While black voters were ready to reject Miriani, a familiar electoral problem remained. The UAW, still assuming its central role in progressive politics, backed Miriani and inferred that black voters would just have to accept its decision as the price of coalition politics. But few whites understood how blacks’ attitudes had changed since 1957, or how the TULC might mobilize black Detroit for a campaign beyond the limited concerns of trade unionism. With the labor movement, the police department, the citywide white homeowners’ association, and the business community all arrayed against them, TULC leaders Horace Sheffield and Buddy Battle, working closely with Reverend Stephen Spottswood of Metropolitan A. M. E. Zion Church, devised a “Five Plus 1” electoral strategy. The plan advocated support of the four incumbent Common Council members who supported Patrick’s resolution to strengthen the city’s Commission on Community Relations, as well as Melvin Ravitz, a liberal professor of sociology at Wayne State who was running for council for the first time. The “1” in the slogan referred to the young, liberal Democratic challenger to Miriani, Jerome Cavanaugh, a lawyer. Sheffield and Spottswood had been impressed by one of Cavanaugh’s early television appearances and, after further investigation and discussions with him, decided to organize support for him throughout black Detroit. TULC brought together in working harmony the other major black organizations (the Urban League, the NAACP, the Nacirema and Cotillion Clubs). They, in turn, reached out to the church community through the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a citywide organization of white and black ministers. As the possibility of victory seeped deeper in the community, touching members of New Bethel’s Political Action Guild and other similar groups throughout the city, TULC made another critical decision: they organized church members, trade unionists, and volunteers into a massive door-to-door campaign that registered individuals to vote the suggested slate. The election results astounded everyone: Cavanaugh easily defeated Miriani, and the five council candidates all won their seats. It stood as a transforming moment for black Detroit, an election that marked the public recognition of the very real political power they possessed. Coalitions would be necessary in the future, but what exhilarated black voters was their success against both the established union movement and the business community. The era of dependence on white trade-union leaders appeared over, and a more demanding black voice, unified for the moment, celebrated its coming out in this urban, industrial world.40
C. L. Franklin also celebrated this signal moment in Detroit’s history. Through the Metropolitan Civic League for Legal Action, Franklin had participated in the political mobilization to the extent his schedule allowed. As the founding president, he welcomed mayor-elect Cavanaugh when he addressed the league’s victory meeting following the election. But how much time he personally devoted to the campaign remains unclear. His touring continued, Los Angeles remained attractive, and familial and ministerial concerns demanded his attention as well.41
As his children, except for Carolyn, the youngest, reached college age, C. L. actively looked to guide them toward careers. This was consistent with his belief that a father’s role, while less central than a mother’s, had a certain primacy regarding the external world. Vaughn, of course, already had a career in the Air Force. C. L.’s relationship with Carl Ellan was yet too new for him to play a forceful role, though he did insist that his son Cecil attend college. Accepted at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Cecil balked, unwilling to leave friends in Detroit and unsure of what he might study. C. L., who had made all the arrangements for his admission, confronted his son. He would personally put the son on the plane, Franklin announced, but if Cecil elected not to attend classes, “then just remember don’t come back here.” C. L.’s expression was harsh but, after the fashion of his mother, quite to the point. Years later, after Cecil had graduated cum laude and had become the successful business manager for Aretha, he thanked his father for the tough choice he had presented.42
Erma, too, felt her father’s concern that she attend college. Following the birth of her second child, she went to Clark University, also in Atlanta, where she stayed for two years. In 1962, during her sophomore year, musicians she knew from Detroit, who toured with the popular R&B band led by Lloyd Price, played a club in Atlanta and urged her to audition for the band. She did, Price made an offer, and the combination of the salary proposed and the excitement promised led Erma to accept immediately. Erma had been interested in a music career ever since Berry Gordy had approached her, and Lloyd Price’s band proved to be a wonderful musical fit. Her biggest record was the original version of “Piece of My Heart,” which rose into the top ten on the national rhythm-and-blues charts in 1967. Erma’s mother-in-law, Ollie Patterson, cared for her children, Thomas and Sabrina, while she was touring.43
Aretha’s situation proved more complicated. Eighteen in 1960, she already had two children and had left high school before graduating. She also possessed a considerable reputation from her gospel recordings and tour appearances. Her musical abilities were exceptional, and when she told her father of her desire to record popular music, the preacher father and this talented gospel-performing daughter became the talk of the church world.
The most dramatic example of a revered gospel performer “going pop” during the 1950s was Sam Cooke. The gospel star released his first secular recording, “Loveable,” in 1957, under an alias, Dale Cooke, in an ineffective effort to avoid a negative reaction from his gospel fans. Cooke had a reason to be worried. When his crossover became public (no name change could mask his voice), many of his gospel supporters felt angry, even betrayed, by their musical minister’s embrace of the secular. Even before Cooke’s celebrated crossover, Ray Charles had infused his popular music with the harmonies and inflections of the black church. In the wake of Charles’s enormous influence, many gospel quartets, the famous as well as those more obscure, delivered popular lyrics set to sacred harmonies, while the music of those groups who remained within the gospel tradition increasingly reflected popular trends.44
Precisely because church traditionalists sensed the inevitability of this sea change, many reacted strongly when the daughter of the nation’s foremost black preacher followed Sam Cooke and others into popular music. Some in New Bethel were openly critical of Aretha and even more so of her father for allowing her to record rhythm and blues. “Can’t serve two masters,” Hulah Gene Hurley said, summing up the feeling of many. The criticism spread well beyond Detroit. Throughout the South, ministers and parishioners alike were openly critical, and Jasper Williams thought “it was a very traumatic time for the church” nationally as well as in Detroit.45
C. L.’s defense of Aretha was immediate and public. In an interview with the Michigan Chronicle’s entertainment reporter in March 1960, shortly after he accompanied Aretha to New York to initiate discussions about recording contracts, he confirmed directly that her “switching to the popular field [is] with my permission.” He dismissed the argument that, as a minister, he should “frown upon popular or jazz music,” because “good Christian people can be involved in the popular field,” as were many of his “respected personal friends.” C. L. extolled a musical diversity that incorporated “all kinds of music as long as it is good.” He acknowledged that Aretha may have left the gospel field but “she has not left the church nor turned her back on the religious training she received in her home.” The following year, C. L. and Aretha appeared jointly in Memphis’s Ellis Auditorium at the first Handy Festival of Music. Advance billing pitted the “Hallelujah Street” hymns of the father against the “Beale Street” songs of the daughter, but the actual performance underscored the multilayered cultural vision each possessed. Aretha took the stage first and sang gospel selections before C. L. preached to the large crowd. The service concluded, C. L. had the doors of the church thrown open as he announced that Aretha would now sing R&B and whoever wanted to stay or leave could do just that. Relatively few left. As Jasper Williams, present in the audience that day, recalled with a bemused c
huckle, in this father’s fierce defense of his young daughter’s career “he never backed down from that and it was very, very hard to do that in that day. But people, because it was him, accepted it. They accepted it. It was like taboo, it was the worst thing in the world that a gospel preacher should do or could do, but he didn’t care.”46
By November 1960, Aretha’s record, “Today I Sing the Blues,” landed on Detroit’s Top Ten list, along with songs by such local friends as Jackie Wilson, the Miracles (with Smokey Robinson), and her longtime favorite, Dinah Washington. Within two years, hometown enthusiasts were calling her “the female ‘Ray Charles’” and the “New Queen of the Blues” (to distinguish her from the queen, Bessie Smith). But in fact her career sputtered during these early years, as producers at Columbia Records never quite allowed her to record material that touched her soul. In her performance style, however, Aretha captured the very essence of black church worship service. For her brother, Cecil, Aretha did “with her voice exactly what a preacher does with his when he moans to a congregation.” For Ray Charles, Aretha “always sang from her inners,” from the deepest source within. “In many ways she’s got her father’s feeling and passion,” for when C. L. “—one of the last great preachers—delivers a sermon, he builds his case so beautifully you can’t help but see the light. Same when Aretha sings.” But C. L. himself had the last word for those critics who trembled for shame over his support of his daughter. “Aretha is just a stone singer,” Franklin declared. “If you want to know the truth, she has never left the church.”47
But the church itself changed, as did political debate and musical expression as the 1960s progressed. A new generation, one born and reared to the rhythmic cacophony of urban Detroit, drove this transformation, and in the process challenged ministers as diverse as C. L. Franklin and A. A. Banks, to say nothing of Detroit and the nation itself.
CHAPTER NINE
A RISING WIND
The continued police dragnets, a familiar daily violence on the streets, and the deterioration of those schools that had “tipped” predominantly black infuriated Milton and Richard Henry and their pastor, Albert Cleage. Too many failures by politicians to deliver on campaign promises, too many empty avowals of racial democracy by union leaders together produced a deep suspicion of liberal solutions. They had supported Jerome Cavanaugh’s candidacy but never expected freedom to flow from the mayor’s hands. Instead, Milton Henry later recalled, this trio supported political coalitions they thought potentially beneficial while simultaneously looking “to be more overt and to be sort of the devil in the pot.” Early in the 1960s, being “the devil” meant to increase militancy and aggressiveness in demanding full rights in a city that still had segregated restaurants and hotels, to say nothing of residential and occupational discrimination. Inevitably, this approach brought them into direct conflict with the established civil rights groups in the city.1
In late November 1961, the first issue of their new weekly, the Illustrated News, appeared. Edited by Henry Cleage, Albert’s attorney brother, the paper’s intent was to create “the kind of newsletter that you need to build a grassroots movement,” said Grace Boggs, a political ally. The first four issues featured a series by Albert Cleage, “The Negro in Detroit,” geared to challenge conventional thinking. These articles were a fiercely critical analysis of the local black elite who so desperately “wanted to get along—to be like their white neighbors . . . [that they] consciously and deliberately sacrificed every racial characteristic and stereotype for the cause of acceptance.” The elite, Cleage suggested, had been largely successful but for one major problem: their acceptance by white Detroit would not survive as the “slums spilled over” and the growing black population’s need for housing shattered white liberals’ confidence in integration.
What made Cleage’s thinking especially different from others’ was that he did not condemn the “slum hoodlum with his hostility and violence.” Rather, he found the reasons for the hoodlum’s actions in the “anger at the world which has rejected him,” as evidenced in the social conditions that structured daily life. An inner sense of “worthlessness” motivated this person and the admittedly destructive behavior was, in its “own peculiar way,” a fight “for recognition and acceptance.” In a conclusion guaranteed to generate an intense reaction, Cleage suggested that both the “teenage hoodlum” in a “black leather jacket and tight blue jeans” and the “middle class person” concerned “with the ‘right people’” and “a house on the ‘right street’” shared an identical insecurity. Each lacked a sense of self and—to borrow a metaphor from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel—each remained invisible to themselves. Neither thought themselves somebody.2
Very few people in Detroit at this time spoke publicly as Cleage did. C. L. Franklin certainly addressed the issue of self-worth among African Americans of all ages, but he neither bestowed semi-approval on that “slum hoodlum” nor ridiculed the prospects of integration. Quickly, however, the group around Cleage and the Henry brothers committed itself to a political strategy that kept “moving the ante up,” pushing beyond “where we were” so as “to be the catalyst down in there, creating the change.”3
Early in 1962, they went public as the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), its very name a critique of the well-known civil rights organizations. Richard Henry presided over a membership composed primarily, his brother Milton noted, “of professionals and educators, people who were professors in the universities here.” In its first months, GOAL attacked the segregated nature of the city’s schools, as well as the biased textbooks used in them, and threatened a lawsuit over the city’s singular focus for urban renewal (i.e., destroying housing to make room for commercial development or freeways) in black neighborhoods such as Paradise Valley. The group also called on black voters to support only black congressional candidates in the 1962 primary.4 In all of these activities, Cleage and GOAL followed their dual strategy of seeking alliances even as they roiled the pot. Cleage, for example, became a member of the executive board of the Detroit NAACP in late 1962, while he regularly delivered withering public criticism of what he considered its conservative inaction. In a speech at a luncheon of the Booker T. Washington Business Association, a politically conservative group of elite black businessmen and professionals (many of whom Cleage had known since childhood), he directly held them responsible for making his militant approach necessary. The “sickness of frustration, anger and hatred among Negroes,” he argued, was the result of a weak black leadership “pussy-footing with discrimination.” He accused the elite of being primarily concerned with bias in their professional worlds. Until the appearance of GOAL, he challenged, the city had lacked the “militant, vocal leadership . . . of the type that gives a point and direction in the life of Detroit Negroes.”5
Although Cleage and the Henry brothers often made uninformed and ill-considered attacks on others, their criticisms of education policy and urban renewal attracted considerable support. As Cleage argued at a socialist forum in Detroit’s Eugene V. Debs Hall in September 1962, “a militant and independent Negro leadership” focused on the needs “of the total Negro community” just might mobilize large numbers of previously inactive black citizens. The apathy so often noted was not inherent in these men and women, he insisted, but rather grew from their exclusion from civic life by both white society and elite blacks. Cleage argued that racism was not an episodic social illness but a structural consequence of America’s social and political culture, and he therefore demanded a thorough, indeed a revolutionary, cure. His approach increasingly found an audience. Even the Detroit News felt compelled to include Cleage in its 1962 discussion of the city’s black leadership. “He is a militant and a nationalist,” the paper explained, “but not a fakir nor a wild-eyed visionary.”6
That same year, Cleage brought jazz drummer Max Roach and his wife, singer Abbey Lincoln, to the church to discuss “Black Nationalism in Jazz.” Lincoln’s natural hair—what would in a few years be called
an Afro—caused much comment among the hundred people present, and the couples’ discussion of nationalism ranged well beyond the world of jazz. Cleage gently criticized the couple for several “questionable arguments and conclusions” and upheld the possibility (which Roach ignored) that whites committed to a radical transformation of America could be allies. He also wondered at the simplistic economic thinking at the core of the couple’s philosophy of racial uplift. Although not yet a nationalist himself, Cleage applauded the speakers for the courage to speak their minds and proclaimed the evening “an exhilarating experience” that made “a genuine contribution” to political debate.7
No one could confuse the tone and substance of Franklin’s 1955 public criticism of the NAACP with Cleage’s acidic dismissal of contemporary black leaders. But each man shared a conviction in the potential of the individuals in the pews before them, and as they continued to evolve, each realized the need for a more aggressive approach to the city’s problems. By June 1963, they would join forces to pose the greatest threat to date to Detroit’s established civil rights leadership.
On March 10, 1963, New Bethel’s second exodus ended as an exuberant C. L. Franklin led a caravan of three hundred cars from the church’s temporary quarters to a newly renovated structure on Linwood and Philadelphia, on Detroit’s West Side. An all-black construction company had transformed the former theater into a church with a seating capacity of over twenty-five hundred. Some furnishings and many decorative touches still awaited completion, but taking possession ended a difficult period for Franklin and the congregation. They had survived two years of wandering as the city refashioned the Hastings Street corridor and weathered a legal challenge by three disgruntled members over the pastor’s management of construction funds. Franklin himself had wandered in more ways than one. In contrast to his practice during the construction of the new Hastings Street church a decade earlier, he traveled extensively during this second dislocation, treating Los Angeles as his second home. But now, standing in the new pulpit for the first time, his gaze flitting from the packed floor to the equally crowded curved balcony, Franklin’s joy burst forth. “This is a day of victory, triumph and achievement,” he exulted, “and we are happy.” C. L. praised the faith and the commitment of the congregation, and he proudly offered the beautiful structure created by skilled black workers as proof not of “reverse racism,” but of what “as a race we can do for ourselves if we take advantage of opportunities to qualify ourselves.” Telegrams poured in from President John F. Kennedy, J. H. Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. It was a special moment. “On this particular occasion,” Charlie Thompson recalled, laughing at the memory, “you just couldn’t shut him [Franklin] up. He was kind [of] like Muhammad Ali! You couldn’t shut him up, I tell you. . . . Everybody could feel it. Peoples just applauding and crying and it was really something to celebrate for.” Not insignificantly, walking into New Bethel’s new sanctuary ended Franklin’s dalliance with Los Angeles. Within the bounds of his customary travels, he was home to stay.8
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