In the late nineteenth century, Julia A. Hooks, whose two sons would later run the family’s photography business, opened a music school on Beale for both black and white students. She taught classical piano and, with a local reputation as the “black Jenny Lind” (a popular songstress), gave singing lessons as well. That tradition continued among a segment of black Memphis even decades later. With a different purpose, Lucie Campbell organized the Music Club in 1904, attracting members interested primarily in singing, especially sacred works. The growth of gospel music in Memphis and the nation owed much to Campbell, who was the music director of the National Baptist Convention from 1916 to 1963. She advocated for Thomas Dorsey’s brand of gospel blues within Baptist circles, and she discovered and trained talented performers, then promoted their careers. Thomas Shelby, for example, a young gifted musician, studied with Campbell and, under her sponsorship, became the pianist for the convention in the 1930s.43
But not everyone in the black religious community accepted gospel blues. Many ministers, North and South, banned it from their churches, declaring the incorporation of blues chords and a syncopated beat “sin music.” These “mere” singers claimed that their music was a form of preaching, raising many a ministerial hackle at this presumed invasion of ordained prerogative. Echoing the battle lines drawn in their opposition to black secular music in general, these ministers and their supporters ridiculed the gospel blues, insisting that under the guise of faith it simply brought jazz into the sanctuary. Their stubborn position confounded gospel blues advocates. “The European hymns they wanted me to sing,” Mahalia Jackson explained, “are beautiful songs, but they’re not Negro music. I believe most Negroes—unless they are trained concert artists or so educated they’re self-conscious—don’t feel at home singing them.”44
Beginning in the late 1920s in Memphis, the new gospel music sparked the formation of gospel quartets. These all-male groups were community based, drawing members from one or more of the local church choirs or neighborhood organizations and rarely performing as a distinct group during church services. Rather, they expressed their faith in this new style (which, songstress Nina Simone wryly observed, “allow[ed] you to use the same [i.e., forbidden] boogie-woogie beat to play a gospel tune”), singing at weekend concerts before local audiences. Through the 1940s, the majority of the Memphis groups were not professionals. Their members were workingmen—porters, laborers, pipefitter’s helpers, and the like who maintained their jobs as they polished their performance. Some of these quartets had origins at the workplace: all four members of the I. C. Glee Club, founded in 1927 and active during the following decade, worked for the Illinois Central Railroad and occasionally performed at functions there as well. Other groups such as the Pattersonaires, established at New Salem in 1945, were church based. Ernest Donelson, one of the original Pattersonaires, recalled how each group would have at least one major program yearly, to which they would invite many other groups to perform as well. Coupled with requests from fraternal lodges and community groups for benefit performances, to say nothing of the time spent in practice, quartet members devoted a considerable amount of their nonwork lives to singing their faith. That faith motivated them, as did their place in the local gospel scene. “Well, everybody wanted to out-sing the others, basically,” Donelson explained. “There was some competition.”45
The ability of these quartets to harmonize faith and syncopation proved immensely popular, and it was a clear alternative to Beale Street for those who so desired. But these hymns also carried other meanings. As W. H. Brewster, the pastor of East Trigg Baptist, put it: “I write these songs for the common people who could not understand political language, common people who didn’t know anything about economics.” With the city’s white political machine controlling black access to the voting booth in South Memphis, and with violence against blacks who violated segregation’s strictures—to say nothing of directly protesting such conditions—a frequent occurrence, such efforts were anything but insignificant. Brewster’s most famous gospel composition, “Move On Up a Little Higher,” written in 1946, was not only a hymn about “a Christian climbing the ladder to heaven,” but it also urged blacks to “move up” in education, in the professions, in politics, and other aspects of social and political life. Recalled Brewster: “I was trying to inspire Black people to move up higher. Don’t be satisfied with the mediocre. Don’t be satisfied. That was my doctrine. Before the freedom fights started, before the Martin Luther King days, I had to lead a lot of protest meetings. In order to get my message over, there were things that were almost dangerous to say, but you could sing it.” Ernest Donelson concurred. Brewster’s hymn, he noted after decades of performing it, is “more of what you call an inspirational song. You listen to it, and you get hope, you see a better day tomorrow.” Mahalia Jackson’s 1947 rendering of the hymn sold more than 2 million records, when sales of one hundred thousand “constituted the Mt. Everest of the gospel climb.”46
C. L. never composed a hymn, and there is no direct evidence of his involvement with these gospel groups. But given his attention to the choir at New Salem, to say nothing of his own considerable skill as a singer, he most likely attended occasional gospel concerts and perhaps even sponsored events at New Salem. People like Brewster and Campbell, as well as the blues-drenched gospel quartets in the city, had a profound impact on him in these years. On a personal level, he and Brewster had a good relationship, working well together in various ministerial contexts, and they exchanged pulpits with each other on occasional Sundays. Increasingly, C. L.’s God was both in and of this world, as well as beyond it, and he felt the imperative to engage as best he could each aspect of that ineffable continuum. The praise song he presented from the pulpit could extol the spiritual and intellectual richness that infused black cultural life, the sacred as well as the profane. In his sermon “Without A Song,” C. L., echoing Brewster, taught: “Some things you can’t say, you can sing. Isn’t it so?”47
Perhaps the first quality that attracted the notice of other ministers during C. L.’s early years at New Salem was his ability to regroup the congregation following the departure of the divisive Reverend Payne. As both the crowds at Sunday service and the permanent membership increased, the scope of church activities grew. In addition to church fund-raising dinners that might feature fried chicken, chitlins, or spicy spaghetti and ice cream (the “Heaven and Hell” party), New Salem now boasted a Boy Scout troop; the Red Circle Girls, which taught young girls “to be ladies”; oratory contests for the church’s youth; and a revived and enlarged choir. Franklin expanded the deacon board, those men responsible with aiding the pastor in counseling members, and charged them with bringing to his attention families in need for whom he might take up a special collection at services. Franklin undoubtedly saw himself as a preacher first and an administrator a distant second, but he understood that responsibility for the overall condition of the church remained his. In this regard, C. L. proved a good evaluator of others’ abilities. James Waller, with assistance from Barbara Franklin and occasionally Thomas Shelby, Lucie Campbell’s protégé, proved to be a fine director of music; Reverend Silas J. Patterson was an efficient assistant pastor. Like many pastors, Franklin delegated duties to aides, keeping a sharp eye on church finances himself, while concentrating on preaching and pastoral counseling.48
After but a few years under C. L.’s leadership, New Salem had grown considerably larger, achieved institutional stability, and created an intricate pattern of church activities that brought people to the church regularly to discuss issues important to parishioners. This did not go unnoticed by his ministerial colleagues. C. L.’s early involvement with the National Baptist Convention was yet another sign that marked him as a man of ambition and ability. The convention was the largest organization and its leaders among the most influential in black America. Thus attendance at the annual meeting carried both social and career implications. A young minister focused on moving up made friends and contacts
with other young pastors; he might also attract the notice of the more famous. As the convention rotated among northern and southern cities annually, regular attendees came to know something of the varied black communities across the nation, and they returned to their congregations with experiences to share and, perhaps, a deeper understanding of their ministry. Attendance also boosted a pastor’s standing within the congregation. “That would brighten them up towards me,” Reverend Ivory James remembered, “you know, for me to tell that [his conventions experiences], and they could see that maybe I was growing.”49
C. L. attended his first convention in 1940, in Birmingham, Alabama, and over the next four years attended meetings in Memphis, Chicago, and Dallas, missing only Cleveland in 1941. He gave no sermon nor led a prayer service that was officially noted, but he assuredly made new friends among peers and probably among the more established ministers also. These annual trips introduced Franklin to cities he had never before visited, each with a somewhat different African American cultural expression. The cumulative effect was to impress the possibility that Memphis was not necessarily the terminus of his metaphorical Highway 61. C. L.’s attendance also signaled something about his ongoing relationship with the New Salem congregation. The congregation paid all of his expenses to these gatherings through extra collections taken up specifically for that purpose. This yearly tax, coming on top of weekly contributions and the occasional special collection, so poor a membership would not have levied on itself unwillingly.50
The respect C. L. began to garner from his ministerial fellows reflected as well his coolness in a crisis. On a Sunday in mid-May 1943, following a baptismal service in the outdoor pool that brought forty-seven new members into the church, a near-lethal dispute disrupted New Salem services. As the choir reentered the church through the rear door nearest the baptismal pool, gathering before them any stray parishioners not yet back in their pews, a “blood curdling scream” pierced the note Barbara Franklin had just sang. At the rear of the church, a man later identified as J. W. Prophit attacked Mrs. Ocie Tolbert, a church usher, and Willie Lee Anderson, who had been talking to Tolbert in a rear pew. Although married, Ocie Tolbert had carried on an affair with Prophit for some time, until earlier that spring, she expressed her affection for Anderson. (Anderson’s stepmother was a church member, as were the Tolberts, and his affair with Mrs. Tolbert, the Memphis World ingenuously noted of Anderson, had “led him back to church.”) As Prophit saw the couple talking, he left the church for his home a block away and quickly returned with a straight razor, with which he attacked both of them. He “ripped her neck open,” Franklin remembered years later. “I don’t see how she lived.” Anderson, his neck slashed less severely, ran toward the front of the church. Both injured parties lived, and Prophit, who ran from the church, was shortly cornered after having crawled under a white family’s house near McLemore Avenue. The commotion within New Salem was riotous, “everybody running and screaming,” C. L.’s daughter Erma recalled. As Franklin calmed his members that Sunday, he also sought to direct public discussion of the affair in a manner favorable to New Salem’s reputation. In an interview with the Memphis World a few days later, he distanced the church from Prophit, claiming he was not a member, and sought to elevate the church and his own pastoral image above the carnage.51
Equally important for C. L.’s reputation among his colleagues were the personal qualities he exhibited when confronted with the city’s racism. One Sunday in the early 1940s, C. L., Barbara, and Vaughn were driving in the new family car to a church where he was to be the guest preacher. Pulled over by a policeman allegedly for speeding, C. L. told the family to remain quiet while he talked. The policeman accused the “boy” of speeding, Vaughn recalled, and asked for his name, license, and destination. C. L. told him and acknowledged he was speeding. With name and license in hand the policeman then responded, approximately: “Well, ok boy, now you take it easy now.” Vaughn looked at his father. “And I could see the expression on Dad’s face, he was one angry, angry person.” Yet, bitter as C. L. undoubtedly was, his sense of self-worth would not allow the slur to define his response. Nor did he make a public statement about the incident—perhaps because it was such a commonplace form of harassment as to be unremarkable unless more dramatic violence followed.52
Deeper than the bitterness, yet driven by it, was the commitment to mobilize others to undo racism’s grip. To change the landscape, C. L. took to the airwaves. Radio was not a new technology in black religious life in the 1940s. As early as 1929, Reverend J. C. Austin, then pastor of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, broadcast Sunday services on a local station; a decade later, such broadcasts could be found nationwide. In a different vein, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux’s very successful New York broadcast integrated political commentary with a theological perspective during the depths of the Depression, while in Atlanta in 1940, Reverend William Holmes Borders began a weekly twelve-minute program that stressed social topics “from the distinct viewpoint of the Negro.” Gospel quartets and choirs in live performance were another type of religious broadcasting. Memphis, for its part, enjoyed local radio programming of gospel quartets as early as 1929, only six years following radio’s beginnings in the city.53
C. L. was not the first black Memphian to have a radio program, but he may have been the first pastor to broadcast directly from his church. It was, whatever its precedents, a program that drew considerable attention. Titled The Shadow of the Cross, the program began in the summer of 1942 on WMPS, a local affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting Company. Modeled in part after the popular Cleveland, Ohio-based Wings over Jordan program, aired nationally on CBS, C. L.’s broadcast aired each Wednesday evening between ten and ten-thirty. Franklin’s purpose was to offer religious inspiration and hymns, provide a moment of unity for “Negroes of the Mid-South,” ease interracial tension, and, the Memphis World continued, “acquaint white listeners with the Negro’s loyalty and accomplishments on behalf of this country.” R. S. Lewis, Jr., the son of the former owner of the Memphis Red Sox, who had taken over his father’s funeral business, sponsored the show. Invited singers performed, as did the New Salem choir. One of the most popular features was C. L.’s regular performance of a favorite hymn. In addition, C. L. invited speakers to discuss issues of the day—local businessmen, educational leaders, and men and women involved in a variety of religious and social efforts. W. H. Jernagin, a leader in the National Baptist Convention, appeared, as did Shirley Graham, then the southern field organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As her inclusion suggests, C. L. looked to air multiple voices, and even in that city’s racially tense atmosphere he intended to press against racism’s prohibitions whenever he could. In spring 1943, Franklin and Lewis presented a new feature, a weekly news summary of “important happenings of interest primarily to Negroes.”54
Within months, The Shadow of the Cross attracted a wide audience, the Memphis World describing it as “a veritable ‘voice in the wilderness,’” and proclaimed him in “the forefront [of] the growing leadership of young Afro-Americans” locally. C. L. had found the right mix, touching both the hurt and the promise of daily life among black Memphians. As he sought to do from the pulpit, the radio program bridged rural and urban experiences, the hard past with the promise of the future—all in a fashion that underscored the necessity of a more self-conscious individual awareness. The religious component was the wellspring, without which nothing else flowed. But in opening up a broader social and political discussion concerning civil rights, blacks in the war effort, and the opportunities possible even in segregated Memphis, C. L. gave the “colored people of the tri-states new hopes and inspiration” and perhaps even affected some whites. In the Memphis of “Boss” E. H. Crump, the city’s political kingpin, where Crump directives forced local black opponents to flee for their lives and prevented labor organizers such as A. Philip Randolph from speaking, this was not insignificant. C. L. Franklin, not yet th
irty, roused in others a sense of the future possible as they, too, reclaimed their public voice.55
All this was happening only three years removed from his circuit-preaching days in rural Mississippi. His intelligence, magnetism, and hunger to excel in part explain his success. A relentless ambition to be known, honored, and even celebrated for his gifts likewise played a part. Underneath all lay the resolve, born of a near corporeal yet intangible fear first experienced as a youth, never to allow limitations imposed by others to circumscribe his spirit. By 1942, his public position was such that it had been near impossible for the established religious and secular leaders of black Memphis to omit C. L. when they organized the committee that would raise money for the war effort. The committee raised more than $300,000 in 1942, and would raise even more in 1943, when W. C. Handy returned to Memphis to lead a fund drive to replace the bomber—lost in action—black Memphis had earlier funded. The irony of this effort was evident: the money raised would support a segregated military. But C. L. saw his place as in America—a better America, to be sure, but one worth the collective fight to create. This intimate commingling of democratic hopes and racist experience, the essence of black life during this era, was the point of the NAACP’s “Double V for Victory” campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. This effort was widely supported in black America, and C. L. certainly made his own contribution to it when he invited the NAACP’s Shirley Graham on his radio program.56
Singing in a Strange Land Page 9
