SCLC named the Washington encampment (erected in West Potomac Park, between the Washington and Lincoln memorials) Resurrection City, an open call for a new life for the nation and its oppressed citizens. However well-intended such expressions were, the reality proved far more discouraging. Lyndon Johnson, who had stunned the nation on March 31, when he announced he would not stand for reelection that November, placed federal troops and Washington security forces on alert before the first demonstrators arrived on May 11. In effect, this cordoned off the United States Congress, the intended object of the demonstration, from the marchers. Despite the efforts of national director Reverend Bernard Lafayette and his staff, SCLC’s planning suffered even greater delays in the wake of King’s death. The first of the wooden shanties intended to house participants was not constructed until two days after the first group arrived. Organized youth gangs from Memphis, Chicago, and elsewhere added to the tension, and by May 22, the organizers demanded that two hundred gang members leave the campgrounds. Not all did. The weather also contributed to the chaos, as heavy rains turned the grass into a slippery, muddy slop. The number of protesters peaked at about twenty-five hundred on Sunday, May 26, and dropped to barely five hundred eleven days later, the day following the assassination of New York senator Robert Kennedy, after his triumph in California’s Democratic presidential primary. The often-postponed Solidarity Day, meant to boost morale and increase attendance, was finally held on June 19, with addresses by Reverend Benjamin E. Mays, Coretta Scott King, Walter Reuther, and the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. After the speeches, even more people left for home.14
C. L. Franklin had not accompanied his son in mid-May, when the Detroit participants left for Washington. But he did go to Washington in June, for Solidarity Day, and he preached two days later at St. Stephen’s Baptist Church. There Franklin took his text from the book of Daniel, particularly the account of three Israelites, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused to worship Babylon’s gods. C. L. had given the sermon many times before, and it served his political purposes well that evening. The three men were willing participants in the Babylonian government, Franklin preached, for there is nothing wrong with political engagement even in a strange land. But their refusal to worship false gods underscored his central message that “there are higher laws” than those of a mere king. The men’s proud affirmation before the king, reasserting their refusal to bow, led to their confinement in a fiery furnace. At this point, with the audience aware of the Lord’s coming intervention that would save these dissenters, Franklin turned the sermon directly toward the present. America, “our republic,” he argued, is putting law above justice here in Washington: “I feel like if the state was as concerned about justice as they are about law and order—there wouldn’t be any need for Resurrection City.” He warned of yet more dangers to come, of continued poverty, jailings, humiliations, murders, and asked of the audience but “one firm resolution today: we’re not goin’ bow!”15
Some weeks later C. L., accompanied by his daughter Aretha, attended the somber SCLC convention, the first since King’s death. The gathering in Memphis, held in the wake of a depressing conclusion to the Poor People’s Campaign, painfully underscored the consequences of King’s absence. The speeches, including one by C. L., and the hymns, including selections by Aretha, could not lift the gloom. Back in Detroit, Franklin involved himself at New Bethel; traveled a little—he was still the chair of the Evangelistic Board of the NBC; and continued an active social life that included visits with Clara Ward. But his powers continued to recede.16
That fall, he supported the Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, in his race with Republican Richard Nixon and the segregationist, third-party candidate, George Wallace. The Wallace phenomenon was disturbing, as the Alabama governor appealed to a significant minority of white working people in Detroit. Wallace Malone, a UAW member since 1949 and a New Bethel trustee, recalled heated discussions in the plants that revealed the profound limits of the union’s official stance on integration among many rank-and-file members. That same campaign saw the return of Coleman Young to a larger public spotlight. Publicly a Democrat now, if still with a biting critique of that party’s policies (he had been elected to the Michigan State Senate during the 1960s), Young supported the national ticket. After Nixon won the election in a very close race, C. L. turned his attention more fully to his pastoral activities. On New Year’s Eve, he joined other ministers as one of the major preachers at the “Watch” meeting, “an old form of expressing thanks to God” for past blessings and future hopes. Franklin and his colleagues began services at ten o’clock in the evening and preached into the new year.17
During the fall’s presidential campaign, Franklin had labored to create a new, hopefully for-profit organization that would promote the cultural contributions of black peoples throughout the world. At a Chicago press conference early in the new year, he announced the formation of the International Afro Musical and Cultural Festival, Inc., an enormously ambitious undertaking with a projected board of directors of forty-four people serving on nearly twenty separate committees. The board’s composition indicated that the chairman had learned well some lessons from his long association with Albert Cleage. C. L. surrounded himself with old friends and appended an “honored guests” list of famous black performers, an effort to call in favors from members of the entertainment community he had so long befriended. The Astrodome in Houston, Texas, would host the inaugural event that June.18
Well before Houston, C. L. delivered three sermons at New Bethel that revealed the explicit importance of traditional and contemporary black cultural expression to his sacred performances. He had long drawn on the rich oral traditions of black song and folklore, integrated within a black preaching legacy passed down by example and reborn in the voices of successive generations. As this preaching tradition had directed, he always began his sermons with a biblical text, to affirm God’s blessing on the preacher and the words to come. Now, however, Franklin altered that customary practice. In the sermons he gave during Negro History Month in February 1969, his central texts were not biblical, even when he read a passage from the Bible. In yet another departure, he did not deliver these sermons from his accustomed outline—a series of phrases usually, which allowed his talents, experience, and preparation to mix with the spirit at that moment to breathe a transcendent meaning into his words—but instead from prepared manuscripts written in advance that incorporated long, precise quotations from a variety of authors. The results were mixed. His delivery was at times stilted, the power of his rhythmic pacing often absent, and his message occasionally wandered.
Franklin took as his first authority the “godfather of soul,” James Brown. Adapting the title of Brown’s enormously popular song, “Say It Loud, I Am Black and I Am Proud,” as his sermon’s title, Franklin extolled the growth of pride among African Americans in recent times. Neither “exaggerated self-esteem” nor “haughtiness or arrogance,” this pride was instead a testimony to “one’s own dignity, self-respect,” and to “one’s own racial identity.” Martin Luther King had done much to arouse these feelings, for in the mass act of saying “no” to oppressive power there developed “a sense of wholesome pride, a sense of dignity, and a sense of somebodiness never witnessed before.” But, Franklin offered, King was not alone. Brown, too, encouraged “a new sense of dignity and somebodiness.” He cited at length poems by both Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen to illustrate the deeper history of the simple sentence “I am black and beautiful.” To prevent any ambiguity, Franklin then turned to address a pressing contemporary issue: “We as Christians do not agree with those who preach black supremacy and separatism.” Integration and nonviolence melded black political and cultural traditions into a race pride “with malice toward none and charity toward all.” That complex union of protest politics, the “somebodiness” rooted in the slave spirituals (fam
ously proclaimed by William Holmes Borders on national radio in 1943, and the core of C. L.’s preaching), the potential still vital in Abraham Lincoln’s vision of the possible—all these continued to frame C. L.’s central vision. But this intermingling of the martyred hero and the musician may still have scandalized some of New Bethel’s more conservative parishioners.19
The next week C. L. delivered a meandering sermon in a stilted voice. His text was from the prophet Jeremiah, particularly the phrase in the first chapter, “to whom the word of the Lord came.” Immediately, however, he explained that the sermon’s subject was the then-popular song, “Heard It through the Grapevine.”20 A tortured effort led Franklin to the theme that, as American history schoolbooks all but ignored black people, most of what “we have received” about that history has come “as it were through the grapevine.” He singled out in this regard Carter G. Woodson’s efforts from the 1920s to build Negro History Week and also offered a long list of black men and women whose achievements were notable. The grapevine was, in fact, the alternative vision embedded deep within African American culture, “the grapevine of history, authentic history” essential for self-knowledge, survival, and race pride in this strange land. Properly understood, the grapevine revealed that despite superficial appearances, “the Negro in one way or another has been the central thread of American history.” He explained: “I’m saying that men like Bilbo and Rankin [Mississippi segregationist politicians] and men like [George] Wallace and all of these kinds of people went into office because they happened to hate Negroes.” Now, however, the mobilization of the black community inverted that dynamic, and it represents “a concrete challenge [to] and the severest test of the world’s boasted democracies.” But his reading voice lacked its normal rhythmic pacing, and the tuning of words was minimal. The congregation’s response, with but a few exceptions, was subdued as well, a sharp reminder, by contrast, of the intimate partnership that structured his preaching.21
The third leg of Franklin’s trilogy was strongest both in theme and presentation, even approaching the power of his more familiar sermons. He opened “The Meaning of Black Power” with a long citation from King’s Where Do We Go From Here, which traced the origins of the slogan to a 1966 demonstration in Mississippi. The notion of black power was then new to the civil rights movement, C. L. reminded his people, but novelist Richard Wright and others had long ago used the term. As the phrase was an “essentially emotional concept,” it carried different meanings. In an effort to go beyond the “verbal flourishes and the hysteria of the mass media,” Franklin announced that the sermon would “assess its values, its assets and its liabilities, honestly.”
Black power was, at root, “a cry of disappointment,” Franklin told a packed New Bethel that Sunday evening, “born from the wombs of despair and disappointment . . . a cry of daily hurts and persistent pain.” In a fundamental way, black power is “a reaction to the failure of white power” to act justly. Like Malcolm X, but in a very different fashion, C. L. recognized the legacy of slavery and racism, of forced lessons that blackness was “a sign of biological depravity,” that “his whole history has been soiled with the filth of worthlessness.” Like Malcolm, too, Franklin castigated his people for frequently lacking the self-awareness to grasp “how slavery and segregation have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man.” But unlike Malcolm, C. L. turned to the “grapevine of history, authentic history” he had learned as a boy in church, in Mississippi. There, “the old Negro preacher” countered such bleakness by reaching toward his people with a fierce admonition: “You are not n i g g e r s.” C. L. restated this legacy, now in a higher vocal register and with an elongated, lilting delivery. “You are not s l a v e s, you are not hewers of wood and drawers of water; you are God’s children.” This, then, was another meaning of black power, to think of oneself “as a child of God and a member of the human family.” Again, in contrast to Malcolm and to Albert Cleage, C. L. rejected efforts to tie black power to black nationalism, “for that means pro-black,” a term he rejected because it “means the same thing that the southern white man means. His nationalism is pro-white.”
Franklin emphasized the need for African Americans to build political and economic strength in order to break down “the iron curtain of racial exclusion” that still framed the policies of “so many companies and industries in our city and country.” No longer reading from his text, Franklin now preached of the need to “control our own destiny,” to own rather than rent homes, and to support black businesses for the jobs they create for “your sons and daughters.” School boards, financial institutions, jobs, and above all the police—in the city now more than 40 percent African American, all must truly serve the people they represent. As he moved into his chant, Franklin decried the fear and distrust blacks held of each other, a residue of what the “white folk taught us” in slavery. As the prolonged shouts and pitched cries from the pews urged him on, he professed to understand men who “dedicated themselves” to achieving this vision. Jesus, he proclaimed, as his palm kept the beat on the pulpit, suffering in the garden was such a man, and so too were Gandhi, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King. The gap between these leaders and the people in New Bethel that night was all too real, yet C. L. sought in abbreviated form a transformation similar to what he had once achieved in the magnificent sermons of his prime. He would “go on anyhow,” despite his unworthiness. Those in the pews could as well “keep on marching, keep on believing, keep on suffering,” for “O-o-h-h! one of these days / my master / will say, ‘Well done.’”22
Barely had New Bethel absorbed Franklin’s sermon on black power when the volatile public tensions that idea evoked engulfed the church in a firestorm of bullets. On March 29, 1969, on a bitterly cold Saturday evening, nearly 150 black men, women, and children came through the doors into New Bethel’s welcome warmth. Many dressed in bright, multicolored African-style robes. A small group, perhaps ten, wore the military fatigues, black jump boots, and black berets that identified them as members of the Black Legion, the Republic of New Africa’s military wing. As the crowd settled in, RNA leaders Imari and Gaidi Obadele (Richard and Milton Henry) spoke briefly with Ralph Williams, a New Bethel trustee responsible that evening for preparing the church for Sunday’s services after the meeting. Originally scheduled to meet in another church, the RNA approached C. L. Franklin a few days before their convention, when the original pastor withdrew his offer in the face of criticism. Franklin, who of course knew the Henrys quite well, readily agreed.23
The first sign of trouble came when Milton Henry began his opening remarks. Ralph Williams looked on, horrified, as Henry spoke while flanked by two uniformed Legionnaires, “standing there like soldiers with [loaded] rifles.” Other armed men stood guard at the front and side doors of the church. Williams immediately called his pastor, who uttered a stunned “No!” when informed of the presence of guns within the church sanctuary. Pastor and trustee agreed that nothing could be done immediately that would not worsen the situation but that Williams should tell RNA leaders that he had to close the church at 11:00 P.M. As that time approached, however, Milton Henry was yet in the middle of his major speech. Other RNA officials told Williams to “just be calm,” because the meeting was almost over.
When Henry finished, he lingered in the well of the sanctuary, talking with supporters. Williams cut some of the lights to encourage the crowd to leave. A large group had moved into the foyer at the rear of the church, preparing to exit onto Philadelphia Street. A smaller group, including children, gathered by the church kitchen, whose side doors opened onto Linwood. Williams hesitated to turn off more lights; he did not want anyone to hurt themselves in the dark. Accompanied by a guard, Milton Henry left through the kitchen for his car parked outside just as a police car traveling north on Linwood, staffed with two rookie officers, screeched to a halt parallel with the kitchen door. Officers Michael J. Czapski and Richard E. Worobec thought they saw a group of perhaps ten or twelve a
rmed men milling about south of the door. On foot, they approached a single armed man near the door. Shots rang out, Czapski fell dead, and Worobec, seriously wounded, crawled back to the patrol car. As Henry and his driver quickly left the scene, only to be apprehended ten minutes later, the wounded officer called in a plea for help at 11:43 P.M. Although the only uninvolved eyewitness to the shooting remembered seeing one armed man that evening, Worobec’s repeated message, “They’re shooting at us,” raised other fears in the minds of the police. Within minutes, a large police force arrived, convinced it was at war with black-power insurrectionists thought to be barricaded in the church. At 11:50 P.M., police stormed the church entrance on Philadelphia.24
Within New Bethel, bedlam erupted. Although the police later claimed that they encountered “a hail of gunfire” when they approached the church, the physical evidence examined the following day proved definitively, in the words of the official report of the Detroit Commission on Community Relations, “that the firing came from the outside.” As the police opened fire, shattering the glass doors and windows, those in the foyer, screaming with fear, first ran and then fell to the floor, crawling in every direction, seeking safety from the barrage. Ralph Williams, who had tried to lock the front doors after the first shot, found himself crawling down the right aisle toward the piano just by the pulpit, along with approximately twenty other people. As the police, now in the rear of the church under the balcony overhang, continued their fire, Williams led his group through the kitchen to the steps that led to the basement and, ultimately, a subbasement. At that point, “no one knew what this was all about.” The police soon followed. As Williams recalled:
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