Franklin had assumed his duties as pastor of New Bethel in June, but his formal installation occurred the following September. A weeklong celebration that involved ministers and congregants from numerous black Baptist churches, the ceremonies also served to introduce C. L. and Barbara formally to the larger community. Visiting ministers extended the fellowship of Detroit’s Afro-Baptist world, while other guests reflected C. L.’s earlier career. Juanita Brewster, daughter of W. H. Brewster, the Memphis minister, gospel composer, and Franklin family friend, was the guest soloist. A delegation from Friendship Baptist journeyed to participate in the installation. Mrs. Mary Gaston, that church’s corresponding secretary, told the large crowd that “although it is our deepest regret to see him depart from us, we know that God does everything for the best.” The festivities ended with a large banquet at the Gotham Hotel, on Orchard Place between Woodward and John R Street, the elite black-owned hotel in Detroit.11
In electing the Gotham for his installation dinner, as opposed to the church dining room, C. L. indicated a major tone of his coming ministry. From one perspective the hotel was the perfect choice, as none of the major downtown hotels that served whites in 1946 allowed blacks to enter except through the service entrance. But the choice also introduced Detroit to the personal style, the flair, which would define Franklin’s ministry. In 1946, the Gotham symbolized the cultural crossroads. Some nine blocks from New Bethel and just around the corner from the Paradise Theater, the Gotham had been lavishly renovated three years earlier. Most major black entertainers stopped there when they played Detroit, and the hotel became “the place to go and was the major social meeting place” for Detroit blacks with some means. The banquet signaled that proximity to musicians, celebrities, and their culture would be an intrinsic dimension of his ministerial style. Many of Franklin’s congregation could not afford tickets for the banquet, yet no one expressed any discomfort about this. It is quite possible that many members saw in C. L.’s choice a positive reflection of their church’s coming prominence and, by association, their own as well.12
Franklin’s primary responsibility, however, was to strengthen and to lead his congregation, and that required the full application of his preaching and administrative skills. Success there, he expected, would create a place for himself in Detroit and, perhaps, beyond as well. Neither goal would come easy.
In certain respects, Detroit was more like Memphis than Buffalo. The “onflow of life” coursed through those two cities, and in each, the black population dwarfed what Franklin had found in upstate New York. While all three communities had established ministerial cultures, the greater variety of religious professions allowed by the larger black population made for a more complex and competitive situation in both Memphis and Detroit. In the Motor City, for example, in addition to the numerous churches associated with the National Baptist Convention, black Detroiters attended regularly other churches affiliated with the three black Methodist national organizations (African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal); with the black Pentecostals, the Church of God in Christ; and with such mainline white groups as the Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Congregational denominations, and Roman Catholicism. In addition, there were numerous storefront churches, often established by self-appointed ministers, speaking powerfully to the religious needs of the poor and migratory; it was in Detroit, in the 1930s, that the first mosque of the Nation of Islam took root. There were as well unaffiliated preachers with national reputations such as James F. “Prophet” Jones, who regularly filled his large church on the corner of Linwood and Philadelphia, west of Woodward, with charged sermons extolling individual potential. A vibrant religious culture surged through Detroit, its praise hymns, rhythmic responses, and music streaming into the surrounding streets from worship houses on Sunday in a manner reminiscent of Saturday night on Hastings Street.13
Not surprisingly, Detroit’s Afro-Baptist ministerial society, C. L.’s immediate professional peers, was enormously complex and varied greatly in its estimation of each other. Some, preachers and congregants alike, gauged a minister’s relative standing and position by the size and wealth of the church. Others emphasized even more the level of education attained and the learned quality of the prepared message delivered weekly. A “Morehouse man,” for example, or a minister who attended one of the other historic black colleges, possessed both the requisite education and the network of social connections across the nation to mark him apart from the largely untutored rural migrants and, perhaps, recommend him eventually for a leadership position in black Detroit’s leading clubs and organizations. Others, however, shunned such criteria, favoring instead a preacher with a charged emotive appeal. Some looked to a minister’s social message, urging the congregation to engage political life as a consequence of their faith, as a measuring rod of influence and importance. Nor were these the only distinctions made: one’s origins (were you an Alabamian, a Mississippian?) proved important, as did a minister’s renown stemming from involvement in Baptist organizational activities at the city, state, or national level.
C. L. was not unaware of this ranking system. Indeed, he utilized his own version of it on occasion. When he arrived in 1946, he later suggested, there were but a handful of Baptist ministers he thought were leaders, and only two were men of his own generation. Like himself, these two were southerners who had assumed their Detroit pulpits in 1946 and 1947, but there were few other obvious similarities.14
The son of an evangelist father and a devoutly religious mother, A. A. Banks Jr. was born in Texas in September 1913, sixteen months before Rachel Franklin delivered her son in Mississippi, and attended grade school in Bryan, Texas. His father’s ministry took the family to Kansas City and then Pocatello, Idaho, where Banks became “the first Negro male” to graduate from the local high school. The family had some resources, for even in the midst of the Depression, young Banks returned to Texas to attend Bishop College, where he was active in a Christian interracial student organization. Graduating in three years, he then took a master’s degree at Howard University and, in 1942, a bachelor of divinity degree, all the while serving as the assistant pastor of Shiloh Baptist church in Washington, D. C. The following year, Reverend Robert L. Bradby, the sixty-six-year-old pastor of Second Baptist, called Banks as his assistant, with the intention of grooming him as a successor. Following Bradby’s death in 1946, Second Baptist called Banks. At age thirty-three, Banks led the oldest and most distinguished black church in the city, one founded in 1837, and in recognition of its importance, Reverend D. V. Jemison, president of the National Baptist Convention, himself preached Banks’s installation service. The preaching tradition at the church was restrained and intellectual. Since Bradby entered Second’s pulpit in 1910, J. Pius Barbour noted, Sunday services were anything but “a knock-down, drag out emotional orgy.” Like Bradby, the new minister preached from a prepared manuscript in lecture style. With almost four thousand “audited members” in 1947 and the funds to maintain the church’s stately appearance, Second Baptist offered Banks a natural platform for advancement. A self-contained man with cautious instincts, his reserved style, administrative capabilities, and careful encouragement of social change quickly won for him a leadership position within Detroit’s black community.15
The second contemporary C. L. noted was Jesse Jai McNeil, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1913. A powerful intellectual and a manuscript preacher who avoided the whoop, McNeil held degrees, including the doctorate, from Columbia University. Following a stint at a church in Nashville and a three-year term as dean of the School of Religion at Marshall College in Texas, McNeil arrived at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Detroit with a reputation as a “progressive-minded” pastor who emphasized a “strong sociological outlook” in his ministry. Within a year of his arrival, he constructed a community center adjacent to the church, known as Neighborhood House, which provided “a day nursery, health center, vocational guidance, and adult education” for an
yone in need. In 1949 he instituted a lyceum program, engaging his congregation with a series of speakers on social, educational, and religious themes. A civil rights activist whom a local columnist dubbed in 1948 “the preacher who is all out for N.A.A.C.P., the Committee on Civil Rights, [and] the United Negro College Fund,” McNeil described his ministry as bearing “responsibility both to our congregation and to our community.” McNeil quickly assumed a leadership position in both the black and white religious communities. Active in the World Council of Churches as well as Detroit’s Baptist Ministerial Conference, by the mid-1950s he led council delegations to Europe to study democracy, served on Michigan’s State Corrections Commission, and was active in numerous interracial committees.16
As sharply different as the backgrounds of these two men were from C. L. in education, preaching style, and social connections, the background and experiences of their wives denoted yet another marked difference. Victoria Banks graduated from Prairie View State University in Texas and received her master’s in child development from Iowa State. She assumed numerous duties at her husband’s church and also was the first black instructor at the Downtown (i.e., white) YWCA’s religious study program. Pearl McNeil held an undergraduate degree from Howard, a master’s from Fisk, and a doctorate in political science from Columbia University. Deeply involved at Tabernacle Baptist, she also held office in a variety of city and state associations and remained involved with her national sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. More startling, during and long after the House Un-American Activities Committee had scoured Detroit looking for suspected Communist sympathizers, Pearl McNeil continued her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, one of the very organizations under suspicion by the federal government. Although the Banks, the McNeils, and the Franklins all shared southern roots and were contemporaries of one another, the Franklins would never join the other families at social gatherings among Detroit’s elite black professionals, businessmen, and civic leaders. The social distance these differences in education, preaching, and individual style created were not impermeable at all times. Reverend McNeil and a delegation from his church joined in celebrating New Bethel’s sixteenth anniversary in 1948, but that significant demarcation line remained throughout C. L.’s career.17
As real as these differences were, however, C. L.’s business acumen gained him at least a physical presence among this more elite cohort. In negotiating the terms of his contract with New Bethel in 1946, he had insisted the church purchase a parsonage for his family’s use. Whether he or the trustees selected the neighborhood remains unclear, but when the Franklins arrived in Detroit, they moved into an elegant mansion at 649 East Boston Boulevard worth an estimated $17,000. Nestled in among the equally expensive homes of other black professionals and ministers in the city’s North End, some three miles north of his church, C. L. happily found himself in a rather rarefied atmosphere. As in Buffalo, many wealthy whites resided in the neighborhood, and his fellow black residents reflected a particular economic and social standing. Toi Derrecotte remembered that in the 1940s, when most blacks still lived in Paradise Valley, “many of the cream-colored had floated away to mansions on Arden Park and Boston Boulevard.” C. L.’s dark-chocolate skin distinguished him in that company, as did his relative lack of wealth. Nevertheless, with the financial help of New Bethel’s working people, C. L. and Barbara grew into a style the equal of any in the neighborhood, and then some. William Robinson first entered the six-bedroom Franklin home in the winter of 1946-47, when he became friendly with Cecil, the Franklins’ six-year-old son. Robinson lived one street over, on Belmont, and was a regular in the Franklin home throughout the 1950s. He remembered it as “a huge house,” “a beautiful mansion,” and recalled vividly the impression the interior made on his young mind: “Once inside, I’m awestruck—oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I’ve never seen nothing like that before!”
There was as well impressive furniture, including “an elaborate Emerson TV,” and a grand piano that Smokey Robinson remembered Aretha, not yet five years old, playing on one of his first visits.18
With his family settled and comfortable, C. L. addressed the administration of New Bethel. As often occurred in Baptist polity, where congregations frequently dismiss their pastors and call another, one of the trustees at New Bethel had assumed the leadership role in all but name after Ramsey left. Echoing C. L.’s experience in Buffalo, this man “more or less controlled the church,” had significant trustee support, and resisted C. L.’s immediate efforts to assert his authority. Eventually, C. L. “turned him out” without splitting the church, using patience, a crafty intelligence, and an iron determination grounded in the sure knowledge of the hold his preaching exerted on the members. The new pastor did not “jump on [the trustee] prematurely”; rather, he waited until the man’s growing resistance to, and resentment of, his rulings led members themselves to complain about the trustee’s obstructionism. Quickly, he outflanked the trustees who opposed him. When they left New Bethel, he was free to replace them with his supporters.19
In other ways as well Franklin imposed his will on the church. During his trial sermon, he had carefully watched the collection baskets and calculated that there was but $40 from a crowd of some five hundred that Sunday. At that moment he “made a decision that if I became pastor I would change that, and I did.” He increased church membership dues and instituted multiple collections each Sunday: one for the building fund, one for the poor and destitute, and one for church expenses, including his salary and upkeep. Secure in his appeal as a preacher, C. L. encouraged in members “over the years” the necessary “loyalties and discipline about giving.”20
This aspect of the Afro-Baptist ministry has long been scorned by critics as exploitative, as these clerical leaders secured their economic standing on the offerings of their largely poor members. There is some truth in this, and one could find parallel situations among the numerous parishes of Detroit’s Catholic working class. But the members of New Bethel and other religious communities offered their hard-earned dollars freely each Sunday as they thought reasonable, given their individual circumstances. They also gave in direct relationship to what they understood their pastor gave them, and in C. L. Franklin they had a superior preacher whose weekly sermons engaged their intellect and their spirit. The Baptist minister, moreover, had little choice but to raise the weekly collections. Unlike such Protestant denominations as Methodists and Episcopalians, or Roman Catholics, Baptist churches had no ecclesiastical structure to dispense funds in a financial crisis. Each Baptist church stood on its own foundation, each congregation the final arbiter of the individual institution’s leadership. In this most American of circumstances, minister and members had only each other to assure their continued collective presence. The majority of the congregants at New Bethel, poor as they were, repeatedly affirmed the value they placed on their church and their pastor. They understood, as did C. L., that part of the role they required of the pastor was to raise from them each week the necessary funds to keep the entire enterprise solvent and growing.
In the first two years of his ministry in Detroit, C. L. focused considerable attention on establishing a reputation. This required the help of ministerial colleagues and a number of them, along with their parishioners, joined in celebrating the anniversaries of New Bethel’s founding and his own second anniversary as pastor during 1947 and 1948. Coupled with his appearance, accompanied by his members, at other churches on similar occasions, New Bethel’s people proudly appreciated their pastor’s stature among his peers, the majority of whom also lacked the advanced degrees of the elite. The fundraising, of course, continued. At the church’s fifteenth anniversary in 1947, members raised almost $8,000 for the building fund, then the most successful single drive in New Bethel’s history. A year later, additional drives retired all but $3,000 of the mortgage on the parsonage on East Boston Boulevard and raised an addi
tional $5,000 for the poor.21
Milton Hall was but one of the thousands of New Bethel members whom C. L. touched. Seventeen years old in 1948, Hall arrived in Detroit fresh from rural Arkansas. Within a few months he found New Bethel, heard C. L. preach, and “I joined up with that church family the second Sunday in March in 1948, and I’ve been there ever since.” C. L. impressed him deeply: “I could see that he was a God-sent man and he had a sermon, a song, and prayer . . . [and] he wasn’t short on none of them.” A church member for more than half a century and a deacon for more than three decades, Hall supported his family through working at Ford Motor Company, where he was a union member for over thirty-five years. “See,” he exclaimed, “Reverend Franklin spoke for me when I couldn’t speak for myself. I was with the church. I was with the crowd. He [C. L.] on front. He did the preaching, he did the speaking. I didn’t have nothing to do, but I was recognized. I had somebody to speak for me.”22
For Deacon Hall, the New Bethel congregation became an extended family and its pastor, whose faith was palpable to the young man, a rock in a time of awkward transition. Inexperienced, without formal education, overwhelmed by the very intensity of the city, his sense of self was yet understated, his confidence weak. The company of those who had themselves undergone similar transitions—his pastor, too, had once been unable to speak—was a comfort. Critical, however, was the opportunity to gather self-knowledge and awareness in the shadow of a preacher with an uncanny ability to address the deepest recesses of another’s soul. Through his faith and through his pastor’s influence, Milton Hall came to exult in the knowledge that he was, indeed, somebody, that he possessed a unique voice with which he might leave his mark on the world. In the years to come he would counsel church members in spiritual difficulty, raise his voice against racist practices within his union, and participate in civil rights activities. He was but one of a thousand men and women who joined New Bethel in 1947 and 1948, drawn by this preacher who, from the wellspring of his faith, framed a ritual space each Sunday that allowed them to glory in his voice as they discovered new dimensions in their own.23
Singing in a Strange Land Page 14
