The numerous parties C. L. hosted when these entertainers played Detroit were selectively planned. Sylvia Penn, who organized many of them, suggested that the guest list included only “four or five people in the church.” Since Penn and her husband counted for almost half of that number, few New Bethel people were invited. Franklin did not socialize with church members when, enjoying a drink and a wide-ranging conversation, his house pulsated with impromptu live performances. Many in the congregation would have been scandalized had they known, a fact C. L. clearly understood.37
From conviction rather than caution, however, Franklin sought to narrow the presumed divide. Through his sacred role as a preacher, he explored in his sermons what was to many an apparent contradiction: rather than a source of evil, the space where the sacred and the secular mingled was the very source of his strength, the wellspring from which the core of his message flowed. That space was, in fact, humanity’s central experience, its grounding, for Franklin preached that his God acted through human beings living in this world. There was no idealized spiritual space free of taint and temptation.38
As Franklin integrated these multiple influences in his life into even more compelling preaching performances, he still faced the practical problem of preserving a wandering congregation. The absence of a radio program did not help. In Memphis and again in Buffalo, C. L.’s radio programs attracted new members to his church and spread his reputation, although the two consequences were not necessarily identical. The programs had proven of interest to many who felt drawn less by a desire to join C. L.’s church than by the preacher’s pointed socioreligious analysis of contemporary events. In any case, what struck Franklin was how his exposure in that medium spread his name across the community. “I knew [that] by reaching the whole city,” he later explained of radio’s significance, “it was much better than just preaching to the people who just came into the church.”39
Without a radio show, Franklin turned to other means. In 1950, he recorded a gospel hymn, “I Am Climbing High Mountains,” for Philadelphia’s Gotham label. One of four sides he recorded that fall, the appearance of the two 78 records underscored C. L.’s continued willingness to explore new technological possibilities to promote his message and his reputation. Most likely Joe Von Battle, whose record shop at 3530 Hastings was just down the street from New Bethel, made the recordings. Deeply a part of the Hastings Street music scene, Von Battle held the key to potential success for many local artists. He recorded them both for his own label, JVB, and sold their tapes to larger record companies. Eddie Burns, a Detroit bluesman who backed John Lee Hooker on many of his recordings, depicted Von Battle as “a kind of big-shot guy. Mouth full’a gold, rode around in Lincolns. He was a hot shot and he was cuttin’ just about everything that walked up and down Hastings Street. He’d just go out there and flag ’em in because he has a studio at the back.” The industry in Detroit was chaotic and competitive, with paper-thin profit margins encouraging questionable practices, in part because the industry was itself but a minor adjunct to the larger scenes in Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. In 1950, for example, Von Battle recorded four sides with Hooker using an alias to avoid legal action from another local company with exclusive right to Hooker’s music. C. L.’s financial arrangements with Von Battle for his gospel hymns remain unknown, but not unlike any other aspiring musician on that street, C. L. also found through Von Battle the opportunity to reach a broader audience. At first, that may have seemed like enough.40
Cutting that gospel record also marked Franklin as different from the majority of other ministers. It was one thing for him to bring his choir to Sacred Cross Baptist to engage in “another preaching and singing battle” with his good friend, Reverend M. L. Franklin, and his choirs. That was, in the words of Horace White, an older, culturally conservative Detroit minister, a “private” affair.41 But if only a very small percentage of African American ministers had radio programs in the city at this time, the number of those who recorded hymns was negligible. In a community where the gospel blues were still not welcome in many congregations, C. L.’s recording set him apart in a public fashion. He possessed real talent and was anything but bashful about expressing it. What he first began in Memphis when he shed his literalism and explored a new relationship between faith and the world about him, he now proclaimed with a maturity and a confidence as never before.42
On Sunday, October 14, 1951, New Bethel’s long exodus finally ended, and the congregation processed into their new church. They had more than survived their wandering; like the Israelites of old, they had grown through the tribulations. Church membership increased as the new building neared completion, and the pastor’s openness to the Hastings Street community generated some rather unusual support. After the original fiasco, C. L. had secured the needed loan from a “downtown broker,” which allowed major construction to continue. What was more noteworthy, Bill Lane, the Chronicle’s entertainment reporter, wrote in 1953, was that during the construction “night club owners, beauty and barber shop operators, numbers bankers, professional and business people, and plain citizens were all donating money to start a new building for the young minister they heavily admired.” C. L. was unique among his fellow ministers in that he welcomed all of the residents of Hastings Street—prostitutes, drug dealers, and pimps as well as the businessmen, professionals, and the devout working classes. Since 1946, he had greeted on the street those usually shunned by church people, talked to them with respect, remembered their names, and invited them to Sunday services. C. L. believed, Charlie Thompson explained, “that if anybody needed redemption, it was the unsaved,” and that could not be achieved by “running from these people.” Responding to such unexpected kindness from a Baptist minister, these men and women embraced Franklin in turn. As Sylvia Penn noted, prostitutes, jazz musicians, drug dealers, and “every pimp in the city liked him. . . . They would give him money and I’d go to them and sell tickets for him too.”43
Even more unusual was Franklin’s ability to retain the support of his conventional parishioners as he opened the church doors to the Hastings Street habitués. Teachers, lawyers, and insurance agents mingled each Sunday with working people, some with well-paying union jobs but the majority far poorer. Among them were sprinkled musicians and other Hastings Street regulars. Franklin had an ability to cross social lines, to draw from the more respectable in his flock a sense of compassion for those less so. “Reverend Franklin taught me how to love people,” Robbie McCoy, a religiously devout friend and admirer explained. He taught me how “to respect people. How to do for those persons who needed help.” Franklin drew from people a better sense of themselves than they often thought possible. This Christian vision, together with his profound preaching power and charismatic appeal, stretched outward from the church sanctuary to create the possibility of a broad, inclusive community. Perhaps the deep impact of this power explains the extraordinary step taken by New Bethel in December 1950. Contrary to the Baptist tradition, which cherished each church’s ability to call and to dismiss pastors from their pulpit, the congregation accepted C. L. Franklin “as a life time pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church by a majority vote (84-15).” For his part, the church minutes stated, C. L. agreed he would resign as pastor if two-thirds of the paid-up members voted him out or “at anytime that he became an open and public shame to the church.” A lifetime contract at a major Afro-
Baptist church, at age thirty-five—with little more than a decade of major church preaching behind him and only four years at New Bethel—was unusual among his peers. To have received it even as he prodded his members, at times to their discomfort, to expand the parameters of their faith’s meaning in the world was extraordinary.44
The opening of New Bethel ten months later was a glorious affair, with festivities filling the week preceding the formal entrance into the church. On Tuesday, October 9, W. E. Ramsey and his congregation presented a program especially prepared for the “county, state, and city politici
ans” in attendance that evening. That Wednesday, New Bethel’s Thomas Shelby directed a gospel celebration that featured Mahalia Jackson and Robert Anderson and his Chicago choir. Thursday brought M. L. Franklin to the pulpit, with a program emphasizing the involvement of business and professional people in the church. At all of these events large audiences, including people from throughout Detroit and even a delegation from Friendship Baptist in Buffalo, enthusiastically participated. Finally, on Sunday morning, October 14, a “massive parade,” reminiscent “of huge religious crusades of the past,” one reporter enthused, joyously made its way to the church. They gathered first at the Brewster Center and then processed throughout Paradise Valley: east to Hastings and then up Hastings to Alexandrine, a left to St. Antoine, a right onto Willis, then another right one block to Hastings before the marchers beheld the new stone-and-steel church. As they entered the building cries of surprise broke through the decorum. The interior was enormous, capable of seating twenty-five hundred people, and possessed a choir loft behind the pulpit with room for two hundred singers. Five murals dominated the sanctuary’s high walls: three depicting the central mysteries of the Christian faith (“The Last Supper,” “Jesus in Gethsemane,” and “The Resurrection”) “and two professional paintings of the admired pastor himself.” Knotty-pine joists supported the ceiling, as they did the enormous balcony. Three floor-to-balcony windows on each side allowed ventilation and, in good weather, a position for the overflow crowd to witness services. Although incomplete (funds for office space, new pews, and the baptismal pool were yet to be raised), the $225,000 building was a stunning change from the former bowling alley.45
As the enormous crowd filled the church and settled in, the choir offered a hymn, and one of New Bethel’s assistant ministers, Reverend J. T. Furcron, led a devotional service. More hymns followed, and then C. L. Franklin approached his new pulpit for the first time. His text that day was from the Book of Joshua, which recounts the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land in the decades following Moses’ death. Specifically, Franklin selected the twelfth verse of the fourteenth chapter, where Caleb, now eighty-five, reminds Joshua of his efforts as a military scout forty-five years earlier against the Canaanites. Although the rest of his group betrayed their mission, Caleb persevered, and Moses promised him “the land whereon thy feet have trodden” after the Israelite conquest. “Now therefore give me this mountain,” Caleb demanded of Joshua, who then awarded him Hebron.46
Franklin read the biblical text and then announced the sermon’s central theme: “a man of high objective.” He began with a detailed discussion of Caleb’s history, emphasizing how Caleb had come through the Egyptian bondage, the exodus, and subsequent wanderings, and had always remained faithful to the goal of freedom for his people. In contrast, many of the Israelites lacked the will to follow their God’s commands; resisted and even sought to harm their leader, Moses; and were willing to settle for bondage in Egypt. In a direct, bracing comment, he reminded his congregation on that joyous occasion that so many in biblical Israel “were willing to satisfy themselves with a second or third class citizenship in Egypt rather than face head-on the inevitable difficulties that one must encounter on the high road of adventure.” Biblical Israel at this time was “so overcome with the slave psychology of Egypt that had been imposed upon them that they were willing to conspire against and even murder, the man who was leading them to that freedom.”47
Certainly, the phrase “second or third class citizenship” had a contemporary rather than a purely biblical ring. Citizenship within Egypt was never a central issue for the Israelites in bondage, but that concept possessed vital meaning for blacks in postwar America. So, too, with his discussion of “the slave psychology of Egypt.” While that had a clear biblical reference, it also carried a potent corollary within African American life: the portrait of Caleb whose faithfulness to his divine mission distinguished him from those who had internalized the oppressor’s image of themselves. Here, in this new building, C. L. took a great step forward, using for the first known time the ritual of the sermon to challenge his people to free themselves. And as Franklin talked of that man of high objective, the parallel with New Bethel’s pastor was not lost on many in the congregation. More than a building had risen.48
CHAPTER SIX
THOUGHTS OF LIBERATION
Just before ten o’clock in the morning on Thursday, February 28, 1952, Coleman Young, a thirty-four-year-old World War II veteran, settled into his chair in room 740 of the United States Federal Building in downtown Detroit. His was not a voluntary appearance, and his lawyer, George W. Crockett Jr., accompanied him. Together, these two black men observed Congressman John S. Wood, Democrat of Georgia and chair of the Un-American Activities Committee of the United States House of Representatives, gather his notes and hold a final brief consultation with his counsel. Then in its fourth day of public hearings investigating the threat of Communist subversion in the auto industry, the committee had already cleansed one local media outlet of a presumed traitor: Joseph Bernstein, labeled a Communist official in the hearings on Tuesday, found himself fired from his position as a layout artist for the Detroit News the following day. But three days earlier, as all in that room well knew, a federal appellate court had upheld the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for revealing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. As the chairman gaveled the session to order, a bevy of regional and national print journalists quickened their attention, and the technicians opened the radio microphones that would broadcast the hearing live throughout the Detroit region.1
Young’s examination began innocently enough. Responding to the committee counsel’s queries, Young explained his background—Alabama born but reared in Detroit’s Black Bottom after his parents migrated in the 1920s—and employment history since graduating high school in 1937, much of which involved positions within various trade unions in the city. But very quickly, the battle was engaged. Frank Tavenner, counsel for the committee, lectured Young that he expected cooperation in uncovering the threat of Communist infiltration in the numerous organizations the witness had joined. Young bristled. He informed Tavenner that he would not “react only in such a manner that this committee may desire me. In other words, I might have answers you might not like.” Tavenner immediately followed with, “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” Young refused to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment’s constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination, as well as “my rights under the first amendment, which provides for freedom of speech, sanctity and privacy of political beliefs and associates, and, further, since I have no purpose of being here as a stool pigeon, I am not prepared to give any information on any of my associates or [their] political thoughts.” Undeterred, Tavenner then asked Young about his involvement in the National Negro Congress—“That word is ‘Negro’, not ‘Niggra,’” Young interrupted. Admonished by the chair not to argue with counsel, Young retorted: “It isn’t my purpose to argue. As a Negro, I resent the slurring of the name of my race.”2
Accused of being uncooperative, Young responded sharply. “I consider the denial of the right to vote to large numbers of people all over the South un-American, and I consider”—he was cut off but quickly regained the initiative—“I consider the activities of this committee, as it cites people for allegedly being a Communist, as un-American activities.” In a direct exchange with Chairman Wood, who proudly informed the witness that he had received all of the “112 Negro votes cast” in his Georgia district in the last election, Young’s anger was barely containable. “I happen to know,” he informed the Congressman, that “in Georgia, Negro people are prevented from voting by virtue of terror, intimidation, and lynchings. It is my contention you would not be in Congress today if it were not for the legal restrictions on voting on the part of my people.”3
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