Racial distinctions seemed not to have been a defining factor in the Franklin children’s experience on Glenwood. Just over six years old when she moved, Erma quickly became best friends with the white girl next door and remembered no incidents of prejudice. Her major complaint was Buffalo’s climate: “God, it was cold!” It was also during these years on Glenwood that the family sensed that Aretha might possess a special musical talent, her interest in singing and picking at the piano at age three already causing comment within the family. Vaughn, ten years old when the family left Memphis, found in his first “integrated educational system . . . something that was new to me.” The teaching level at School No. 8, a few blocks from his house, was “a little bit higher” than in Memphis, and the principal insisted Vaughn repeat a grade. “It was a big change,” he recalled without resentment. His Buffalo neighborhood teemed with kids, many more than on Lucy Street in Memphis, and he enjoyed playing with them.30
Yet Buffalo at war’s end was anything but idyllic for the Franklin family. Relations with neighborhood children may not have been complicated, but Vaughn did have a number of encounters with openly racist teachers who made him “feel like, well, I don’t want to go into this classroom, because I know I am not going to pass this here.” Similarly, Vaughn and Erma both heard their father mention at dinner-table discussions “obstacles he had run into in Buffalo.” But by and large, the children remained isolated from such tensions. When that larger world did intrude upon the family (as with Vaughn’s teacher), the response often became Barbara’s responsibility. At home, C. L. established rather stern codes of conduct for his children, especially the two oldest, but it was Barbara who reinterpreted them for the children during his frequent absences. His father was “a very strict person,” Vaughn explained, who “wouldn’t allow us to go to the movies.” He never told the older children why. “He would say NO, and that was it.” When C. L. was away, however, Barbara “did give us a little bit of leeway.” The children were allowed to see a movie, provided they promised not to tell their father. But beyond these and a few other equally frustrating snippets, little is known about the Franklins’ family life in Buffalo. Asked years later what his wife felt on leaving Memphis, C. L. quickly claimed that “she expressed appreciation” before exploring in greater detail why the move was important for him. One can imagine the tensions inherent in a relationship strained by five preadolescent children and one very public and frequently absent husband and father. Moreover, what was true for her children with their young playmates may not have been as true for their mother with her adult white neighbors.31
The responsibility for five children undoubtedly kept Barbara close to home, at some remove from the daily recognition due the wife of an important minister in the black community. Barbara, however, was not completely isolated. Churchwomen regularly helped her with household chores, babysat for the children, and ran a variety of errands. If she brought the children to the church for a meeting or a choir practice, she had an instant surplus of babysitters from among the women and older girls. Many of these women, moreover, became her friends. In addition, soon after settling into her new home, Barbara’s mother, Clara, moved from Shelby, Mississippi, to Buffalo, where she maintained her own residence. Discharged from the military in 1945, Semial, Barbara’s brother, joined the Buffalo branch of the Siggers family; that same year, Clara met and married Arthur Press Wofford, an established black Baptist minister in the area.32
Barbara and C. L. clearly shared moments together beyond the pressures of the daily schedule. C. L.’s ever-present search for knowledge led him to a literature course at the University of Buffalo “just to acquaint myself with it. I felt it would widen the horizon of my understanding.” In that class he first read Richard Wright’s novels and embraced Rudyard Kipling, who became a lifelong favorite. Kipling’s poems, meant to be read aloud for their rhythmic cadences, appealed strongly to this developing master of the chanted sermon. In Buffalo as in Memphis, Semial recalled, the couple read after the children were asleep, and these books and articles sparked conversation. There were as well family dinners, often with ministerial guests, with conversation across a wide range of topics. Alternatively, parishioners felt privileged to invite the pastor and his family into their homes. On one such occasion, when the host asked her ministerial guest if he might like a slice of potato pie, Vaughn recalled his father’s response: “‘Yes, sister,’ he said. ‘Just fold it in half!’ He loved potato pie.” To some extent, then, C. L. incorporated his public world into his family life, and those moments shaped the emotional texture of his marriage and relationship with his children.33
C. L.’s appetites, his fundamental drives as well as his more prosaic needs, had always been large. Almost immediately on arriving in the city Franklin sought out “older pastors . . . whom I would call upon and get advice if I did not have any at hand, or did not know who to contact.” Among those he met were the two deans of the Afro-Baptist ministry, J. Edward Nash and E. J. Echols Sr., each of whom served as a bridge to a black communal past. Nash, born in Virginia of slave parents in 1868 and college-educated, had led Michigan Avenue Baptist, the city’s premier Afro-Baptist church, since 1892. Echols, Mississippi-born and educated at the same Howe School of Religion in Memphis that C. L. attended decades later, took the pulpit at First Shiloh Baptist in 1916. Both churches and the pastors’ homes were well within the black perimeter on the city’s Lower East Side. Through these and other Baptist ministers, C. L. met prominent black leaders in the local NAACP and the Urban League. He crossed paths with other black residents at the Michigan Avenue YMCA, which opened in 1925 as a de facto segregated institution. The Michigan Avenue Y promoted a full program of children’s activities, academic and vocational courses, and classes on parenting and other family issues. It also sought to broaden black Buffalo’s thinking with a speakers’ series that brought to its podium, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nannie H. Burroughs, the leader of the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, and Chicagoan Oscar De Priest, elected in 1928 the first black congressman since Reconstruction. Occasionally, supporters of Buffalo’s once-strong nationalist movement affiliated with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association also addressed audiences at the Y. Franklin had sought similar ends on a smaller scale with his Memphis radio show, but the relative freedom possible in Buffalo marked the Queen City as decidedly different from E. H. Crump’s town.34
As much as C. L. may have consulted others, he was no longer the relative innocent who had come to New Salem in 1939. Within a month of becoming pastor, he offered his church to A. Philip Randolph for a major mass meeting addressing the condition of black America in a postwar world. Randolph, the son of a minister, was most famous as the leader of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which gained recognition from the American Federation of Labor in 1937 after a twelve-year struggle, and as the organizer of the 1941 March On Washington to demand equality in defense industry hiring. Randolph’s presence at Friendship Baptist prominently affirmed the pastor’s support of civil rights and trade union activism as a core element of his ministry. A few months later, C. L. and his minister of music, Thomas Shelby, directed a “Battle of Songs” among gospel quartets from Chicago, New York City, and Buffalo. The event was such a success that hundreds were turned away from the packed church. It was, the local paper proclaimed, an “unprecedented vocal program,” and it helped C. L. project a presence beyond the walls of Friendship Baptist.35
C. L.’s radio program made an even more dramatic impact. In contrast with Memphis, black Buffalo had no radio programming and Franklin’s initiative, in late spring 1945, was “rather new to the Negro,” the Buffalo Criterion noted. Sherman Walker’s funeral home sponsored the hour-long weekly program Voice of Friendship, which highlighted religious worship (including at times a brief sermon by C. L.), gospel music, and commentary on current events. In an August 1945 radio address, C. L. focused on the profound changes generated by the defe
at of Germany and Japan, and then asked of the nation black America’s central question. Since it took a combined effort of all races, creeds, colors, and backgrounds in America to win the war, “have we learned the vital necessity of living together in a way where all men . . . are free and equal? Or,” he asked ominously, making explicit the central concern he urged his audience to confront, “have we returned to the philosophy of the Bilbos, the Rankins and the Eastlands [all staunch Mississippi segregationist politicians], that of suppressing the minority and denying them the right to free citizenship?” Following his comments came the segment News about Negroes around the World, in which C. L. read, much as he had on his Memphis radio program, news briefs about Negroes in the war effort. Given the negative coverage of black nurses and soldiers in the dominant media, Franklin’s approach was, said the editors of the Criterion, “very uplifting and encouraging” and would, it was hoped, “ultimately lead to better race relations.” Friendship and its pastor were to be commended “for [the] responsibility which they have accepted upon behalf of local colored people.”36
The intense hostility and brutal violence that greeted Willie Walker, C. L.’s biological father, and so many other veterans following the Great War did not occur again in 1945. White attitudes had changed to the extent that the orgy of lynchings was not repeated. Yet the American South remained thoroughly segregated, and race riots in Detroit, New York, and elsewhere against blacks in 1943 clearly indicated the continuing depth of whites’ racial hostility. But blacks’ attitudes had altered visibly. The “Double-V for Victory” campaign—over fascism abroad and racism at home—sparked a more pointed public debate among African Americans than had existed twenty-five years earlier. Whether returning black veterans migrated North or stayed in the South, as future civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Amzie Moore did in Mississippi, they shared with their communities a broad commitment that the experience of their father’s generation would not be their own. With that resolve, the fight for democracy at home entered a new phase. This intense discussion within black America provided the broader context for C. L.’s own efforts.37
The structure of Franklin’s radio program, melding sacred and secular themes, prayer and politics, suggested a variety of motivations in this intense, ambitious man. Franklin grasped the simple truth that the larger the audience technology allowed, the greater his potential reach and reputation. He began to use a microphone on Sundays at Friendship. This preserved his voice and allowed him to reach more easily the largest congregation he had ever regularly addressed. C. L. welcomed the extended renown technology made possible, as he did the invitation to give a major sermon at the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention, held that September in Detroit. That appearance would become the second major turn in his career in as many years.38
The National Baptist Convention attracted thousands annually in what was the largest gathering of black religious adherents in the nation. Each convention provided the opportunity to engage in intense socializing, prayer services, and political education. In this regard, the gathering held in Detroit was no different from earlier meetings. At least fifteen thousand Baptists—estimates vary as high as thirty thousand—gathered in Olympia Stadium on West Grand Boulevard for the main sessions, while the Women’s Auxiliary, the youth group, and the organization of ministerial wives met at different Detroit churches. Serious tension developed even before the sessions began. It was but two years since a violent, intense race riot had rocked the city, and many white Detroiters adamantly opposed the entry of these Afro-Baptists into a stadium they considered a white public space. A movement to cancel the rental agreement gathered support, and two days before the convention’s opening, the nation’s black Baptists had no meeting space. In one ironic twist among many in the American racial experience, Reverend D. V. Jemison, president of the National Baptist Convention and a black Alabamian, privately appealed to two white Alabama politicians to intervene. Congressman Sam Hobbs and United States Senator Lister Hill eventually secured Olympia Stadium for the gathering, but racial tension continued. As Reverend J. Pius Barbour, the editor of the National Baptist Voice, noted, “We forced our way in that Olympia and the white people took good pains to show us that they did not want us there. There was some kind of crazy union agreement,” he explained, “that had white people standing all around there doing nothing and yet getting our money.” The situation with the microphone system especially infuriated Barbour. The system required a certain technological expertise, and white union workers simply would not operate it properly, with the result that many a speech or sermon came across as “a growling noise like a hog.”39
Despite these difficulties, the convention proceeded. Nannie H. Burroughs, the corresponding secretary of the Women’s Auxiliary, gave a powerful presentation on the theme that “Christianity must fight for the FIFTH FREEDOM”—that is, amending Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous 1941 definition of the Allied war aims as the Four Freedoms—the “FREEDOM OF RACE.” She decried the continued exploitation of Africa and India by white colonial nations and focused attention on domestic social issues essential to the creation of a more democratic postwar society: the imperative to eliminate urban slums, the southern tenant-farm system, the poll tax, and separate accommodations for the races while providing for the nation’s real housing and educational needs. The recommendations from the men’s meeting were equally direct, as D. V. Jemison also explored the connection between Christianity properly understood and the promise of American democratic life. He demanded a strengthened Fair Employment Practices Commission to prevent discriminatory actions in the workplace, an end to poll taxes, inequality in public accommodations, and other forms of segregation. Jemison warned that if the world peace now in place took its direction at both home and abroad “from political demagogues” rather than Christianity, the seeds of the next conflagration would already be sown.40
While these recommendations would not themselves change national politics, they were not without effect. However many the exact number of delegates present in Detroit, they in turn represented more than 6 million reported members of the organization nationally. These delegates—pastors, deacons, choir directors, church club officers, and church members—all returned to their communities following the six days of the convention with stories, lessons, and understandings of what they heard and whom they met. In this sense, the yearly meeting was a giant turbine, gathering within it varied ideas, experiences, and beliefs within a broad, common framework. When the convention finished, the delegates streamed back to their home territories, electric with new ideas and excited to introduce them. It was, at times, a stunning form of popular democratic social action, a vibrant alternative to the demeaning images of black history and current life that still dominated most white attitudes, elite and popular.
But the main attraction of the convention was always the preaching, the vocal expression of the deepest faith commitments in this communal tradition. At these meetings the great preachers in the tradition exhibited their continued power—or failed to, and dropped a notch in others’ eyes. Here, too, newcomers sought to impress and perhaps take advantage of an elder’s slippage, elevating themselves closer to the top echelon. Preachers tested themselves against peers (in a manner not totally dissimilar to the after-hours cutting sessions among jazz musicians), and different styles found their exponents. Ministerial contributors to the National Baptist Voice, for example, still debated the issue of the whooped or chanted sermon; some thought it bespoke an uneducated, rural people sunk in oppression and poverty. They favored instead the manuscript preacher, who wrote out his sermon in advance in order to incorporate as much book learning as possible. J. Pius Barbour, educated at Morehouse and at Crozier Theological Seminary, where he now trained future generations of black ministers, disagreed. In a 1944 article he distinguished between “the swamp whoop”—the preacher who offers a biblical story “in a sing song fashion, like he has the hiccoughs”—and the “intellectual whoop�
��—the preacher who “reads a deep essay, which he fools himself into believing is a sermon.” Dismissing both, Barbour extolled what he called the “artistic whoop.” This required control of a superior musical voice and the ability to “touch any emotion by the cadence of the voice.” Such preachers delivered “profound sermons and gradually work the people up” until they reached the spiritual climax where faith, the power of the message, and the emotional openness of the moment prepared all for an experience beyond words. Proponents of one or another approach carried on the debate throughout the convention.41
Into this exuberant, complex, and occasionally heated context the preacher from Friendship Baptist, just thirty the preceding January, willingly leaped when he agreed to preach at the Detroit meeting. He had been at numerous conventions before and so understood all too well the defining potential of his first sermon before a national audience. But he was still rather inexperienced. Indeed, Friendship’s pastor was not even the most famous C. L. Franklin among Afro-Baptist ministers: Reverend Claude L. Franklin, also known as C. L. and also born in Mississippi, led Great Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. The Brooklyn Franklin was college educated, had received an additional divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and still whooped part of his sermon. He was the subject of a front-page story in the National Baptist Voice just months before the Detroit convention. Yet it was the then less known Franklin from Buffalo who received the invitation to preach. Perhaps one can detect the influence here of B. J. Perkins, in 1945 the national treasurer of the National Baptist Convention, in arranging to give his protégé his moment.42
Singing in a Strange Land Page 12
