks, of Everybody’s Temple of Holiness, a local Pentecostal congregation, to lead one night’s service. For traditionalists, the fact that Bishop Hooks was female and in the pulpit offended just as much as the fact that she was Pentecostal, a sect many Baptists disdained. Departing yet further from the norm, C. L. held the banquet not in the church dining room but rather in the Ebony Room of the Gotham Hotel. This was not the first time he had used the Gotham since his 1946 installation dinner; his 1954 banquet was in the same room. But the 1957 affair held a different surprise. Seated at the head table, along with Judge Wade McCree, attorney and candidate for Common Council, William T. Patrick, Jr., and other dignitaries were “Mr. and Mrs. T-Bone Walker.” Placing the popular Texas blues artist at the head table was classic Franklin. The two men knew each other, C. L. loved his music, and the guitarist played Detroit that week. It was, however, “probably a little bit different” from what most other ministers would do, Bea Buck, C. L.’s former secretary, conceded. While some thought Walker’s blues sounded almost like a sermon, many others were more likely to remember his 1948 Detroit arrest on drug charges or the skimpily clad woman who joined him nightly on stage for certain songs. C. L. never gave such comments recognition. “He was not intimidated by public criticism,” Reverend Jerome Kirby explained. If Franklin intended to act in a certain way, “he was going to do it whether you thought he should do it or not.” He was, Gardner C. Taylor emphasized, “quite an amalgam.”50

  Walker was not the only artist Franklin socialized with. B. B. King considered C. L. “my main minister.” Regardless of what time King closed his Detroit set the night before, he was in a front pew for morning services at New Bethel; and when King remarried in 1958, he and his fiancée flew to Detroit so that C. L. could perform the ceremony at the Gotham. If Franklin provided King with a religious approach he could embrace (the singer carried C. L.’s recordings on tour), Franklin exerted a direct professional influence on another blues singer, Bobby “Blue” Bland. Bland had “lost the high falsetto” that had made his voice so recognizable and needed another sound to distinguish his approach from others. He listened to “‘The Eagle Stirreth in [sic] Her Nest’ over and over and over,” practicing C. L.’s “squall,” the climax of his whoop when the eagle is released from his cage, until he “got it to perfection.” Bland’s version of the “squall” became his trademark.51

  In other ways as well, C. L. lived unconventionally. He was, to be sure, a preeminent Baptist minister, but he was also a relatively young, handsome single man, on the road many days a year. Segregation forced all black performers to gather together in the hotels and rooming houses that would accept them, with the result that traveling preachers and gospel groups lived cheek by jowl with blues, pop, and rhythm-and-blues performers. They might be at the same hotel on Tuesday evening in Shreveport, Louisiana, then again on Thursday in Baton Rouge, and Saturday in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was in the very nature of the circuit, Erma Franklin explained of her experiences traveling with her father during school vacations, that “we would run up on Sam Cooke and Dinah Washington and Lionel Hampton and, oh my God, all the gospel singers.” Present, too, might be some of the great black comedians, such as Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, or Moms Mabley, and singers B. B. King, Bobby Bland, Ruth Brown, Wynonie Harris, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. The star quality audiences bestowed on these secular artists proved attractive to many gospel performers. Traditionalists might grumble, and Mahalia Jackson sang her beautiful and somewhat reproachful hymn, “I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing about in My Song,” but the transformation of the religious culture continued apace.52

  The strains of being on the road were quite real. Promoters frequently reneged on the agreed fee, the whites-only restaurants refused food and the gas stations restrooms, and the threat of v
iolence hung as a constant reminder of the dangers of black performers becoming too visible to the white world. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, a group of white racists, opposed to the presumed “savage” sexual influence black music had on white audiences, violently broke up a Nat King Cole concert before an all-white audience. The beaten and shaken performer canceled his southern tour and returned to Chicago. Such tensions intensified as the civil rights movement grew and heightened the very human needs performers experienced as they balanced alternating bouts of exhilaration, fear, and decompression that were the emotional essence of tour life, even in good times. As Ruth Brown put it, the “final compensation” after the applause faded and the promoter hopefully paid in full “lay in the comraderie among the artists on these tours.” Performers might tour for as much as three months at a time, and daily they “told jokes, played games, laughed, cheated, shot the bull and made love. That last was inevitable,” Brown noted, explaining the obvious, “for we were all flung in at the deep end of the adrenalin tank. . . . It seldom got to the point of ‘Let’s get married,’ it was just being natural and keeping your business within your business, but these ‘tingums’ [affairs] could be hot stuff while they lasted.”53

  Gospel performers were as human as anyone else and did not live apart from any aspect of this performance culture. While not all had affairs with other performers or with fans—the Dixie Hummingbirds, for example, enforced a very strict code of behavior for group members—many did. As a teenager in the 1950s, Etta James toured with Little Richard (Richard Penniman) and recalled it as “a time of crazy orgies, and Richard, along with nearly everyone else, was a willing participant.” One of the “wildest parties” she attended occurred in Philadelphia, where, among others, gospel singer Alex Bradford’s sexual appetites stood out in the young singer’s memory. “When it came to partying,” James commented in a more general vein, “the gospel gang could swing all night.” Willa Ward, Clara’s sister, recalled a particular evening following an annual Baptist convention in Chicago in which Bradford also figured prominently. Ministers and gospel singers, some of them bisexual, gathered and after earlier leading delegates “to holy dancing and shouting [they] were now doing their own inspired thing,” Willa archly commented. At this party she first discovered her sister’s bisexuality, when one of the hosts approached Clara to apologize for not inviting a woman for her that evening. Questioned by her sister, Clara explained, as Willa remembered, that while “my thing is men,” her mother’s controlling protectiveness and intrusive spying “gets between me and any man I decide to get tight with.” It was a painful, awkward moment for the sisters and a complicated one for the revelers who, the next morning, donned their clerical collars and tuned their voices for the convention’s morning session.54