Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  The election in Detroit of an African American mayor did mark a coming of age. Through Young, black Detroit now directed the very institutions that had systematically discriminated against them, and worse, for so long. Reelected in 1977, Young remained in office until 1993, presiding over an increasingly ravaged local economy. George Crockett, Young’s counsel at those 1952 hearings, remained a judge at Recorder’s Court until his retirement in 1978. Two years later, at age seventy-one, he won election to Congress, where he served for a decade. Like his comrade Coleman Young, Crockett had also traversed successfully the social space that separated outsiders from members of the city’s black inner elite. In their way, Young, Crockett, and Franklin, among others, had journeyed far beyond their Mississippis, real and metaphorical. For C. L., since the days he first longed to explore Highway 61, he had grown into a public role far different than the one prescribed for most young Mississippi black boys.39

  Franklin experienced no radical transformation in the aftermath of the New Bethel shootout. In a basic way, the lessons of that event required no break with his past. He remained the militant integrationist and committed Christian who searched for the best in an American democratic tradition he insisted his people must claim as their own. As black Detroit largely turned its collective face away from separatist or revolutionary solutions, activists of nearly every tendency, from NAACP supporters to disillusioned separatists, funneled that assertiveness into a continuing transformation of the city’s political structure. Franklin again assumed a role, if now a minor one, in this transformation even as he husbanded ever more closely his waning energies.

  Old habits brought renewed public notoriety. In 1972, Detroit police arrested Franklin on drunk-driving charges after his new Cadillac collided with another car as he left “an alley adjacent to the Rio Grande Motel” a few blocks from his home, at five-thirty on a Saturday morning. Neither he nor his passenger, a twenty-six-year-old woman, were injured, but the court did require C. L. to post a $1,600 bond, due to an outstanding traffic warrant already issued for another accident. After some hours in custody, he stood silently as his lawyer posted the bond. Decades before, Franklin had a firmer control over his impulses, seeing them perhaps as the “final compensation,” in Ruth Brown’s phrase, for his extraordinary sacred performances. Increasingly during the 1970s, however, one senses a more desperate quality. Fatigue, age, polyps on his throat, high blood pressure—the causes varied, but C. L. felt his energy wane. Not surprisingly, funerals, especially of close friends, also took a toll. In 1973 he preached and his daughter Aretha sang at the Philadelphia funeral of Clara Ward. Although not as close as they once were, C. L. nonetheless had lost a dear friend. Other funerals inevitably followed. The 1976 service for Florence Ballard, an original member of the famous Motown group the Supremes, provided C. L. with another dramatic moment reminiscent of his prime, as he preached to an overflow congregation packed with entertainment celebrities. Back in New Bethel a few months later, his mood was more somber, his conduct ever more typical. C. L. sat on the dais during the funeral of Benjamin McFall, the mortician, confidant, and friend, a co-planner of the 1963 march and a New Bethel trustee for thirty-five years. Illness prevented Franklin from delivering the eulogy, and he sat mute in the pastor’s chair behind and to the side of the pulpit.40

  The jarring presence of C. L. Franklin, seated, his voice silenced as others preached, soon became all too common. In part, his absence from the pulpit precipitated the sharp decline in New Bethel’s membership during the decade, but C. L. was powerless to change. Whether visiting another Detroit church or at the yearly Baptist convention, an announcement that C. L. Franklin would preach drew crowds that listened, with disappointment, as the famous preacher introduced a substitute, often an assistant minister, in his place. The letter of a Los Angeles minister in fall 1977 was typical. Reverend J. W. Evans asked C. L. to extend his stay at his church’s twentieth anniversary by a few days, with a solicitous concern that reflected a broader awareness. “Please don’t think that I am trying to be too strenuous upon you,” he wrote Franklin, “because I realize that you are not Preaching as long as you once have.” Evans offered the still-famous preacher $1,000 to preside over another’s sermon and give a brief closing message.41

  While his muted voice left audiences disappointed, Franklin’s recordings from years past continued to sell well throughout the decade, and African American divinity students still studied his sermons. In contrast, however, with John Lewis’s experience two decades earlier, when he huddled around the radio with fellow students, straining to catch every Franklin tone and rhythm, fewer young people did so in the 1970s. The political and cultural upheavals that followed in the wake of the protests Lewis and many others led encouraged different sensibilities in a generation now twice removed from Franklin’s formative experiences in the Mississippi Delta. Church attendance among young people, as Franklin well knew, had dropped considerably. Even among divinity students, the chanted sermon seemed to many as old fashioned as the blues themselves, and the less emotive, more purely intellectual approach of a Gardner C. Taylor or a Howard Thurman vied with the new militant themes of the Black Theology movement as more suitable approaches for an increasingly sophisticated, urban black audience.

  Despite the changes that accompanied aging, Franklin was not despondent. Sixty-two in 1977, he was neither elderly nor incapacitated. Within the new limits he had to acknowledge, he continued an intensely active life. He mentored young preachers such as Jerome Kirby, much as J. H. Anderson and B. J. Perkins had served as his models decades before. He was attentive to his assistant ministers, particularly C. L. Moore, Leonard Flowers, and E. L. Branch, younger men whose careers he advanced. He continued to collect money for charity and, reflecting the changing era, raised considerable amounts through talks and benefits to establish a C. L. Franklin Scholarship fund for the college expenses of New Bethel’s young members. He also took great pride in his family. Rachel, his mother, remained his fervent advocate and was present for the 11:00 A.M. service at New Bethel every Sunday her health allowed. His children, too, gathered. Vaughn, forty years old when he left the military in 1974, reentered Franklin family life, and Carl Ellan Kelley’s relationship with her father continued to grow during the 1970s. By the mid-1970s, Erma’s singing career had ended, and she returned to live in Detroit. Carolyn wrote and arranged music and lived in Detroit, as did Brenda Corbett, their cousin. Together, this trio often provided backup vocals for Aretha. Accompanied by her brother Cecil, who had left the ministry to manage her career, Aretha was on the road frequently, performing and recording, living in that world of celebrity that her father had explored before her. From all of them, Franklin took deep pleasure in their presence and in their achievements, for whatever his deficiencies as a parent when they were younger, his adult relationships with them were strong and mutually rewarding.42

  His curtailed activity encouraged reflection. In the fall and winter of 1977-78, he welcomed a young blues musician and musicologist, Jeff Todd Titon, into his home for a series of long, revealing interviews. C. L. allowed Titon to videotape six of his sermons. Franklin also shared his reflections with a local reporter. He and the church had experienced many “trying times” since 1946, he explained to the Detroit News interviewer, and he touched on his efforts through his sermons and other activities to affect the thinking of his audiences. The results, he thought, were positive: “My church is not as narrow minded as it was, when I became its pastor. It’s gratifying to look back at the way things were and to see how far we’ve come and to know my leadership had an impact on the revolution.” Protest, he commented, was “necessary . . . as a first step in the movement.” But now, with political avenues open and the community more actively engaged, elected black politicians such as Coleman Young had the opportunity to enact laws “to insure equality of opportunity.” In both protest and politics, Franklin explained, he had tried to make a difference.43

  Perhaps it was simply hard to
explain in only a few words what he had done. For decades, C. L. Franklin had preached to raise self-consciousness, to compel his audiences to shed a “slave psychology,” to find the courage to stretch out their hands and allow their God to act in and through them. At the center of that struggle he stressed the necessity to sing because of the pain; to nurture one’s voice in a strange land was in fact to develop a vision of the possible that countered the debilitating limits others imposed. Various infirmities increasingly stilled his voice, yet as often was the case with celebrities, the accolades continued. In May 1979, smiling, eyes crinkled with pleasure, his broad face a warm, inviting welcome, Franklin beamed from the inaugural cover of Church Magazine. His perfectly styled conk, touched to avoid even the hint of gray, and his thin, trimmed mustache evoked a certain worldly confidence. His three-piece, cream-colored suit perfectly complemented his coloring, with further accents from the light shirt, paisley tie, and pendant around the neck. The well-tailored outfit emphasized his square, broad shoulders, and there was only the slightest hint of added weight. The photographs were proof that, on some days, he could still project a charismatic aura the near equal of any in his prime.44

  Some weeks later, on the first weekend in June, New Bethel celebrated their pastor’s thirty-third anniversary in their pulpit with a full program of sermons, hymns, and gifts. A week later, on Friday evening, June 8, C. L. attended the first anniversary celebration of his former assistant, E. L. Branch, at Detroit’s Third New Hope Baptist Church. He brought with him a current assistant, R. W. Wright, and following a genial discussion in the pastor’s office, the three men entered the sanctuary. There, in a pattern by now almost expected, the advertised preacher introduced the assistant who would deliver the sermon while the more famous man sat in a deacon’s chair. Franklin did “make some strong remarks that night,” Branch remembered, and as always, whether he preached or not, Franklin “received the offering.” His comments that Friday night at Third New Hope was the last time his voice carried from the pulpit into the pews.45

  As his children had insisted for some time, the near West Side neighborhood surrounding his church and home had become increasingly dangerous. Franklin knew the danger for, just a week earlier while he enjoyed his celebration at New Bethel, a burglar had broken into the well-kept LaSalle Boulevard house, only to be scared off by the alarm. That concern weighed on him following the services at Branch’s church. Rather than joining Branch and Wright for a late meal, Franklin told the young ministers he had to return home, where he had people working on the house. “If they don’t take something,” he wryly told Branch, “they will leave the door open so somebody else can.” Nothing was disturbed, however.46

  Just after midnight, early on June 10, C. L. relaxed, alone in his upstairs bedroom, watching television. Outside, a group of burglars, four men and two women, attracted by the antique stained glass in the windows they hoped to detach and sell, prepared to enter the house. Earlier that evening, this makeshift group of thieves had tried unsuccessfully to break into several other homes in the neighborhood. In something of a random decision born of their frustration, they decided the glass warranted a final effort. None of the robbers had any idea whose residence it was, nor was it clear that would have made any difference to them. Patrick Watson Thompson, age twenty-three, climbed up the back porch and pried open a screen on a second-floor window as the others waited below. Franklin heard a noise, probably when Thompson removed the screen, and retrieved the loaded pistol he always kept in the house. Thompson came through the window, crept down the hall, and thrust his head into the bedroom, only to find that Franklin “was laying for me.” Franklin fired two shots. Thompson returned fire with his semi-automatic handgun. It was about one o’clock that morning, neighbors later testified, when they heard the four distinct shots from the house. Sometime after, neighbors investigated and discovered Franklin unconscious, crumpled over, one bullet in his right knee and another, rupturing the femoral artery, in his right groin area. His gun and two of its spent shells lay strewn about. There was no evidence that Thompson had been hit. In their panic, Thompson and the others fled, leaving behind the glass and almost $30,000 in cash and checks, the wounded pastor’s anniversary gifts.47

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Franklin had lost an enormous amount of blood. He went into cardiac arrest on the way to Ford Hospital’s emergency room and was resuscitated by the paramedics, only to suffer another arrest at the hospital. Given the blood loss, his unconscious state, and successive heart stoppages, the attending doctors decided to accept “the fact that he was gone.” Some minutes later, someone in the room exclaimed that the patient was “Aretha Franklin’s father,” and with great effort they resuscitated Franklin once again. Claud Young, who was not in the room but who talked at length with the doctors who were, estimated that Franklin’s brain was without oxygen from nineteen to twenty-nine minutes. Whatever the precise time, that interval determined the quality of Clarence LaVaughn Franklin’s remaining life.48

  Aretha, accompanied by Carolyn, Cecil, and Brenda, was performing in Las Vegas when Brenda received the phone call. The four immediately rushed back to Detroit, where Erma was already at the hospital, along with her grandmother, Claud Young, and other close family friends. The prognosis was not encouraging. C. L. remained on the critical list, in a coma, “unresponsive, comatose.” By the start of his third week in the hospital, C. L.’s conditioned worsened, and a hospital spokeswoman indicated new “complications as a result of the prolonged coma.” As the family prayed, the police arrested the six individuals who were present when he was shot. All were young, residents of Detroit, and African American. One of the men received immunity in exchange for his testimony against Thompson, and two others pleaded guilty to burglary and assault with intent to murder. The two women pleaded guilty to reduced charges of breaking and entering, a plea bargain that infuriated the more than twenty thousand delegates attending the NBC’s Christian Education meeting in Pittsburgh. A jury found Thompson not guilty of attempted murder; his lawyer convinced the jury that the testimony against him was tainted by self-interest. He did receive a ten-year sentence for the break-in. Two others, brothers Jerome and Howard Woodward, received long sentences for reneging on their agreement to testify, but their sentences would be sharply reduced a year later, on a technicality. In an irony that revealed yet again the intimate, if often tortured, intertwining of black and white lives in Detroit, the county prosecutor who tried the burglars was the same William Cahalan who had defied Judge George Crockett a decade before. Even odder, the judge who sentenced the Woodward brothers was Samuel H. Olsen, the former county prosecutor who had refused to investigate the Detroit policeman who killed Cynthia Scott.49

  A past of a different kind trailed the news of the shooting across black America. C. L.’s well-known penchant for the nightlife and his well-

  publicized 1968 drug trial spawned a storm of rumors and innuendoes. In one rendering repeated widely, embellished with a bewildering array of imagined details, Thompson and Franklin were principals in “a drug deal that went bad or something.” The money found in the bedroom only spurred such speculation, as in some versions, Franklin became the dealer and not the buyer. Given his continuing income-tax difficulties, however, it should not have surprised anyone that he operated with cash whenever he could. Billy Kyles heard the rumors, too, and stressed that he never saw any “factual evidence” to support them. His friend had no need for money, he noted, and was not addicted to any drug. The conduct of the police and the burglars alike further undermined the credibility of these legends. Given his continued public stature, to say nothing of his well-known drug arrest, it was inconceivable that C. L. could operate as a serious drug dealer without attracting the attention of the police, many of whom would have been only too happy to embarrass Mayor Young and black Detroit with such a spectacular arrest. Three of the six burglars who were given full or partial immunity, moreover, never raised the issue of drugs with police or pros
ecutors, despite the potential benefit in such revelations for them.50

  Prayer vigils and fundraisers dominated the months and years that followed. Still in a coma that December, Franklin came home from the hospital. He had survived a series of infections, could breathe without life support, and hospital costs were mounting. There was also the hope that a return home to familiar surroundings would aid his recovery. The search for signs became an exhausting emotional effort for family members. Aretha worriedly told Erma some months after their father returned home that C. L. was “less responsive” than two months ago, although he “seemed to brighten up when Cecil visited last night.” Friends and parishioners came to the house daily, offering prayers, food, and a quick visit to tell Reverend of their love. Ralph Williams and Harry Kincaid came daily to carry their pastor from the bed to a chair, to improve his circulation. Fannie Tyler, C. L.’s private secretary and trusted aide, came nearly every day as well, as did Mother Rachel. E. L. Branch played tapes of C. L.’s sermons on his afternoon visits, praying for a spark of recognition to light up his mentor’s eyes. At times, the unconscious Franklin startled visitors. When Margaret Branch entered the bedroom one evening, “he raised up on that bed.” Frightened, “scared to death,” she nonetheless glimpsed hope: “but he was trying to talk to me.” It was an involuntary rather than a willed movement, however, and he did not regain consciousness. Cneri Jenkins and his wife also visited occasionally, and he was certain on one visit that his pastor “was trying to tell me something, but, he just, spit was flying everyplace.”51