Despite his time away from Detroit, Franklin had followed the political upheavals created by GOAL and the direct-action tactics, including sit-ins and group arrests, practiced by the young militants in the Detroit chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It was, however, a struggle seven hundred miles to the south, led by his good friend, Martin, that provided him reentry into the highly contentious freedom movement in the Motor City.9
After the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. had become the nation’s most recognized civil rights activist. As the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King and his allies raised considerable funds to finance direct challenges to the systematic segregation of the Deep South. Early in 1963, King and SCLC turned their attention to Birmingham, Alabama. The state of Alabama, perhaps second only to Mississippi, was a center of white resistance to civil rights. That January, the newly elected governor, George C. Wallace, declared in his inaugural address that his administration would “draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, ‘Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’” Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, fervently supported the governor’s sentiments, which he had long enforced by any means necessary. On Wednesday, April 3, the first demonstrators marched downtown to face arrest at the hands of Connor’s police. Over the next week, the mass demonstrations continued, but as white resistance intensified, fewer black demonstrators willingly offered themselves for arrest and possible beatings. King, worried that serious defeat for the movement was imminent, sought new tactics to rejuvenate the Birmingham movement. On April 12, Good Friday in the Christian calendar, King, his chief assistant, Ralph Abernathy, and the city’s longtime leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Fred Shuttlesworth—ministers all—led a group of demonstrators who were arrested and then jailed.10 But even that potent symbolism failed to generate more protesters. By Thursday, May 2, SCLC implemented another tactic long debated and discussed: More than one thousand young people, students in the black grade schools and high schools of the city, streamed out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in waves of fifty at a time, into Kelly Ingram Park, which marked the divide between black and white Birmingham. There, a phalanx of police met them, arrested them, and carted them to jail in police wagons. The following day, Connor ordered his fire department to turn water hoses on a second massing of young protesters and his police to use their snarling guard dogs to contain the demonstrators. By Saturday morning, newspapers around the world reproduced the horrifying pictures of teenagers and children under brutal attack by the city’s forces of public safety.11
Despite the international press attention, the cost of the demonstrations, including bail money, fines, legal fees, and daily sustenance for demonstrators, drained SCLC’s treasury, and King and his advisers had to raise more money immediately. They turned to three nationally known supporters who were also gifted fundraisers: Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, and C. L. Franklin. Jackson responded with plans for a program in Chicago, held on May 27, which C. L. helped to organize. The writer and radio commentator Studs Terkel emceed the event, introducing in turn Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt, and Aretha Franklin, whose rendition of “Precious Lord,” Thomas Dorsey’s famous gospel hymn, “turned church out,” in the words of one eyewitness. King then spoke, and the event raised more than $50,000 for SCLC.12
Efforts in Detroit proved more complicated. As in black communities across the nation, the visual images from Birmingham fueled both comments and protest. One ill-planned protest meeting early in May attracted only fifty people—enough, however, for Albert Cleage’s supporters to demand he speak to the group. TULC announced that same week plans to participate in a national march on Washington for May 30, Memorial Day, to protest the “ghastly events” in Birmingham. On Friday, May 10, Franklin and New Bethel trustee Benjamin McFall asked forty people to an invitation-only meeting to support Mahalia Jackson’s effort in Chicago. Some thirty attended, but the five major civil rights organizations in the city ignored the invitation. Significantly, Franklin did not invite Cleage. He may have reasoned that while Cleage’s continuing public attacks on other black leaders attracted some, they made coalition-building immensely difficult. Franklin may also have noticed how Cleage’s supporters worked to dominate every event they attended.13
The meeting elected officers for an organization whose purpose was already reaching beyond simply a support role. Franklin became chairman, McFall co-chairman. The board of directors and committee chairs included Thomas Shelby, Jackie Vaughn III, James Del Rio, Nelson Jack Edwards, and John Burns, all men close to Franklin. In acknowledgment of his public stature, the absent Cleage was later asked to become one of the fourteen directors. C. L.’s leadership position remained intact—but only for the moment.14
The traditional black leadership, who had largely ignored the May 10 meeting, convened five days later. This time, Franklin was not invited. Disturbed at Franklin’s prominence at the first meeting, the assembled leaders requested a private meeting with Franklin the following day to ask him to step down as chair of the new group. Pressed by George Crockett, then a leading member of the Cotillion Club, who “insisted [Franklin] had no leadership image or experience for this sort of thing,” Franklin refused. He had been duly elected and “would continue to serve until removed by a proper vote.” The exchange sparked a public conflict with the black elite that C. L. had long anticipated. Two days later on May 17, the ninth anniversary of the Brown decision, a large crowd came to New Bethel in a heavy rain for the group’s second meeting. All of the major organizations had sent representatives. The new organization adopted the name Detroit Council for Human Rights (DCHR), and its committee structure expanded. The traditional leadership angled to have two of its supporters appointed to head the planning committee, with power to speak for the council—a move that would have made Franklin’s position honorific rather than substantive. C. L. refused to step aside, and the two designated spokesmen, Dr. D. T. Burton and the young lawyer John Conyers Jr., resigned instead. Franklin’s supporters applauded, and those who had previously dismissed him had no choice at the moment but to accept his authority.15
By the May 17 meeting, Franklin’s plans had progressed well beyond a simple supporting role for the Chicago rally. The group announced a major march in Detroit, with King as the main speaker, with a dual goal of supporting SCLC and focusing attention on racial issues in Detroit. On May 20, Franklin asked Councilman William Patrick to sponsor his application for a permit for a march, then set for June 11, of some one hundred thousand people down Woodward Avenue. As was his style, Cleage supported the march but saw in the DCHR an opportunity to supplant the old leaders who, he argued, spoke on behalf of “white ‘Liberals’ rather than for the Negro masses.” If Franklin could “avoid being boxed in by the old guard leaders,” Cleage argued, “. . . we may see a complete change in the Detroit picture, and soon.” Such words did not sit well with the Baptist Ministerial Alliance, which had initially supported the march but now rescinded its approval. Some of their opposition was personal: resentment of C. L.’s stature and success, and the fact that until now he had rarely been active in any of the community activities the Alliance sponsored. When Franklin appeared at an Alliance meeting on May 28 to discuss the reversal, a fight nearly broke out. Reverend A. L. Merritt, president of the Alliance, denied Franklin speaking privileges, as his dues were not yet paid. New Bethel’s minister exploded, denouncing the decision and demanding the floor based on his seventeen-year membership in the group. Merritt refused, and C. L. “angrily went after” him but was restrained by other ministers. As C. L. later told a Detroit reporter, “I temporarily lost my temper,” but he refused to be dissuaded by such opposition.16
What enabled Franklin to retain his leadership position—for his opponents were correct: he had rarely volunteered, nor had he been asked to involve himself in their public activities�
��was his close friendship with King. The civil rights leader had asked him for help, and King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, reinforced that connection with a well-publicized telegram prior to the May 17 meeting that praised Franklin on behalf of her husband for “sparking a city-wide fund drive” for SCLC. As potent as that endorsement was, Franklin’s opponents persisted in efforts to unseat him. Just before May 30, Crockett and TULC’s Horace Sheffield called SCLC’s Atlanta office to inform King’s staff of what they considered a disastrous situation in the making. In a long discussion with Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, one of King’s main assistants, the two men explained their inability to remove Franklin and urged SCLC either to withdraw King’s participation for the march now planned for Sunday June 23, or have SCLC publicly appoint Charles W. Butler, pastor of New Calvary Baptist Church, as SCLC’s Detroit coordinator. Hoping for a compromise—perhaps because there was no way to convince King to withdraw support from his friend—Walker, impressed by the critique of Franklin, chose the second option. Butler, an active member of the Baptist Ministerial Alliance, which had just denied Franklin speaking privileges, announced his own appointment at a meeting at New Bethel on May 30. Neither Franklin nor anyone else objected, but they also ceded no ground in leading the fundraising or the coming demonstration.17
Of course, the open tension between Franklin and Detroit’s entrenched black leadership, religious and secular, had deep roots. But there was as well a personal dimension that drove both sides in this dispute. Men like Edward Turner, A. A. Banks, and their colleagues had long dismissed Franklin as a mere preacher. They abhorred his public style and denigrated his political analysis. Yet, in this moment of crisis, King had reached out not for Arthur Johnson, his Morehouse College classmate, nor other close acquaintances among the black social elite, but for the Mississippi-born migrant.
It was not just Franklin who worried the entrenched black leadership. Cleage’s considerable organizational and oratorical skills, coupled with Franklin’s ability to move crowds, posed a substantial threat to their position. But the politics of the two men were not, in fact, interchangeable. Both were committed to integration at this time as were the other leaders, but Cleage’s persistent critique of American liberalism’s systematic inability to solve African American problems distinguished him from Franklin, who remained a liberal Democrat. Traditional leaders feared Cleage’s influence on Franklin (whose intellect they belittled privately); they worried that together, the potential effectiveness of these two men might mobilize those whom these elite leaders had always presumed to represent. Arthur Johnson of the NAACP caught well their mood of apprehension. The march “was the first major challenge to the leadership of the NAACP” during his tenure in Detroit. With the increasingly militant language finding stronger echoes on Detroit’s streets in anticipation of the coming march, “none of us knew exactly where things were going.”18
In early May, before the march had received much public attention, Mose Atkins, “a colored citizen” of Detroit, wrote the NAACP to suggest a new tactic. In an effort to force the Kennedy administration to intervene in Birmingham, the group should have “our colored bus drivers go on strike and tie up Detroit bus service. This will learn the Kennedys to keep their word.” A few weeks later, an anonymous letter to Detroit’s Urban League struck an angrier tone. Reflecting perhaps Cleage’s rhetorical influence, the writer warned “you old Uncle Toms” to “move and move right or we are going to move you out and no one will listen to you.” Insisting that the established leaders must “stop pleasing these white people,” the writer added: “We are watching you and if you don’t go right you won’t have anyone to lead and then the white man won’t need you either.” Even longtime NAACP supporters waved caution signs. One such local activist, known only as Patterson, castigated the organization for its refusal to publicly support Franklin and the DCHR’s march. He predicted the demonstration would be a success “beyond all expectations because the PEOPLE will be participating . . . not the $100.00 plate dinner members but the little people.” And he warned that “a ‘rising wind’ of resentment and bewilderment on the part of the community” toward the NAACP would grow even more forceful. “You will have an open revolt on your hands soon within the organization. Believe this please,” Patterson pleaded. “I’d be with you—But you make it difficult.”19
On June 7, in a last effort to control the march, a committee chaired by A. A. Banks that included Arthur Johnson and Charles W. Butler met with Franklin and other officials of the Detroit Council for Human Rights. Incredibly, Banks insisted that all funds raised be split equally between SCLC and the Detroit branch of the NAACP. Franklin rejected this immediately. Only days before, his hand had been strengthened when, in a conference call with King, Wyatt Walker, Charles Butler, and himself, King requested Detroit ministers to send telegrams affirming their support for the June 23 march directly to Franklin, who would then transmit them to Atlanta. As Arthur Johnson well understood, King’s support trumped all arguments.20
Franklin’s understanding of black Detroit’s history infused his call to join the march. Alone among the city’s leaders, C. L. emphasized in a newspaper interview that the coming march would mark—almost to the day—the twentieth anniversary of the 1943 riots. The “same basic, underlying causes” for that disturbance “are still present,” he explained, as are the “fear and frustration” so evident in 1943 as well. “We comprise nearly 30 per cent of the population, for example, but 70 per cent of us live in substandard housing. Our demonstration,” he declared in his own blunt way, reflecting his evolution since his 1955 public letter, “will serve as a warning to the city that what has transpired in the past is no longer acceptable to the Negro community. We want complete amelioration of all injustices. This is a new leadership.”21
As the march grew closer, the back-room maneuvering intensified. A spokesman for the Baptist Ministerial Alliance criticized Franklin’s and Cleage’s insistence on black leadership of the march, while black leaders in the UAW (particularly Sheffield, Buddy Battle, Nelson Jack Edwards, and Marc Stepp) negotiated with Franklin over Walter Reuther’s role in the event. Marc Stepp, who attended the meeting, recalled that Franklin and other unnamed DCHR leaders demanded an all-black leadership because they “didn’t want Walter to take it over.” The negotiations resulted in a role for Reuther that did not challenge DCHR’s control, but the deep suspicion of the powerful union’s assumption of primacy regarding black Detroit’s interests remained. The NAACP also worked to outflank the march leaders, secretly printing a thousand picket signs with the group’s name prominently displayed. “I was trying to keep the NAACP from being smothered,” Arthur Johnson explained, decades later.22
However important the political maneuvering was to those involved, it played itself out against a somber backdrop. Early in the morning of Wednesday, June 12, a sniper, hiding in nearby bushes, shot dead Medgar Evers, the World War II veteran and head of the Mississippi NAACP, as he crossed from his car to the front door of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers had given the powerful speech at Detroit’s demonstration and memorial commemoration of Emmett Till’s murder in September 1955. On Saturday, June 22, on the eve of the Detroit march, police arrested Byron de La Beckwith, a former United States Marine, in his home in Greenwood, Mississippi, and charged him with the murder. De La Beckwith proudly affirmed his membership in the White Citizens Council of Mississippi, and Greenwood’s elected city attorney volunteered his legal expertise to the accused.23
Sunday, June 23, broke clear in Detroit, the temperature warm but not excessive, the bright sunshine an encouraging welcome for the day to come. By noon, people began massing along Woodward Avenue for the 4 P.M. start, and the crowd grew enormously as the churches let out in the early afternoon. The marchers, Chronicle reporter Ofield Dukes later wrote, were diverse: “Negroes of all classes—street walkers, doctors, school children, senior citizens, drunks, clergymen and their congregations, etc.—came from near and far to ‘walk for freedom.�
��” It was, in so many ways, a C. L. Franklin crowd. As the numbers surged to somewhere between 125,000 and 200,000 people, the joyous marchers took possession of the streets in the city’s main shopping and entertainment district where, until recently, they had been denied equal service. Significantly, the march was a black affair. White marchers never appeared in appreciable numbers—“masses of brown and black people punctuated by sympathetic whites” was Chronicle columnist Broadus N. Butler’s impression. Some black unionists expressed disappointment at the noticeable absence of most of their white coworkers.
Singing in a Strange Land Page 30