While Franklin’s energies were spread thin, others in the Motor City focused more concretely. TULC strove to improve the situation of black workers in both the UAW and other area unions and encourage a more aggressive black political presence in future elections. But conditions within the union movement remained difficult for black working people. Four years after the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which had generated significant hopes for change, there remained at least thirteen national unions operating in Detroit that did not accept black members, that segregated them into separate, powerless locals or denied them access to apprenticeship programs. Of the 134 unions in the merged AFL-CIO, only 5 had any black representatives on their national board. Two of the unions were predominately black, and the other three were decidedly left-wing in their politics. The United Auto Workers, its progressive reputation notwithstanding, had none. Trade-union interracial committees, Horace Sheffield judged, had “become nothing more than public relations agencies” intent on creating “a good image as far as the union is concerned.”26
At the United Auto Workers’ national convention in Atlantic City in October 1959, TULC members regrouped to demand again representation on the International Executive Board. At a meeting with TULC members the evening before the convention opened, Walter Reuther pleaded the weakest of excuses in refusing to support a black candidate. The union was bound by American social conventions on race issues, he stated. He then added insult and insensitivity to temerity by claiming that the time was not yet but would come, he assured the black delegates, when “a Negro will be qualified” for the position. Still, Horace Sheffield spoke during the convention and placed in nomination for the position Willouby Abner, a Chicago organizer for the UAW, a lawyer, and an NAACP activist. The convention received Sheffield’s nominating speech in near silence. Abner then stood and, as decided beforehand, declined; there was absolutely no support from the white delegates, Reuther supporters all. Buddy Battle led some forty-five black delegates in a walkout on the last day of the convention less to influence policy—decisions had already been made and many delegates had left—than to demonstrate their commitment to continuing the fight. It had some effect: at the next convention, Nelson Jack Edwards, a TULC founder, a New Bethel congregant and trustee, and a longtime UAW member, became the first African American elected as an international representative.27
Although C. L.’s attention to secular politics drifted at times, he remained deeply involved, if most often in a quiet way, in the effort to control the National Baptist Convention. It was with this organization, and not the Metropolitan League or the NAACP, that Franklin maintained his most consistent institutional commitment. Three years after the tense 1957 meeting, the ferocious struggle again dominated the national convention. The reform forces gathered in Philadelphia to challenge Jackson’s bid for another term. Once more, police were called to maintain order, as supporters of Jackson and Gardner Taylor each claimed victory for their presidential candidate. Legal battles followed, and at the following year’s convention in Kansas City, delegates participated in the closest approximation to open warfare ever witnessed in the convention’s long history. Physical struggles between opposing forces broke out for control of the microphones, for the aisles through which speakers approached the podium, and for the podium itself. In the melee, Jackson supporter A. G. Wright, pastor of Detroit’s New Harmony Baptist Church, fell to his death from the dais. Twenty-five police cars responded, and police officers secured the building. Jackson again claimed victory while the reformers despaired of ever changing the National Baptist Convention. Instead, many, among them Charles Hill, A. A. Banks, and H. H. Coleman of Detroit, and C. L.’s friend from Memphis, W. C. Holmes, left to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention.28
As one of the most influential ministers in the convention, C. L. commanded considerable attention. Many expected him to support the reformers and even to align with the Progressives. Franklin advocated civil rights, had long been friendly with both Martin Luther Kings, father and son, and sought in his sermons to activate that yet-silent voice in others. All of these positions conflicted sharply with Jackson’s lifelong conservatism. In July 1961, just before the tragic Kansas City convention, King and Jackson argued over the merits of the recent “freedom rides,” where integrated teams of activists risked their lives to end segregation on interstate buses and public accommodations. While King thought the tactics used by John Lewis and his comrades absolutely appropriate, Jackson argued that “Negroes going to jail won’t touch the conscience of the segregationists. Their moral sensitivity is not that tender.” The Baptist leader condemned civil disobedience as a tactic, insisting that any protest must obey even an obviously immoral law. Jackson offered an alternative approach to King’s, one he called “from protest to production,” which emphasized the responsibility black Americans had “to invest what we have in order to help produce the things we need and the things that will enrich our community and our nation.” This argument, with its separatist, self-help tones reminiscent of Booker T. Washington’s thinking and the contemporary approach of the Nation of Islam, rejected the goal of desegregating public buses in favor of creating investment and job opportunities for African Americans that would enable them to buy their own cars. As Bernard Lafayette remembered: “He [Jackson] would say, ‘That should be your goal, not to waste your energy trying to see if you could sit next to a white person on a bus.’”29
Following the 1961 convention, Jackson had stripped both Kings of their official positions within the organization, a move tantamount to expulsion. A week later, when he preached the Detroit funeral of A. G. Wright, Jackson had delivered a furious public attack on the “freedom movement” and, by implication, the younger King. “The disrespect for law in the move for freedom has opened the way for criminals to come into our midst,” Jackson had decried, proclaiming his ministerial enemies as the “hoodlums and crooks” who occupy “the pulpits today. They are not men who have God on their side.”30
Franklin faced a complicated situation. He respected J. H. Jackson personally, admired him, and even before this crisis freely discussed policy differences with him. But while the public attacks on King undoubtedly ired Franklin, he never resigned from the convention: he was one of a cohort of ministers far more activist and militant than Jackson, who remained within the fold despite deep disagreements. To Franklin, as to ministers Clay Evans of Chicago and Sandy Ray of Brooklyn, the convention represented the most significant mass organization in black America. In its programs and from its pulpits, these activists thought, a message went out that could—and did—mobilize black consciousness.31
But if Franklin stayed, he did so on his own terms. His concluding sermon at the yearly gathering was an event anticipated by thousands of delegates, whose offerings provided the preacher a handsome fee and the convention a sizable contribution. (As chair of the Evangelistic Board, the committee charged with encouraging effective preaching and revivals nationwide, Franklin devoted to his duties the most energy of all the leadership posts he ever held. In all of these commitments to the convention, however, Franklin remained his own person.) In the aftermath of the schism, he praised publicly the freedom movement and King’s leadership, and the relationship between these two men remained quite close. C. L. was King’s “favorite preacher,” one of the civil rights leader’s closest aides noted. Many a Sunday evening during a strategy meeting, when sleep was often scarce and tempers short, Bernard Lafayette recalled, King would “stop the meeting, you know, in time for Franklin to come on” over WLAC radio. “Martin loved C. L.,” Samuel Kyles affirmed, and that feeling was mutual. For his part, Jackson, who could be a vicious political infighter when necessary, had few options. As Jasper Williams understood the dynamic between them, Jackson “could not afford to be mad” with Franklin “because Reverend Franklin wouldn’t care what Dr. Jackson thought. And Dr. Jackson knew that and he needed him.” Franklin’s
ability to embrace both J. H. Jackson and Martin Luther King created a space for less famous Baptists to follow his lead, participate in the freedom movement, and retain allegiance to the institution that nurtured their spiritual and psychological growth.32
In Detroit, meanwhile, other new voices emerged in response to changing conditions. Prominent among them were the Henry brothers, Milton and Richard, whom C. L. had rejected for membership in the league. In tandem with their very close friend Albert Cleage, the Henry brothers would develop an intricate, if conflicted, relationship with Franklin across the coming decade.
The brothers, like Cleage, were also northerners, two of the eleven children born in Philadelphia to Walter and Vera Henry between 1914 and 1935. Walter Henry was a postal worker, holding a steady job at good pay that placed the family high in economic standing among the city’s nonprofessional black families. The parents were “strivers,” one childhood friend of Milton’s noted, who stressed the importance of education, devout faith, and respectable conduct as the keys to success. They led their children to public libraries weekly, insisted that they read widely, and, Vera Henry explained, consciously sought to “teach our children to love God and respect themselves as decent human beings and good Americans.” Milton, born in 1920, absorbed these lessons in his own fashion. An Army Air pilot during World War II, a member of the all-black Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, Henry refused to adapt to southern racial etiquette, much as Jackie Robinson, Coleman Young, and countless other black soldiers had done during their military service. As a result, he did not receive an honorable discharge from the service, a mark that would lead Temple University’s law school to reject his application. Although Yale did accept him, these experiences radicalized him. In 1948, while still a student in New Haven, Henry organized in black Philadelphia on behalf of the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience to a Segregated Army, urging young black men to refuse to register for the military draft with the Selective Service System. The league, led by A. Philip Randolph and his assistant, Bayard Rustin, sat Henry in a sound truck, where he discussed these issues over the loudspeaker as the vehicle traveled through black Philadelphia. Ernest Dunbar, then a young man, heard Henry’s words. “In the world of 1948,” he recalled, “ it seemed like a shocking heresy even to blacks.” It also shocked the city’s legal establishment. His Yale law degree notwithstanding, Milton “failed” the Pennsylvania entrance exam to practice law when, during the obligatory interview, he refused to accept as a condition of passing the restriction that he not defend any civil rights cases in the city.33
In 1950, Milton moved to Pontiac, Michigan, a city thirty-one miles north of Detroit, where he quickly challenged the de facto segregation of the city’s public schools. Shortly after, his younger brother, Richard, who as an eighteen-year-old had helped on the sound truck, arrived and soon became an occasional reporter for the Michigan Chronicle. Richard did not have the same formal education as Milton, but he became an avaricious reader and critical thinker committed to the education of his people. In his role as a public intellectual, he published an eleven-part series in the Chronicle between April and June, 1954, which discussed in accessible language the relationship between historical memory and contemporary black consciousness. Titled “Conspiracy of Silence,” the articles ran as the Supreme Court’s desegregation order in Brown v. Board of Education appeared and offered a quite different perspective. Henry began with the assertion that the “single evil in American life” that fostered bigotry was, in fact, a conspiracy of silence concerning “the true story of the Negro’s past.” Whites and blacks both believed in “Negro inferiority,” he argued, for both groups held that “the Negro lived in savagery and darkness until brought into contact with the white man.”34 Most blacks internalized this assumption, knew no other history to correct it, and thus “constantly feel they must ‘prove’ themselves to whites.” Whites, on the other hand, “constantly expect that feeling from Negroes.” This explained the infuriating pace of change, as majorities in both groups thought that black people “must, therefore, ‘work up’ to equality with the white.” In a wide-ranging analysis based on the premise that history is important because “the past is eternally joined to the present,” Henry discussed the achievements of African culture north and south of the Sahara Desert. He drew on the work of American scholars such as the historians W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, the anthropologist Melvin J. Herskovits, as well as El Edrisi, “a Moslem historian,” and R. E. G. Armattoe, a Ghanian poet and critic, to stress African achievements in government, the arts, science, and literature that were never taught in U.S. schools. Africa was the source of humanity, its very birthplace, and in Egypt he found a distinctively black people whose cultural achievements, he asserted, became the foundation of Western civilization.35
Importantly, Richard Henry examined the use of cultural difference in creating race-specific evaluations of worth. Human sacrifice in an African country like Dahomey (now Benin), a religious practice whose shock value long bolstered white convictions of black inferiority, “was no more barbarous than watching a neighbor burn at the stake was to a citizen of Massachusetts.” Some months later, in a new introduction to the reissue of the articles, Henry continued the discussion. The “history professor [who] prates glibly of Greece and Rome” but remains silent about Africa, India, China, and the Middle East is bad enough; but “equally as bad . . . if not worse” was the highly selective analysis of European history usually offered. The emphasis on Greece and Rome all but demanded historical silence concerning other progenitors of Western civilization who, as Rome reached its height, “were living in comparative barbarism at the same time.” Rejecting this approach as a “perversion of history,” Henry argued that “different groups of people,” framed by different historical and cultural experiences, arrive “at different answers to the same problems.” Thus, the determination of any society’s “‘worth’” has nothing to do with race or with difference but with whether the sociocultural solution “has met the problems” specific to that context. In this manner, Henry concluded with acute insight, “the real obligation in the teaching of Negro history involves not so much an appraisal of Negro history alone as a reappraisal of World history in general.”36
Albert Cleage’s background was even more elite than that of the Henry brothers, but his thinking had developed in similar fashion. From his pulpit at Central Congregational and from podiums across Detroit, he delivered public lectures venomously critical of the social pretensions and apolitical stance of the black elite he knew so well. Weaned on the promise of American democracy presented as fact, the Henry brothers and Albert Cleage developed their critical vision together, becoming part of a deep, subterranean current in black America whose lived experience caused them to loosen the traditional intellectual pilings that had long anchored the community. C. L. shared the broad outlines of this critique but the contours of his self-education, framed within a decidedly nonelite, southern-reared mentality, marked a significant difference between him and this impressive activist trio. Still, early in the new decade, a political kinship bound these varied approaches. From a pulpit such as Franklin’s, from Richard Henry’s articles, from mobilized black autoworkers in TULC, from Detroit crowds defending street-corner orators from police harassment, and from such examples as offered by the year-long struggle of the Montgomery boycotters came the demand to create a more critical understanding that better reflected the actual distance between the promise and the experience of American democracy. Evident in the campaign to elect William Patrick to City Council in 1957, these currents coalesced with even greater force in the 1961 Detroit mayoralty campaign.37
The underlying issues in the 1961 campaign had changed little since the 1943 riot. In his detailed series on race in Detroit that appeared in 1960, Charles Wartman emphasized four critical areas: the “ascribed status” (the very phrase an echo of South African apartheid policy) that maintained segregated patterns in hous
ing throughout the city; the hostility exhibited by a police force with only 150 black officers out of more than 4,000, in a city where blacks approached 30 percent of the population; the limited job opportunities that still prevailed for many; and the segregated nature and poor facilities of the schools for black children. (These same issues had dominated Wartman’s 1953 analysis of the city.) There had been some progress to be sure. Black judges such as Wade McCree had been elected, as was a councilman, and there had been an increase of 49 police officers since 1953—but few in black Detroit believed fundamental change had occurred.38
The record of the incumbent Democratic mayor also was an issue throughout black Detroit. Louis C. Miriani had been elected with the support of every major group in Detroit. Labor hailed him, as did executives in the auto industry and the leaders of the chamber of commerce. The newspapers provided favorable coverage, and black voters voted for him as well. But under the rubric of “cracking down on crime,” Miriani had ordered his police chief to organize widespread stop-and-search operations in black neighborhoods. In one such sweep over a period of days, a search for two accused murderers resulted in the detention of more than 1,500 African Americans, held in police station cells for various lengths of time and eventually released without any charges being pressed. When police chief Herbert W. Hart then attacked publicly the black press and the NAACP for their criticism of these tactics, the mayor supported him. Under Miriani, integration of the police proceeded only imperceptibly, and his opposition helped defeat Councilman Patrick’s resolution to strengthen the city’s Commission on Community Relations, the purported municipal protector of civil rights.39
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