His daily activities at New Bethel were not dramatically different from the years when he traveled so extensively. He was just able to do more with less strain. He counseled parishioners, oversaw church committees (although he generally gave the person he appointed to head a group significant latitude), and presided over the monthly meetings of the trustee and deacon boards. His power to touch individuals even in common interactions continued to astonish. Charlie Thompson marveled that when he sat down with you, C. L. “could make you feel like you was somebody that he cared about. He could make you feel that” because “he was very emotional himself, strong feelings and he demonstrated those feelings.” Margaret Branch, who worked in the church office in the 1960s, had similar experiences. In daily exchanges with C. L., discussing her schoolwork or her plans for the future, she remembered that “he’d always give you recognition for what you were doing. . . . Everybody got praised . . . and identified.” Beverli Greenleaf, who joined New Bethel in the mid-1960s, as a young woman fresh from the small hamlet of McCurry, Arkansas, always thought of C.L. first as the pastor who counseled her and, second, as the preacher who moved her, so touched was she by his evident concern for her and other parishioners. This concern extended to younger ministers as well. James Holley, Samuel Billy Kyles, and associate pastors Leonard Flowers, E. L. Branch, and C. L. Moore were but a few of those C. L. influenced over his career. Kyles remembered when, as a young minister without a pulpit, C. L. paid him “as much as a pastor” for a guest sermon. Jesse Jackson, too, felt Franklin’s warm embrace. Jackson’s mentor, Rev. Clay Evans of Chicago, and C. L. were good friends, and C. L. undoubtedly met the young divinity student through Evans. Franklin and Jackson became close, and Franklin brought him into the New Bethel pulpit, invited him to his 1967 anniversary celebration, and together with Evans, preached Jackson’s 1968 ordination service. All this occurred well before the young minister became a national figure.50
Precisely because C. L. Franklin knew intimately the demands of his chosen profession, his counsel could be quite hard on young men considering the ministry. Jerome Kirby’s parents, migrants from Arkansas, had joined New Bethel in the late 1940s, but they entered another congregation nearer their new home when their son was a young boy. A little more than a decade later, Kirby approached his first pastor for guidance. This seventeen-year-old had struggled for some time over whether he was called to preach. He lacked a sign such as the burning plank C. L. envisioned at age sixteen, and he remained racked by doubt and confusion. Apprehensively, he climbed the concrete stairway, with dull, grayish walls, to the pastor’s office on the second floor, above and to the right of New Bethel’s sanctuary. He knocked and entered on C. L.’s cue. Kirby began to explain his concerns, only to be told by the great preacher that he was too busy to see him now. Over the following weeks this scene occurred again and again, with Kirby becoming more and more distraught. Finally, Franklin asked him in, told him to hang up his hat and coat, and take a seat. This very young man sat before Franklin’s desk and responded as best he could to the few questions C. L. posed. Rather quickly, Franklin dismissed him, told him to get his hat and coat and to leave. The stunned teenager did as he was told. As he reached the door, C. L. stopped him with words that seared themselves into Kirby’s consciousness: “But wait now a minute, let me tell you this. If you can keep from doing it, then don’t.” To Kirby, “that one saying had so much in it.” It was just a sentence, and yet through it C. L. gave the young minister-to-be a guideline for his struggle. Kirby would realize he could not “keep from doing it” and, in time, led his own congregation, yet another minister touched by the powerful legacy of C. L.’s own struggles in Mississippi decades earlier.51
Free of “that steady grind” of the gospel tour, Franklin relished even more the fetes and celebrations that came his way. Both Adam Clayton Powell and John Conyers invited C. L. as their guest to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inaugural ceremonies in January 1965, following the president’s landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater the previous November. Franklin thoroughly enjoyed his place among the celebrities and the pomp in the nation’s capital. At home, New Bethel and his friends honored him yearly, marking his anniversary as pastor of New Bethel with major banquets at downtown hotels. The guest list for each approached a thousand people, and the style he introduced at his first banquet in 1946, at the long-demolished Gotham Hotel, continued on an even grander scale. Beyond the celebratory aspect, these gatherings were also fundraisers. Each year on the anniversary, the congregation raised a cash purse for their pastor or bought him a new car, and sometimes both.52
Franklin considered these gifts donations from a thankful congregation and, therefore, not income. The Internal Revenue Service, however, had some questions. During the 1960s, Franklin reported a salary from New Bethel of approximately $13,600 yearly, and he noted occasional additional income but never more than $1,000. Once, in 1968, he acknowledged anniversary gifts of almost $10,000 but claimed that as a gift “without prior prompting . . . and not for services,” it was nontaxable. This was legal at the time. However, the income he did declare rarely included his significant fees from the gospel tour or royalties received from the sales of his recorded sermons. Thus, after deducting expenses and the exemptions for his mother, youngest daughter, and himself, he never reported more than $8,600 in taxable income. The government objected and, focusing on the years between 1959 and 1962, charged that Franklin failed to report more than $75,000 in income, the equivalent of a $10,000 tax obligation.53
A furious Franklin looked for culprits. Dissidents in the congregation, he suggested in 1965, upset with his handling of the city funds awarded when the Hastings Street church was condemned, were in part responsible. His daughter Aretha put it more bluntly: “Someone from New Bethel had dropped a dime on my father, telling the IRS that he was earning billions.” In another mood, however, C. L. drafted a letter to Lyndon Johnson just five months after attending the president’s inauguration, claiming a peculiar kind of ignorance for so proud a man. “I am originally from Mississippi,” he informed Johnson, a Texan, “where preachers were not required to pay income tax, at least Negro preachers.” He first understood this obligation in Memphis, went to the local IRS office, only to be ordered by the agent “to go home and forget about it”—his $35-a-week salary was deemed insignificant. C. L. implored Johnson to influence the IRS to settle with him, to “lay out a program of payment with which I can comply.” His claims to the president seem improbable. Franklin’s yearly salary in 1940, although he was anything but wealthy, was still significant. More pertinent was the question of whether this sophisticated man, who regularly called on a small group of attorneys for advice, had learned anything about federal tax law in the intervening twenty-five years. But C. L. was not thinking clearly. He faced serious charges and deeply resented the government’s approach to the investigation. In Los Angeles, he complained to an IRS official in Washington, “agents have inquired indiscriminately among nurses, musicians, and just regular working people . . . [who] have never had any business relations with me whatsoever.” They asked Mrs. Mabel Chapman, for example, “if I gambled or sold narcotics.” Such “indiscriminate inquiries” far afield from the actual charges were, C. L. insisted rightly, only “designed to impugn my character and create an unpleasant situation [for me] all over the country.” Although he did not make the argument publicly at the time, privately Franklin felt that his prominence as a social activist, particularly regarding the June 1963 march, “put me in the spotlight and prompted the government to investigate my finances.”54
In April 1966, the U.S. attorney presented a grand jury indictment before a federal judge in Detroit. Each of the four counts in the charge carried a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $10,000 fine. Immediately, C. L.’s friends and supporters moved to help. Robbie McCoy, one of the Chronicle’s religion reporters, publicized plans for a benefit fundraiser, and many wrote her of their prayers and support for the embattled minister
. “The Rev. Mr. Franklin has supported a large number of known persons who needed assistance financially” over the years, McCoy wrote, and she urged all to return that support when he needed it now. In this way the anniversary banquets between 1965 and 1967 became the occasion of black Detroit’s public embrace of and practical support for C. L. Franklin. Eventually, in fall 1967, Franklin pleaded no contest to the charge of underreporting his income between 1959 and 1962. The judge fined him $2,500, ordered him to pay the delinquent taxes, and placed the preacher on probation.55
Despite Franklin’s evident culpability, many perceived him as a victim. Well before he argued it publicly, parishioners and friends thought the investigation was punishment for his leadership of the march, and they concurred with Franklin when he termed the government’s investigation sensational and intentionally destructive. When Franklin’s sentence had yet to be announced, Charles Simmons wrote the Chronicle to remind readers of the charges against former mayor and current city councilman Louis C. Miriani. Against Franklin’s figure of $75,000 in unreported income, Miriani failed to pay taxes for those same years on $258,000, much of which he made while serving as mayor at $25,000 a year. In contrast to Franklin, however, Miriani claimed he was too ill to stand trial, and the judge agreed. “This is the type of inequality,” Simmons concluded his letter, “multiplied by the thousands where Negroes are concerned, that ‘tries men’s souls’ and provokes them to violence. Justice seems to bury its head in the sand on some occasions.”56
Although without a political organization to lead, C. L.’s public reputation grew significantly during these years. He was, of course, the father of Aretha who, by 1967, had achieved the acclamation of both white and black audiences with a talent deeply affected by the black church tradition. While C. L. never achieved a comparable level of fame, certainly not in white America, he recognized in his daughter’s performances that mixture of the sacred and secular that had long informed his preaching. And as African American expression in politics, popular culture, and religion underwent an exhilarating, at times explosive, development in the 1960s, Franklin’s well-known affinities drew considerable attention again. It surprised few, for example, in October 1966, when Franklin buried from New Bethel one of the city’s most prominent black gangsters and reputed drug dealers, Sanders Mallory Jr., better known as “Nick the Greek.” Mallory died of cocaine poisoning while in prison and was, for some, a folk hero. (His funeral attracted an estimated fifty law enforcement officers, who snapped photographs of the mourners.) C. L. not only led the service and eulogized Mallory, a “flamboyant character” of Detroit’s nightlife, but welcomed to the pulpit Milton Henry for a second eulogy.57
This inclusion of Milton Henry suggested another aspect of C. L.’s integration of politics, culture, and religion. In the few years since the bitter public split left the DCHR in tatters, ideological differences had ever more sharply separated Franklin, Cleage, and the Henry brothers. Cleage remained a nationalist, incessantly active and vocal, who developed a distinct religious approach, what he called “Black Christian Nationalism,” to American racial issues. He transformed his church on Linwood into the Shrine of the Black Madonna, with a portrait of the black Christ’s black mother the dominant icon. The Henry brothers moved in a different direction. Milton, ever more committed to a secular black-nationalist revolution, accompanied Malcolm X to Africa in 1964. On this trip Malcolm made his celebrated hadj to Mecca and returned to revise publicly the simple racial dualities he had once preached. Milton and Richard embraced the now independent leader—Malcolm had broken with the Nation of Islam—and invited him to speak at the inaugural dinner sponsored by the Afro-American Broadcast Company. Milton had formed the company to promote black culture and to honor individuals and companies, including Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, for their efforts to present “the Negro to the total society as a being of inherent dignity.” Malcolm X, whose Queens, New York, home had been firebombed the night before while he and his family slept, addressed the sparse audience at Detroit’s Ford Auditorium on Sunday, February 14, 1965. He denounced nonviolence, appealed to black male pride to resist racists who threatened black women and children, and predicted that 1965 would be the “longest, bloodiest, hottest year of them all.” Two days before Malcolm’s next scheduled talk, at New York’s Audubon Ballroom, his home base, on Sunday, February 21, he gave an interview to Gordon Parks, the black photographer and reporter. Malcolm rejected his past denunciations of all whites (numerous African leaders had “awakened me to the dangers of racism”); described himself during his twelve years in the Nation of Islam as “a zombie then”; and predicted that if he was to be a martyr, “it will be in the cause of brotherhood.” It was his last public discussion. That following Sunday afternoon, before a large crowd that included his wife and four children, three assassins, later identified as members of the Nation of Islam, murdered Malcolm before he could finish greeting the audience.58
In the aftermath of Malcolm’s death, the Henry brothers, including Laurence, a writer and photographer, published NOW!, a magazine edited by Richard advocating a black American revolution, and formed an alliance with Robert F. Williams, the former NAACP leader from Monroe, North Carolina, then in exile in Cuba. The brothers also embraced the Cuban revolution as the optimal model for would-be black American revolutionaries. Their planned trip to Cuba in January 1966 to visit Williams, whom they already touted as a prospective leader of the American revolution, proved a dismal failure. Cuban authorities, acting on the requests of the U.S. Communist Party, refused visas. The party, as did its political guides in the Soviet Union, opposed black nationalism, seeing in it a threat to their emphasis on class conflict as the singular catalyst for social change. The finale of the Henrys’ effort to influence international politics approached a classical farce. Milton and Laurence typed a single-spaced, seven-page letter to the Cuban leader that pronounced their revolutionary credentials and instructed Castro on the revolutionary potential of the “black masses.” In clipped, contradictory sentences, the brothers warned that a rebuff would be considered “as a repudiation of every black militant in the U.S.”; promised security for Castro or his representative to visit the United States to meet with the “grass roots revolutionaries who struggle and dream by themselves”; and threatened that if a satisfactory reply did not come within two weeks, they would “publish throughout the Negro press our account of what has transpired. We owe nothing less,” they grandly concluded, “to our people.” Castro’s answer came a few months later, when he rather unceremoniously shipped off Robert F. Williams to the People’s Republic of China, then the ideological alternative to the Soviets within international Communism.59
None of this global revolutionary posturing attracted Franklin, whose vision remained framed by the power of black political and cultural expression to create a fuller American democracy. But when nationalists addressed concerns grounded in black Detroit’s actual experience, Franklin participated without hesitation. He had done this when he included Milton Henry in Mallory’s funeral just months after the Cuban debacle and again when informed of a proposed nationwide strike of African Americans called for February 13, 1967. The strike was to protest the removal of Adam Clayton Powell from his congressional seat on charges, among others, that he misused congressional funds. In Washington, Congressman John Conyers sat on the subcommittee investigating Powell’s fitness to serve, and his support of the subcommittee’s “stringent recommendations” outraged many in his district. C. L. spoke at a meeting that January at Cleage’s church and at a second meeting at New Bethel a few weeks later. At both events, C. L. rebuffed critics who worried about a negative white reaction, arguing that in Detroit as elsewhere, “anti-Negro reaction had already reached the ‘oppressive’ stage.”60
Unfortunately for Franklin and other strike leaders (Grace Boggs, comedian Dick Gregory, and the new president of the Detroit NAACP, Reverend James Wadsworth, among them), the strike was a near total failure, even in Detroit. Pl
anning for the event was too hasty and the announced goal too removed from individuals’ daily experience to justify the forfeit of a day’s pay. Undaunted, the organizers came together again in late June for the second Black Arts Convention in Detroit. Franklin joined with Milton Henry and Albert Cleage on a panel discussing black religion and black nationalism; poet Nikki Giovanni, novelist John O. Killens, and Dudley Randall, publisher of the recently formed Broadside Press, discussed black literature; while Ed Vaughn, owner of a nationalist-orientated bookstore and the driving force behind the conference, led a discussion on economic self-help.61
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