ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been enormously enriched by the warmth, friendship, and generosity of many in the Franklin family. Erma Franklin, C. L.’s oldest daughter, was enthusiastic about this book from the time we met, and that feeling deepened as we traversed together the complicated issues inherent in the relationship between the biographer and the subject’s loved ones. Her sister Aretha did not sit for an interview; her autobiography, which appeared in late 1999, remains her account of her extraordinary family. She has been aware of my work, however, since my earliest visits to Detroit in 1998. Vaughn Franklin and his family were supportive and helpful, as was Carl Ellan Kelley. Brenda Corbett, a niece raised as a sister within the family, warmly welcomed me. Her insights and advice, in a formal interview and in innumerable conversations, were of great benefit, as was her constant encouragement. Together with her husband, James Corbett, they helped make my research trips to Detroit ever more enjoyable. Central also to this reception within the family has been Sabrina Garrett-Owens, Erma’s daughter, and her husband, Oliver Owens. During my first extended research trip in Detroit, Sabrina sensed that I might be in need of a home-cooked meal and invited me to accompany her mother for Sunday dinner. She, too, has been tremendously supportive of my work and, with her husband, the Corbetts, and Erma while she lived, has welcomed me and my family into their lives.
I am also deeply appreciative of the support and encouragement of Jeff Todd Titon, an ethnomusicologist at Brown University. That he introduced me to Erma Franklin would have been enough to win my gratitude, but Jeff did much more. Years before I began my work, Jeff had conducted one long interview, in thirteen sessions between October 1977 and May 1978, with C. L., without question the most detailed and informative interview Franklin ever gave. Early on, Jeff provided me with a transcript of the interview and permission to use it in my book. Nor did he stop there. From his own collection he provided me with tapes (and his own transcriptions of them) of more than seventy of C. L.’s sermons. These acts of generosity by someone whose deep involvement with C. L. Franklin has produced articles and a book-length collection of sermons went far beyond scholarly collegiality. Jeff is a generous spirit, an insightful scholar, and a kind man whose support transcends anything I might have imagined. His compilation (in progress, in DVD format) of video- and audiotapes of Franklin sermons, interviews, and other material will be enormously useful for teaching as well as scholarship.
I have also been most fortunate in the institutional assistance I have received. Both the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the American Studies Program at Cornell University have exceeded expectations time and again. Edward Lawler, Dean of the ILR School, and Frances Blau and Martin Wells, successive Directors of Research at the School, were consistently supportive, as has been R. Laurence Moore, director of the American Studies Program. A Mark C. Stevens travel grant from The Bentley Library at the University of Michigan was most helpful. Support of another kind came from the Advanced Institute for the Study of Religion at Yale University, where I had the good fortune to spend the academic year 1999-2000 as a senior fellow. Under the direction of Jon Butler and Harry Stout, the Institute did everything in its power to allow its fellows to devote their full attention to exploring Yale’s rich library collections. It was a foundational year for me in understanding the task on which I had embarked. That year was enhanced yet further by my colleagues at the Institute. Spending an academic year in an adjoining office to Cheryl Townsend Gilkes and Judith Weisenfeld was a gift. It was also at Yale that I first met Barbara Savage, a wonderful scholar whose comments on my work-in-progress have been invaluable. The kindness and encouragement of Reverend Frederick “Jerry” Streets, the University Chaplain at Yale, was a constant, but one event particularly stands out. Jerry and his wife, Annette, invited me to their home one evening where they had gathered seven African American ministers of various denominations, with a combined preaching experience that approached two hundred years. We listened together to a Franklin sermon, and then I listened, taking notes, with the occasional question, as these preachers talked for more than four hours about that sermon, their understanding of Franklin’s preaching, and of his place in the broader African American religious tradition. It was an extraordinary evening, one that influenced my work deeply. My profound thanks to the Streets, and to their guests, for that opportunity.
Critical support of another kind came from those who invited me to speak about this project as it evolved. Within the Afro-Baptist community, I have been privileged to deliver talks and exchange ideas at the three most important churches Franklin himself led. Reverend Robert Smith Jr., the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church since Franklin’s death, has welcomed me to his pulpit three times for talks. On one occasion New Bethel sponsored, with the Cornell Alumni Club of Michigan, a social following the talk that allowed me to listen to audience reactions at greater length. He and his wife, Cynthia, have also been most welcoming to me and my family whenever we attended Sunday services at the church. The congregation of New Bethel has also been very supportive, and I deeply appreciate their welcoming spirit. I would particularly like to thank Mrs. Beverli Greenleaf, Deacon Milton Hall, Ms. Carolyn King, Deacon and Mrs. Wallace Malone, Deacon Hinken Perry, Mrs. Myra Perkins, and Mrs. Fannie Tyler. Reverends E. L. Branch, James Holley, Jerome Kirby, Samuel Billy Kyles, and Jasper Williams, all with deep connections to New Bethel even as they lead their own churches, took the time to instruct this novice in the richness of the Afro-Baptist tradition. My deep thanks to these men and women, and to all who allowed me to talk with them about C. L. Franklin.
In Buffalo, New York, Reverend William S. Wilson Jr., pastor of Friendship Baptist Church, twice invited me to speak before a combined audience of church members and Cornell University alumni. He, too, sponsored a social after the first talk, which allowed me to learn as he and others discussed my comments about their former pastor. In Memphis, Tennessee, Reverend Mary Moore, pastor of New Salem Baptist Church, and her husband, Ronald, were very generous. They made it possible for me to meet and interview seven men and women who had been church members during Franklin’s tenure. Conversations with the Moores on the church’s history were very informative and helpful.
Reverend Robert L. Johnson, director emeritus of the Cornell United Religious Work, and his successor, Reverend Kenneth I. Clarke Sr. and his wife, Reverend Yolanda Clarke, welcomed this project, discussed it with me, and brought me into the pulpit at Cornell’s Sage Chapel three times in recent years for talks. Bob also made the initial contact for me that led to interviews with Reverend Bernard Lafayette and Congressman John Lewis.
Academic colleagues were also important. I was fortunate in having the chance to try out ideas before demanding audiences at Emory University; The College of the Holy Cross; Vanderbilt University; the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit; Yale University; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; New York University; Princeton University; Universita di Torino, Italy; and University of California, Berkeley. My Cornell colleagues endured me twice, first before a joint audience of faculty and alumni of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and then when I gave the inaugural Rabinor Lecture in American Studies. Still others shared their insights on draft chapters or papers delivered at various conferences. I am most grateful to Robert Bussel, Jon Butler, Jacqueline Goldsby, Kenneth Clarke, Yolanda Clarke, Jefferson Cowie, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Leon F. Litwack, David O’Brien, Steven Pond, Albert Raboteau, Barbara Savage, Valerie Smith, Harry Stout, Frederick Streets, Clarence Walker, and Judith Weisenfeld. Ann Sullivan’s insights on an early draft were enormously helpful. Professor Odie H. Tolbert of the University of Memphis shared with me a portion of his wide knowledge of the gospel tradition, and Ernestina Snead and Christopher Loy helped me think about the blues tones in Franklin’s sermons. The archivists and librarians at the research libraries listed in the notes were unfailingly helpful. I would especially thank Julie Copenhagen, the head of interlibrary
loan services at Cornell’s magnificent Olin Library, and Mike Smith, director of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, and his staff, for their assistance. I benefited more than they may have realized from the work of my undergraduate research assistants in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and I am very grateful to William Adams, Palak Shah, Kevin Sills, Gayraud Townsend, and Kristina Yost.
The penultimate draft of this book received a thorough read from a group of friends in different scholarly disciplines. Their engagement with my work was humbling, their comments incisive and thought-provoking. If I have not taken all their suggestions, thinking through them has made this book immeasurably better. My sincere thanks to Glenn Altschuler, Jon Butler, Robert Hutchens, Harry Katz, Barbara Savage, Frederick Streets, and Jeff Todd Titon. This is now the second occasion I have had the privilege of working with Geoff Shandler in bringing a manuscript into book form. Now editor-in-chief and vice-president at Little, Brown, he remains, preeminently, a superb editor. His incisive questions and comments always demand attention. Working through them, even when I do not follow them, invariably sharpens my consciousness of my own efforts. That Geoff achieves this without ever forgetting whose book it is suggests another dimension of his skill and tact.
I have dedicated this book to two people who have had an enormous impact on me as well as the project. I only met Erma Franklin in January 1998, and less than five short years later, in September 2002, she passed, after a hard struggle with cancer. She possessed an intelligence that was matched only by her sharp wit, and her infectious embrace of life framed both. There was much that could have distanced us: experience and background, to be sure, but even more delicate was my role as the inquisitive biographer. That we overcame these complications at all was due to Erma. She acknowledged more than once that a biography that portrayed her father as a saint would lack all credibility, even as she probed to be certain that there was not lurking in me a sensationalist intent on vivid headlines. I have tried to keep faith with our conversations. Beyond this, we became good friends, and she became an important teacher of mine. At one level, of course, she was a source of information about her father, but she also prodded to be sure I understood him and his career within the broader African American context. Yet for all the importance of these discussions, her friendship gave me yet another gift in the last year of her life. To talk with her frequently, usually by phone, as she struggled with her own mortality was to witness a courageous human being. Her wit, her realism, and her commitment to live life until she could no more gave a definition to the terms spirit and courage that touched my very soul.
I have known Leon F. Litwack since September 1968, when I entered his graduate seminar in American history at the University of California, Berkeley. He was from the first an outstanding teacher and mentor, who urged me to push beyond where I then thought I could go. Within a few years we became friends as well, and that friendship has deepened across the decades. Leon is for me an exemplary model of the committed historian. His intellectual work, in a career that explores the centrality of race in American life, is deeply researched, carefully narrated, and beautifully written—and he has remained a bastion of thoughtful consistency against the cycles of enthusiasms that have swept through the academy in recent decades. My enduring image of Leon will always be of him at a podium, a black leather jacket framing him as a Jerry Garcia necktie sways to his motion, speaking from his mind, with his heart, seeking, like the good preacher he is, to raise our consciousness, to call us to a higher sense of our collective American possibilities. Words fail to convey his impact on me. I can say that I love him and thank him.
Finally, as has been true now for more than three decades, Ann’s presence informs every page of this book, and my life.
NOTES
For publication facts of books and articles cited in the notes, see the bibliography.
The following abbreviations are used in the notes:
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, Metropolitan Detroit Branch, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
ALUA Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
CAB Claude A. Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago
CCO Circuit Clerk’s Office, Bolivar County Courthouse, Cleveland, MS
CLF Clarence LaVaughn Franklin
CLFP Clarence LaVaughn Franklin Papers, in the personal possession of Erma Franklin and Sabrina Garrett-Owens
DCCR Detroit Commission on Community Relations/Human Rights Department Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
DUL Detroit Urban League Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
EF Erma Franklin
FAK Francis A. Korngay Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation, C. L. Franklin File, Department of Justice, Washington, DC
GB Gloria Brown Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
JHJ Reverend Joseph H. Jackson Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago
JPC Jerome P. Cavanagh Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
KJV King James Version of the Bible
KMS Kelly Miller Smith Papers, Vanderbilt University Special Collections, University Archives, Nashville
MDCC Metropolitan Detroit Council of Churches Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
MHC Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Detroit Branch, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
NDI New Detroit, Inc. Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
NHB Nannie H. Burroughs Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
PRB St. Peter’s Rock Baptist Church File, Bolivar County Library, Cleveland, MS
RF Rachel Franklin
RFW Robert F. Williams Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
RRC Robert R. Church Family Papers, Special Collections, Mississippi Valley Collection, University of Memphis Libraries, Memphis
SAO Samuel Augustus Owen Papers, Special Collections, Mississippi Valley Collection, University of Memphis Libraries, Memphis
SEC Second Baptist Church [Detroit] Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
UAW United Automobile Workers of America
URL Una Roberts Lawrence Collection, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville
VF Vaughn Franklin
WPR Walter P. Reuther Collection, UAW President’s Office, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit
1. A DEEP LONGING
1.On CLF’s role as a soloist at St. Peter’s Rock, see interview with Reverend C. L. Franklin by Jeff Todd Titon, October 5, 1977, 8 (hereafter cited as CLF Interview). The full text of the hymn can be found in Bailey, “The Lined-Hymn Tradition in Black Mississippi Churches,” 13-14. CLF’s adult rendering of this hymn can be found on his Jewel album The Eagle Stirs Her Nest; another powerful version can be heard on Marion Williams, “The Moan,” on her album My Soul Looks Back. On the tradition of lining out hymns, see Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, 354-56. (back to text)
2.The specific circumstances of the working lives are unknown; for a detailed description of the economic conditions facing black Mississippians in this era, see McMillen, Dark Journey, 111-94. (back to text)
3.Rachel Franklin, Certificate of Death, State of Michigan,
recorded December 7, 1988, CLFP (copy); interview with Rachel Franklin by Jeff Todd Titon, 2-4 (hereafter cited as RF Interview); CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 1; interview with Brenda Corbett by author, 1-2 (hereafter cited as Corbett Interview). Corbett, a granddaughter of Rachel and a niece of CLF who was reared with the Franklin family in Detroit after her mother died, noted that Rachel Franklin had an elder brother, Robert, who died in the 1960s in his sixties. See Corbett Interview, 10; see also Robbie McCoy, “The Church World,” Michigan Chronicle, March 16, 1968, for a brief account of the death of another of Rachel’s brothers, Alonzo Pittman. (back to text)
4.RF Interview, 14; Corbett Interview, 12, 36. (back to text)
5.On marriage patterns in the Delta and in the rural South in general, see Powdermaker, After Freedom, 68, 143, 157, 197-205. Charles S. Johnson discusses the manner in which “stolen children,” that is, children from premarital sexual relations, were incorporated within existing families in Alabama. See Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 66-68. Bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards recalled that, in 1927, while his mother raised a crop near Shaw, Mississippi, his father worked land further south in the Delta: “And my mother was pregnant when my daddy come home, pregnant by another man. But my daddy accepted her.” Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 13, 18. In other cases, as many a blues song tells, a less understanding and more violent reaction ensued. (back to text)
6.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 1; Corbett Interview, 13. (back to text)
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