Despite these conditions, Memphis provided migrants with jobs which, however low paying, nonetheless positioned black working people within the cash economy—a far cry from the plantation practice of payment in scrip redeemable only at the plantation store. Coupled with the cultural impact of Beale Street and the city’s strong church culture, Memphis native Benjamin Hooks thought, there developed a strong alternative to segregation’s corrosive power.10
When C. L. Franklin delivered his inaugural sermon at New Salem in 1939, he looked out over a poor congregation that was first organized in 1904 by dissidents from First Baptist on Beale Street. New Salem’s membership grew modestly under the leadership of its first pastor, a Reverend Bradshaw, who resigned following the destruction of the church in a 1917 storm. The congregation then called Reverend B. J. Whittaker, who constructed a new, if small, wooden building at 955 South Fourth, a mile south of Beale. In the late 1930s, E. D. Payne held the pulpit. Though the membership had not grown, New Salem attracted attention for its outdoor baptismal pool that was used by many other Baptist congregations.11
Situated in the heart of the densely populated, narrow streets of South Memphis, New Salem was one of the many black institutions in the city buffeted by the desperate need of its members. Unemployment in black Memphis still raged at more than 35 percent in 1940. As Honeyboy Edwards remembered of the era: “People walking the streets then was hungry. There wasn’t no relief, you’d work all day for nothing” if you could find work at all. Statistics bear Edwards out: the average wage for black men in 1940 in Memphis was between $9 and $12 dollars per week; for black women, a paltry $4 to $7. (The comparable wages for whites were $23 and $15 per week, respectively.) Not surprisingly, the type of work available to blacks was limited. Perhaps the largest group of employed black Memphians were the men (and some women) who gathered early each morning on the street corners in the wholesale cotton district downtown between Jackson and Poplar Streets. There they awaited the open-bed trucks that would take them as day laborers to work the fields of “white gold” on cotton plantations throughout Shelby County and across the Mississippi River in eastern Arkansas. Wages here were as low as 40 cents per hundred pounds of cotton picked—and an efficient worker might pick but two to three hundred pounds daily. The second-largest group of black workers, almost all women, was in service to white families. “Negro women are the main link between the white and black worlds of Memphis,” one observer noted of the early 1940s, because every morning thousands of them—“black, and brown and light-tan nurses, cooks, and maids”—made their way from their neighborhoods to the homes of their employers along that white corridor and beyond. There, with long hours, little pay, and the potential for abuse a persistent concern, they worked in support of their own families. Black life in Memphis was harsh, but its very harshness, Honeyboy Edwards thought, posed a peculiar challenge. “If you could make it in Memphis you could make it anywhere.”12
Franklin was just twenty-four when he arrived at New Salem. Reverend Payne had been dismissed some months before for abusing liquor, and the congregation had invited a series of preachers to give trial sermons. By any standard, Franklin was quite young, lacked the pastoral experience that derived from sustained interaction with one congregation over time, and had “rural” written all over his demeanor. He was attractive: a well-
proportioned, dark-complexioned man with a broad, inviting face, close-cropped hair, and rimless glasses that lent an air of solemnity. But his country ambience was sharply noted by more urbane congregants. Alma Hawes Black, reared in Memphis, the daughter of a shipping clerk who had migrated from Mississippi a generation before C. L., recalled vividly her first impressions of her future pastor. She was then sixteen, a church member for four years, and as a student at Booker T. Washington High, influenced by the same stern Lucie Campbell who had taught Barbara Siggers Franklin earlier. Black remembered C. L. Franklin as “poorly dressed” when he first arrived, given to wearing “yellow-type shoes, the kind sold at dry goods stores.” His clothes were not only unfashionable in the Memphis context, Black thought, but they were worn, even torn. Yet this young man projected an intense physical magnetism and charisma that many found compelling. When the entire congregation met in a “church business meeting” to decide who would lead them, Franklin was their first choice.13
Franklin’s country qualities were not necessarily always a drawback. For every family like the Haweses, who had made their migration a generation before, many more in the congregation shared the confusion of C. L.’s far more immediate transition. As he took the pulpit each Sunday morning, they heard in a familiar accent religious themes that echoed childhood experiences. Yet something else occurred as well. Nettie Hubbard, who had first observed C. L. in 1942 and joined New Salem the following year, thought that as their pastor found himself, adjusted to the culture of the city, and deepened the message he delivered, many in the congregation sensed new possibilities for themselves. As his public voice grew, it became a familiar model against which parishioners might test their own voices in new, more assertive ways. “We want to move up a little higher,” Julia Ann Carbage explained, reflecting a dominant reaction of the congregation to their pastor. “And so we start at the bottom and climb up, and that’s the sort of thing that the preacher, Reverend Franklin, did.”14
The signal moment in the church week was the Sunday sermon, the most powerful chord that vibrated through the congregation, and Franklin was “the king of the young whoopers,” Benjamin Hooks recalled. The whooped sermon’s emphasis on the sacred word as performed, as opposed to simply spoken or read, had roots deep in black oral traditions from the slave era that still echoed African influences. Central among these traditions was the need for an active response by the congregation as the preacher delivered his words.15 In 1940, Hooks was a fifteen-year-old boy who assisted his father and uncle in the family photography business located in the building they owned downtown. In that capacity (the brothers were the primary photographers for black Memphis at this time), the teenager met many black Memphians, including Franklin. “Ben Perkins, of course, was reputed to be the greatest of all [whoopers],” Hooks thought, “but he was middle-aged by that time and Franklin was much younger.” Franklin’s parishioners shared Hooks’s impressions. With Franklin in the pulpit, Ernest Donelson explained, “If you wanted to get a seat for the mid-day service, you had to come to Sunday School [at 8:00 A.M.]. . . . Or stand.” New Salem sat approximately four hundred, but Franklin’s drawing power from “all over the city” meant that on most Sundays, worshipers “would be lining all around the walls, standing up.” Nor was C. L.’s appeal simply emotive. Even early in his Memphis career he began to rethink how he used his sermonic power, specifically how he might span the distance between faith and the daily reality of black life near mid-century.16
That gap was substantial. The formal training most southern black ministers gained was minimal, and they as well as their congregations often were uncomfortable with a more literate and sophisticated urban world. George W. Lee, a Mississippi-born Memphis businessman and political activist, argued in 1920 that too many of the local black clergy were “preaching about the glories of the other world and too few [were] pointing out the hell” of this one. A decade later, the Memphis World, the local black paper, criticized ministers, along with businessmen and teachers, for their general acquiescence to racism. Ralph J. Bunche, then a young political scientist and later the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for international diplomacy, delivered the most damning indictment. Following a research trip to Memphis in 1940, Bunche noted the preponderance of black churches (213 of a total in Memphis of 375) and proceeded to excoriate the black clergy for their timidity and the absence of informed commentary: “The Negro preachers of Memphis as a whole have avoided social questions. They have preached thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone, and Moses out of the bulrushes, but about the economic and political exploitation of local blacks they have remained silent.”17
> In 1939, Franklin fit this stereotype perfectly. As he had noted, he was then a fundamentalist in his theological outlook, one who believed the words of the Bible in literal fashion. His chanting ability, its effectiveness with Mississippi congregations already well known, was used to prepare parishioners for the coming judgment day in a fashion that all but ignored the world they inhabited. From the pulpit, his rich baritone enveloped the listener, lifting individuals and ultimately the congregation. His cadence changed: a tonal center supplanted the earlier conversational pattern, and C. L.’s words now danced, in musical key, to an intense rhythmic beat, marked by vocal crescendos, dramatic pauses, and the bending or lengthening of vowels and word endings. His throat constricted, rasping out a growl that punctuated a line and brought both preacher and listener closer to the spiritual power each evoked.18
Franklin’s deep longing—what Benjamin Hooks called “an intimate kind of commotion”—drove him still, in a fashion Ralph Bunche never imagined. As in Mississippi, his desire for education remained intense. Almost before his family was even settled in Memphis, C. L. enrolled in Howe Institute. Founded in 1888 as a combined grade school and high school for black children, Howe’s seven faculty, under T. O. Fuller’s leadership, offered classes in theology, the literature of the Old and New Testaments, and practical instruction in preaching, evangelism, and pastoral work. In addition, Howe offered C. L. an opportunity to make friends with other young ministers also new to the city; there, for example, he first met W. C. Holmes, a fellow Mississippian two years younger, who became a lifelong friend.19
As useful as Howe was, it did not sate C. L.’s hunger for education. Although he was “without accreditation,” as he put it, lacking the high-school degree, he nonetheless enrolled “as a special student” at LeMoyne College, a historically black school located on Walker Avenue, a short walk from New Salem. Founded in 1871, LeMoyne offered bachelor’s degrees to both men and women in the arts and sciences. Here Franklin entered onto a “general study plan” that stressed literature and sociology. This was his first consistent exposure to such subjects, and he reveled in the encounter. He read widely, continued to improve his literacy, and in his sociology classes explored for the first time in a structured fashion the broad outlines of the black American experience. At LeMoyne there “wasn’t any heavy emphasis given upon it, but, you know, [we studied] about the equality of men irrespective of their races; differences only where background or environment or education were concerned.” In the segregated America of the early 1940s, however, such assertions were significant.20
His ministerial career prevented Franklin from completing the degree, though he remained a part-time student at LeMoyne for three years, taking classes in the morning and attending to pastoral duties in the afternoon. Neither the pastors he trained under in Mississippi nor his teachers at Greenville had deviated from a belief in the literal truth of biblical writings. But in Memphis, he recounted, “I began to be exposed to new interpretations, and I started to go to school, and I was exposed to new Biblical views.” In addition, he explained decades after, “I started traveling.” As his preaching prowess developed, C. L. received invitations to lead revivals throughout the region and beyond, and his conversations with other ministers sharpened his thinking. He also began attending the yearly meetings of the National Baptist Convention held throughout the country, where he listened to famed preachers and shared reactions with other young hopefuls. In the process his ideas changed; they “began to evolve,” as he defined himself anew.21
While his studies and travels spurred this intellectual bloom, a rather informal weekly meeting in Memphis proved critical in C. L.’s development. On an upper floor in the Hooks Brothers Building, in a former dentist’s office, the Baptist Pastors’ Alliance gathered each Tuesday for discussion, study, and talk, swapping stories and testing new ideas as they incorporated younger preachers into their fellowship. More experienced ministers guided younger ones, and no less prominent a minister than T. O. Fuller, “as busy as he was,” C. L.’s friend W. C. Holmes remembered, “always made that meeting.” It was also at these weekly meetings, C. L. explained, that one minister “would review the Sunday school lesson for the other preachers, and one would preach.” Both efforts would then be dissected by the assembled preachers, with the occasional joke made at one’s rhetorical excesses or another’s rustic manners. Within the practical framework of preparing a coming sermon lay the sheer pleasure of exchanging ideas in the company of fellow preaching men. This exhilarating experience C. L. found most important “in terms of cultivating me with Biblical thinking beyond what I’d been exposed to in Mississippi.”22
Since none of his sermons from his Memphis days (or from his Mississippi preaching either) have survived, it is difficult to say how this experimentation with new ideas actually changed Franklin. C. L. acknowledged that his intellectual growth at first “aroused [in me] some concern in the process of change, but I viewed it more or less as a deepening understanding.” However it actually occurred, within a few years that literal rendering of God’s written word became more metaphorical, while the here and now became more literal. Like his friend Martin Luther King Jr., who experienced a similar transformation while at Atlanta’s Morehouse College a few years later, C. L. remained most profoundly a Baptist preacher. But his faith commitment, like King’s, did not require him to confine his intellect. Together with the readings for his LeMoyne classes, the discussions at those Tuesday meetings challenged Franklin, prodded him to explore even as they provided a context for him to understand those troublesome feelings “aroused . . . in the process of change.”23
However he might have appeared in the pulpit on Sunday morning, at home C. L.’s was not the only voice in the family. Barbara Franklin, a talented pianist for the church, possessed as well a superb singing voice. Mahalia Jackson, herself a gospel singer extraordinaire, frequently stated that Barbara “was one of the really great gospel singers” in the nation. During the 1940s, the two women became friends, and Jackson stopped over to visit both Barbara and C. L. when her schedule permitted. Barbara’s son, Vaughn, echoed Jackson’s evaluation. “Mom had a beautiful voice,” he reminisced, decades later. Church members also recalled the power of her voice in the choir as well as her reputation as an effective music teacher. These lessons were few, for however talented she was musically, Barbara gave the major part of her energy to her role as wife and mother.24
By all accounts, Barbara’s return to Memphis as the wife of a young but promising minister pleased her. The city was attractive, filled with family, friends, and an enormous range of cultural activity. If any feelings remained concerning her departure some years before, her current status calmed them. Despite her talent, she enthusiastically assumed her role as New Salem’s first lady and was kindly remembered by church members as “a beautiful personality,” “a sweet little woman,” and “good looking, too.” In Memphis even more so than in Mississippi, however, her public position as a minister’s wife was not the easiest of roles. Given that New Salem, like most churches throughout America, was led by a man but was dependent on the dedication and voluntary efforts of churchwomen to function, the possibilities of tension between these women and the new pastor’s wife were very real. Years later, C. L. underscored the very problem even as he sought to dismiss it. Speaking directly of Barbara, he explained that he did not recall his wife experiencing any trouble. “I think [a minister’s wife] only has difficulties when she goes in and tries to compete with the established leaders there. That might bring about conflict, but she [Barbara] never had any problem like” that. If C. L. was right about the absence of conflicts, he certainly underestimated the degree of tact and diplomacy Barbara employed to steer clear of such tensions.25
New Salem, moreover, was only one of many obligations Barbara shouldered in those Memphis years. When she returned to Memphis at age twenty-two in 1939, a handsome, maturing woman about five feet, five inches tall, with a slight frame, her dark hair p
ulled back to feature her light-complected oval face, she did so with far more complex responsibilities than those carried by the teenage girl who had left some six years earlier. She now had two children, Vaughn, age five, and Erma, just over one year old. By that summer, she carried her third child, Cecil, born the following March. In addition to the demanding task of caring for three young children, she ran the house, cooked and cleaned, and provided her husband with a comfortable refuge from his public life. She also organized the family moves. In their first two years in Tennessee the Franklins lived in at least three different homes in the South Memphis area, all within walking distance of LeMoyne and New Salem. Finally, sometime in 1941, the family settled at 406 Lucy Street, just two blocks south of McLemore Avenue, into a small, two-story wooden house with a cramped front porch on a closely packed, narrow street.26
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