29.RF Interview, 7-8; King, Blues All Around Me, 58. Works that have been particularly helpful in considering the complex commingling of sacred and secular expressions include Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues; Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture”; Murray, Stomping the Blues; Ellison, Shadow and Act; and the letters of Ellison and Murray collected in Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, esp. 166. (back to text)
30.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 17-18. Franklin’s memory for dates of events that occurred decades earlier is not always precise. While the length of time he spent in Shelby, for example, may be in question, the order of his travels and experiences between ages 16 and 22 is fairly certain, even if the exact timing is still in question, when his interviews of October 5, 7, and 21, 1977, are read together. He made a generally successful effort to order the experiences in his interview of October 7, 1977, 19-20. (back to text)
31.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 18-19; CLF Interview, May 17, 1978, 254. (back to text)
32.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 40-41. Dorothy Swan recalls the power of CLF’s early preaching in Mississippi in Titon, “Reverend C. L. Franklin,” 94. (back to text)
33.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 19. See also Powdermaker, After Freedom, passim; Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, passim; Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, 224-41. (back to text)
34.Kotlowitz, The Other Side of the River, 229, 260-70; Dawson, Negro Folktales in Michigan, 7. In 1934 Marcus Cooley, a black migrant from Iowa, was said to have hung himself in jail after being arrested by Benton Harbor police for parole violation, an incident many African Americans considered murder. See Kotlowitz, The Other Side of the River, 263. (back to text)
35.CLF Interview, October 21, 1977, 84-85; CLF Interview, November 15, 1977, 156; “The Preacher with the Golden Voice,” 41; Nelis J. Saunders, “A Born Leader,” Michigan Chronicle, May 22, 1965. Some of the dates in the Saunders article are not correct. (back to text)
36.See James Interview, 5, for a discussion of his experiences as a local preacher in Bolivar County in the 1920s and 1930s. (back to text)
37.CLF Interview, October 21, 1977, 85; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 43-44, 52. On the continued impact of Perkins on CLF, see EF Interview, 7; Hooks Interview, 13; interview with Reverend E. L. Branch by author, 27-28 (hereafter cited as E. L. Branch Interview). (back to text)
38.M. K. Young to Erma Franklin, October 5, 1979, CLFP. Young, an employee of the Social Security Administration, a division of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, sent Erma Franklin at her request a Certificate of Contents of Document(s) or Record(s) affirming CLF’s marriage to Alene Gaines. The information Young provided lists Gaines as twenty-five but erroneously gives CLF’s age as twenty-one, when he would have been still three months shy of his twentieth birthday. See also the couple’s marriage license in Marriage Record Book, Bolivar County, Mississippi, 2d District, Book 44, 474, CCO. I want to express my appreciation to a Bolivar County clerk, known to me only as Barbara, who confirmed this information for me during a phone conversation July 2, 2003. (back to text)
39.See Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, 98, and Reid, The Negro Baptist Ministry, passim, for a discussion of the education level of rural black ministers. (back to text)
40.Federal Writers Project, Mississippi, 351-53. On the Percy family see Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, passim. (back to text)
41.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 20; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 46-48, 52. Richard Wright recalled of his Mississippi youth a similar intensity: “I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.” Cited in Wilson, Judgment and Grace in Dixie, 124. (back to text)
42.CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 53-55. For a different perception of this relation between religion and politics in the black South in 1935, see the report of Noble Y. Beall, a white minister affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. After spending a year visiting and interviewing black Baptists throughout the South, Beall concluded that “the American Negroes are keenly conscious of their slavery, emancipation, suppression, and disfranchisement, [and] they are putting forth every effort to bring themselves up to equality with White Americans.” Beall complained that they were confusing social themes and a faith-based message and thus were “prostituting the churches and their organizations for illegitimate ends.” See Beall, “Real Dangers of the American Baptist Negroes,” June 15, 1935, 1, Box 1, folder 9, 1, URL. (back to text)
43.CLF Interview, May 17, 1978, 253; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 44, 51. (back to text)
44.In black Mississippi churches in 1936, there were ten women for every six men. That ratio is based on all black worshipers in the state; since Afro-Baptists comprised 77 percent of that total, their ratio may have been even higher. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1936, 1:83, 864-65; King, Daddy King, 53-54. (back to text)
45.Telephone interview with Semial Siggers by author (hereafter cited as Siggers Interview); Silver and Moeser, The Separate City, 52. For a brief biography of Nat D. Williams, one of Booker T. Washington High School’s outstanding teachers between 1930 and 1972, see Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale, 34-35. Lucie Campbell’s career at the school is discussed in Walker, “Lucie E. Campbell Williams,” 59-60. In 1933 only 18 percent of black children enrolled in Memphis schools attended either of the high schools; see Memphis, Benefits and Opportunities for Colored Citizens of Memphis, 16. (back to text)
46.On the city’s black culture at this time see Lornell, “Happy in the Service of the Lord,” 123-5; Lee, Beale Street, 13, and passim; and below, chapter 3. Muddy Waters is quoted in McKee and Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue, 233. John Lee Hooker, who grew up in the Clarksdale area to become a famous Detroit-based bluesman in the late 1940s, expressed similar attitudes about Memphis; see Murray, Boogie Man, 24, 31. (back to text)
47.Siggers Interview; interview with Vaughn Franklin by author, 1-3, 5-6 (hereafter cited as VF Interview). On black Memphis during the 1930s see Biles, Memphis in the Great Depression, chap. 5. (back to text)
48.RF Interview, 19; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 56; CLF Interview, November 8, 1977, 142. (back to text)
49.Marriage Record Book, Bolivar County, Mississippi, 2d District, Book 47, 473, CCO. There was some question about Barbara Siggers’s actual age. Her eldest daughter, Erma Franklin, in a telephone communication with me on August 15, 2000, gave her birth date as 1917, which corresponds with the date of birth (June 29, 1917) given on her death certificate. This would have made her just shy of nineteen when she married; CLF, forty-one years later, remembered his wife as twenty when they married; the marriage license lists her as twenty-five. The license does list CLF’s age accurately, however. See CLF Interview, November 8, 1977, 142; Barbara Franklin, Certificate of Death, New York State Department of Health, March 7, 1952 (copy), CLFP. (back to text)
50.Douglass Alumni Association, Douglass Heritage, 6-7, 17, 19, 21-27. C. L. Franklin (misnamed Charles L.) was also listed as pastor of First Baptist Bungalow in “Directory of Churches, Missions, and Religious Institutions of Shelby County, National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Inc. Bodies (Colored),” June 25, 1940, typescript, n.p., Box 11-A, SAO. (back to text)
51.CLF Interview, November 8, 1977, 141; EF Interview, 1; VF Interview, 27, 42. (back to text)
52.VF Interview, 43. (back to text)
53.Interview with Reverend Samuel Billy Kyles by author, 1 (hereafter cited as Kyles Interview); Pareles, “Pops Staples”; Pops Staples, “Down in Mississippi,” Peace to the Neighborhood. (back to text)
54.Polk’s Memphis (Shelby County, Tenn.), City Directory, 1939, 330, 1484, 1487; Biles, Memphis in the Great Depression, 91; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 53; VF Interview, 27-28. (back to text)
55
.Myles Interview, 29. (back to text)
3. MOVING ON UP
1.U.S. Bureau of the Census, A Statistical Abstract Supplement: City and County Data Book, 1949, 351, 375. Blacks in Memphis numbered more than 121,000 individuals out of a total population of 292,942. In contrast, New York, with a population (7,454,995 in 1940) more than twenty-five times that of Memphis, had a black population (477,119) just less than four times as large; Chicago’s total population (3,396,808) was more than eleven times that of Memphis while the black population (278,532) was just over twice as large. Savannah, Georgia, had a total population of 95,996, 45 percent of whom were black. Ibid., 351, 363. (back to text)
2.Memphis Jug Band, “Cocaine Habit Blues” (1930), on the collection Walk Right In: The Essential Recordings of Memphis Blues; Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 223; Handy as cited in Nager, Memphis Beat, 29. On Memphis jug bands at this time see Cohen, Nothing But the Blues, 64-65. The full lyrics to Handy’s song can be found on the American Memory Web site, www.memory.loc.gov, as of October 15, 2001. On Memphis and crime see Dickerson, Goin’ Back to Memphis, 51, 58; Nager, Memphis Beat, 25-29; Coppock, Memphis Memoirs, 101; McIlwaine, Memphis, 313. For an account of the rise in the city’s murder rate during the first decades of the twentieth century, see Miller, Memphis during the Progressive Era, 92-93. (back to text)
3.CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 53. (back to text)
4.On Love see Memphis World, July 9, 1943, and May 12, 1944; on Owen see Thurman, With Head and Heart, 17, 57; Williams, Biographical Directory of Negro Ministers, 390; on Fuller see National Baptist Voice, January 15, 1942, 6; Walker, “Dialectic Tensions in T. O. Fuller’s Historical Writings,” 21-22; interview with Reverend W. C. Holmes by Reverend Randolph Meade Walker, McWherter Library Special Collections, 1-6 (hereafter cited as Holmes Interview); on Jenkins see Memphis World, June 25, 1943; Johnson, 1943 Year Book and Directory, 136-37; on Brewster see Boyer, “William Herbert Brewster,” passim; Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel,” 140-43; on Perkins in Memphis see Perkins, Rev. Benjamin J. Perkins Answers the Erroneous Statement; Lee, Beale Street, 163-64; interview with Reverend Joseph Lee Burkley by Charles W. Crawford, McWherter Library Special Collections, 1, 7 (hereafter cited as Burkley Interview); Hooks Interview, 13-14. (back to text)
5.Capers, The Biography of a River Town, 5, 22-23, 107-9, 164; Brock, “Memphis’s Nymphs Du Pave,” 58; Berkeley, “Like a Plague of Locusts,” chap.1. (back to text)
6.Johnson and Russell, Memphis, 1; Federal Writers Project, Tennessee, 51-52, 210; Capers, The Biography of a River Town, 36, 164; Corlew, Tennessee, a Short History, 149, 157, 325, 366-68; Berkeley, “Like a Plague of Locusts,” 16, 21, 103-6. (back to text)
7.Young, Standard History of Memphis, Tennessee, 170-84 ; Capers, The Biography of a River Town, 107-9, 164, 183-205; Nager, Memphis Beat, 18-25. (back to text)
8.See McKee and Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue, 74; McIlwaine, Memphis, 319; Murray, The Negro Handbook, 1944, 19; Johnson, 1943 Year Book and Directory, 9, 11; Sigafoos, Cotton Row to Beale Street, 140; Capers, The Biography of a River Town, 164; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, vol. 2, pt. 6, Population: Characteristics, 689, 709-12; Leroy Carr, “Memphis Town” (1930), in Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 46. Memphis in 1940 was the eighth largest urban black population; in comparison Detroit, ranked sixth, had 149,119 black residents, who comprised only 9.2 percent of that city’s total population. See Murray, The Negro Handbook, 1944, 19. (back to text)
9.Biles, Memphis in the Great Depression, 90, 94-95; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 123; Silver and Moeser, The Separate City, 31-33, 38-39, 131-32; Sigafoos, Cotton Row to Beale Street, 172. In the postwar years the still segregated Lauderdale Houses became the home of a poor white family from Tupelo, Mississippi, Vernon and Gladys Presley, and their young son, Elvis. See Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis, 33-34. On the creation of Memphis through annexation of adjoining lands, see Capers, The Biography of a River Town, 125. (back to text)
10.Hooks as quoted in McBee, “The Memphis Red Sox Stadium,” 162. (back to text)
11.Interview with Alma Hawes Black by author, 41, 42 (hereafter cited as Black Interview); telephone interview with Alma Hawes Black by author (hereafter cited as Black Interview (telephone)); [Reverend Mary Moore], “History of New Salem Baptist Church from 1904 to the 1980s,” (typescript in author’s possession), 1. (back to text)
12.Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 59-60; Biles, Memphis in the Great Depression, 92-93; McIlwaine, Memphis, 312; Sigafoos, Cotton Row to Beale Street, 192, 195. According to the 1940 federal census, among employed black men, 58 percent occupied unskilled or service jobs; another 24 percent were listed in a broad, semiskilled category (“operatives and kindred works”); and 9.4 percent were craftsmen. Among black women, 83.7 percent were recorded as unskilled or service workers. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, vol. 3, pt. 5, Population: The Labor Force, 374-80. (back to text)
13.Black Interview, 6, 41; interview with Julia Ann Carbage by author, 14 (hereafter cited as Carbage Interview); Black Interview (telephone). (back to text)
14.Interview with Lizzie Moore by author, 14 (hereafter cited as Lizzie Moore Interview); Black Interview (telephone); interview with Nettie Hubbard by author, 15 (hereafter cited as Hubbard Interview); Carbage Interview, 14, 44; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 53. (back to text)
15.For a concise, illuminating discussion of the chanted sermon, see Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 141-51. (back to text)
16.Hooks Interview, 9-10; interview with Ernest Donelson by author, 8-9, 15 (hereafter cited as Donelson Interview); interview with Catherine Hawes Rogers by author, 11 (hereafter cited as Rogers Interview). (back to text)
17.On the educational level of black southern clergy see Una Roberts Lawrence, “General Statistics Concerning Negroes in SBC Territory,” typescript (copy), 1937, in Box 4, folder 15, URL; Reid, The Negro Baptist Ministry, 71, 94 and passim; Mays and Nicholson, The Negro’s Church, 249 and passim. Lee is quoted in Harkins, Metropolis of the American Nile, 125. On the Memphis World see Shannon, “Tennessee,” 341; Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, 501. Martin Luther King Sr. recounts a painful experience as a young rural preacher new to Atlanta when a congregation refused to offer him any encouragement, so dismayed were they by his rural expressions and manners; see King, Daddy King, 55-57. (back to text)
18.CLF Interview, May 3, 1978, 204. (back to text)
19.Hooks Interview, 31. On CLF’s intellectual drive, see EF Interview, 12; Kincaid Interview, 28; for comments by New Salem members see Donelson Interview, 15; Black Interview (telephone). On Howe see Howe Institute School of Religion, Commencement Program (1944); Howe Institute, “Announcements,” (typescript, 1945), Box 9, SAO; Howe Institute, Announcements (Memphis, 1948); National Baptist Voice, January 15, 1942. On Holmes see Holmes Interview, esp. 1-6; Williams, Biographical Directory of Negro Ministers, 246. (back to text)
20.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 20; CLF Interview, October 14, 1977, 57, 59. On LeMoyne see Federal Writers Project, Tennessee, 227. (back to text)
21.CLF Interview, May 3, 1978, 204-5. (back to text)
22.CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 53; Hooks Interview, 2. The comment about Fuller is from Holmes Interview, 2, 3. On the Baptist Ministers Alliance and the tension with the competing Baptist Ministers Union, see Baptist Ministers Union, Facts Truthfully Presented, passim; Perkins, Rev. Benjamin J. Perkins Answers the Erroneous Statement, passim; letter to the editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 8, 1933. (back to text)
23.CLF Interview, May 3, 1978, 205; Hooks Interview, 14-15, 28-29. Hooks insisted that CLF remained a fundamentalist in his literal interpretation of the Bible, a point for which I find little evidence. See the discussion of the self-professed fundamentalist E. E. Cleveland, a black clergyman who specifically rejected a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, in Davis, I Got the Word
in Me, 2. On Martin Luther King Jr. see Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 166-67. On fundamentalism in general, see Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture. (back to text)
24.Mahalia Jackson is quoted in Bego, Aretha Franklin, 12; John Hammond, liner notes to Franklin, Amazing Grace. See also VF Interview, 8-9; EF Interview, 15; Garland, “The Lady Who’s the Soul of Soul,” 26; Donelson Interview, 9, 10; Black Interview, 10; interview with Willie Mae Moseley by author, 10 (hereafter cited as Moseley Interview). (back to text)
25.CLF Interview, October 14, 1977, 68-69; Black Interview, 10; Carbage Interview, 10. On the role of women in the black church see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Gilkes, “The Politics of ‘Silence.’” (back to text)
26.The residences were all within the area bound by Iowa and McLemore Avenues on the north and south and Mississippi Boulevard and South Third Street on the east and west. The various Franklin residences are noted in Polk’s Memphis (Shelby County, Tenn.) City Directory, 1939, 330; “Contributors to Baptist Missionary & Evangelical Convention,” Memphis (typescript, n.d.), Box 3, SAO; Polk’s Memphis (Shelby County, Tenn.) City Directory, 1941, 384; National Baptist Convention, Proceedings of the Sixty-first Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, 1941, 192; Polk’s Memphis (Shelby County) City Directory, 1943, 383. (back to text)
Singing in a Strange Land Page 41