Arguably, a significant portion of nonelite black Detroit in the early 1950s were less like Coleman Young or Marc Stepp. Generations of oppressive conditions in their home states had subverted the belief that they possessed the right to a public voice or to the political power necessary to alter the conditions that so viciously structured their lives. William Bundy’s experience in 1946 reflected this dilemma. A graduate of Morgan State College, Bundy lived on Cherrylawn Avenue near Seven Mile Drive, in the small black community in the northwest section of the city. Unable to find a job in a postwar economy flooded with returning veterans, Bundy became a “cadet clerk” in a program initiated by the local Urban League to obtain black men and women positions, even menial ones, among the city’s major employers. The city’s water board hired him as a meter reader for residential neighborhoods. Quickly, white homeowners protested, finding the presence of a black man in uniform on their property a threat, and city officials banned Bundy from his job. The incident itself is far less dramatic than other racial assaults the city’s black citizens experienced, but it was also a common occurrence. Black municipal workers were overwhelmingly grouped among the unskilled and most seasonal employees, an experience not dissimilar to that of black auto workers. No black resident, regardless of occupation, could eat in downtown restaurants, try on clothes at Hudson’s, the major department store, or if they had the disposable cash, hail a cab home from downtown. The unexceptional nature of these insults, relentlessly flowing through the course of one’s daily life, sapped the spirit and quieted the voice of many in patterns long familiar from past southern exposure. In a city many black migrants still viewed through prepolitical lenses, calls to electoral combat could easily seem irrelevant to those preoccupied with daily survival.21
To move large numbers toward the public engagement Charles Wartman advocated required the full resources of black Detroit across all social and economic divides. In the intertwined associations of kin, friendship, and membership in a bewildering variety of organizations grew the links that might bind black Detroit. But during the 1950s, by far the most common gathering place for blacks of every description was the black church, the community’s core institution. This was C. L. Franklin’s domain.22
When Franklin led New Bethel into its new building in October 1951, the structure’s impressive design and spacious interior signified the expectation of even greater prominence to come. Rooted again at the corner of Hastings and Willis, the congregation grew quickly and claimed seventy-eight hundred members by October 1953. Although membership records are not available, the recollections of numerous congregants suggest a church population primarily of southern origins, the vast majority of whom had migrated in numerous cycles since the 1920s. Alabama and Mississippi backgrounds predominated, and the vast majority of parishioners were working people, day laborers, maids, janitors, and the like. Most were not union members. There were as well numerous small-business people, a slice of Paradise Valley’s prostitutes, gamblers, and pimps, and a self-selected layer of the professionals Charles Wartman considered a world apart from the majority. Many parishioners, like their pastor, had not finished grade school, and relatively few had any college training.23
Franklin was not the only minister in the city to preach to so varied an audience, nor was his the only church that experienced so dramatic an increase in its members. But his reputation both as a preacher and as a compassionate pastor raced through and beyond Detroit. Repeatedly during the 1950s, southern black migrants arrived in Detroit with only Franklin’s name as their final destination. Whether they appeared at the church or at his front door on Boston Boulevard, C. L. swung into action, calling on a network of New Bethel activists organized into the church’s various departments and boards. Recalled Sylvia Penn, calls from the pastor along the lines of “‘I got to get these folks a place to stay, they’re here on my porch,’” were not infrequent. “‘I’ve got to get them some food, they got three children with them, they got two children, and we’ve got to help find them a job,’” C. L. would say. “And,” Penn proudly stated, “he never turned anybody down.”24
Franklin’s compassion infused his sermons, but he also used his pulpit to discomfort his audience, to challenge those still at ease with a “slave psychology.” For C. L., the essential starting point was not politics, however, but the deeper realm of individual personality.
In “Moses at the Red Sea,” delivered in the mid-1950s, C. L. began by identifying the day’s text—Exodus, chapter 14—but did not cite those comforting lines that recounted the Red Sea parting, the Israelites escaping, and the closing water engulfing Pharaoh’s pursuing army. Instead, C. L. directed his audience to earlier verses, where the Lord chastised a Moses who beseeched for help rather than lead his people. God demanded Moses to “lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the seas, and divide it,” allowing the Israelites safe passage. C. L. then announced the theme of the sermon: “Facing a crisis with God. Facing a crisis with God.”25
Franklin began, as always, in a narrative voice. Israel’s liberation was part of her “marching toward nationhood,” but that goal reflected more than simply a political purpose. “God had a destiny for Israel, God had a role in history for Israel to play.” Nor was this solely a metaphor. This biblical God—C. L.’s personal God as well—intervened in history, in the daily affairs of humanity. In the hands of some, the promise of God’s intervention could encourage quiescence, a passive reading of the familiar phrase, “God will provide.” But Franklin taught that God acted through individuals in order to bring his ultimate plans to fruition. In this fashion, human concerns were central matters of faith. God inspired, and those so uplifted changed not only their lives, but the world, on his behalf. In short, God wanted you to find your voice and use it. Indeed, the very trials and pains endured during captivity in Egypt prepared the Israelites for freedom. Teaching as he preached, C. L. held that this was not an accident, for “in every crisis, God raises up a Moses. . . . His name may be Moses or his name may be Joshua or his name may be David, or his name, you understand, may be Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass or George Washington Carver, but in every crisis God raises up a Moses, especially where the destiny of his people is concerned.”
It was not always easy. Moses struggled to lead his people toward freedom, but the difficulties he and they encountered came not just from Pharaoh. As harsh as those trials were, “sometimes some people can become so adjusted to slavery and oppression that they are not willing to give it up.” C. L. reminded his audience that even as they left their Egyptian bondage, joyously “singing Moses’ praises” and projecting “visions of prosperity,” the Israelites did not grasp the basic reality “that any people who traveled the high road to security, to justice, to all the privileges that come to citizens, must pay the price. . . . Everybody wants justice.” The preacher pointedly informed the audience, “Everybody wants freedom, everybody wants what’s coming to them, but very few of us take the time to think about the price that must be paid for these things and the responsibility that goes along with the achievement of them.”
With that admonition still reverberating, Franklin brought his listeners back to “the brink of the Red Sea” where the Israelites could hear “the rattling of the chariot wheels of Pharaoh” coming up fast. Some criticized Moses publicly for leading the freedom movement and agitated for a surrender that would avoid a battle even as it would “lead them back into the oppression of Egypt.” It was at this point that C. L.—still in his narrative voice, his teaching voice, although he had already musically tuned, in key, certain words and phrases—embodied the voice of God chastising a Moses who stood confused before his people’s anger. “The instrument of deliverance is within your hands,” Franklin’s God insisted. “It’s within your possession. The way out, the powers that need to be brought into exertion, is within you. . . . What are you crying about, Moses? What are you looking for? What do you think that you want? . . . Stretch out the rod that’s in y
our hands. I don’t have a new instrument to give you, I don’t have a new suggestion for you, I do not have a new plan. Your course has already been charted by destiny. Stretch out the rod that’s in your hand.”
As C. L. preached it, to trust in the Lord was no otherworldly escape. Instead, it was an enormously difficult task that required, in faith, an individual transformation of consciousness that could only be achieved through an intimate grappling with deeply embedded fears. But the possible rewards, too, were great, in the promise of a reconstituted vision of self and, in time, as a transformed community, a better world:
What am I saying? I’m saying that sometimes in the midst of our own crises, in the midst of our own life-problems, in the midst of the things that we find ourselves involved in, sometimes the power of our deliverance is in our own power and in our own possession. What you need, my brothers and sisters, is within you. First of all, it’s faith in God, and second, faith in yourself, and thirdly, the will and determination to put these into practice. The man who stands and simply cries will never go over his Red Seas. The man who stands or the woman who simply stands and complains, stands before your Red Seas or your own problems, and simply cries, will never find the way out.
A complex transformation had just occurred. What had begun with an emphasis on the role of leaders in freedom movements, which would have been familiar to Charles Wartman, had evolved into an insistence that individuals, regardless of social standing or education, had within themselves the power to be a Moses, a Lincoln, or a Douglass in their own personal and social context. They were, in fact, already somebody; they need but recognize that. The idea that one could postpone deliverance until the appearance of an extraordinary leader was, C. L. made clear, false comfort. Many had so internalized the pain of migration, the deep hurt of racism that they had, for solace, only an idealized, otherworldly Jesus or the attractions of Hastings Street’s drugs and alcohol. The goal of Franklin’s ministry was to reach these people, to help them find the source within themselves to reinvigorate their lives. In this sense, C. L.’s version of Moses in this moment of crisis was not overtly political; it was far more important than that. John Lewis, who avidly studied Franklin’s sermons while a student at Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1950s, caught this quality succinctly. A Franklin sermon is “good for the people on a Sunday morning,” Lewis noted. “But it is also good for you Monday and Tuesday, and the rest of the week and for days and years to come.”26
As he began to whoop, Franklin’s message remained consistent, but he brought that modern message home in tones redolent of the rural South:
And now the Lord said,
“Hold out your rod
over the sea.”
O Lord.
And listen!
When you exert the powers
that God has given you,
when you go to your extremity
you’ll find God waiting for you.
C. L. also offered a caution: human suffering, and thus evil, was all too real, and the desired transformation may yet require patience. “Don’t lose faith,” his rhythmic voice insisted, “and don’t give up courage. Oh, wait on the Lord.”27
As always in C. L.’s sermons, the qualities he infused his biblical actors with were to a degree autobiographical. Traditional Christian analysis informed his preaching, as did his continued voracious reading in theology, history, and literature, and frequent discussions, at times seminarlike in their intensity, with other ministers. But the message he preached reflected those influences through the prism of his heightened self-consciousness. As a youth in Mississippi, C. L. had struggled with self-doubts similar to many his audiences knew. Yet through faith, reason, and the support of others, he had found a way to stretch out his hands, to trust in himself and in his God. From Mississippi, Jasper Williams Jr., the son and nephew of Franklin’s close friends, reflected that C. L. “brought with him . . . [the idea] that he could be who he wanted to be, do what he wanted to do, have what he wanted to have.” Charlie Thompson, who came up from Mississippi in the 1950s, emphasized that C. L. touched especially those with a “lower reputation” of themselves because the sermons let them know “that he see[s] them as having self-worth, they was put here for a purpose.” Strengthened by his pastor’s powerful efforts “in building confidence,” Thompson quit his menial job, signed on as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, “and I went in there on fire. I had developed, just listening to him . . . good work ethics, good work habits.” Harry Kincaid offered similar testimony. C. L.’s influence on his family, he deeply believed, resulted in all six children attending college and succeeding in the world. His friend and pastor preached “about religion and the total man. . . . Not just in church service, but during the week when you are out there, as the common street term is, ‘hustling,’ trying to make ends meet.” Franklin’s ability to address both his faith and the world about him touched Kincaid profoundly: “That’s what I meant by total religion, religion covering the total man.” That, too, is what C. L. Franklin meant.28
C. L. had never given up on a radio program, and even before the euphoria at taking possession of the new church building ebbed, he got it. Within weeks he initiated broadcasts of the 10:00 P.M. Sunday evening service over a Dearborn radio station. The situation was not ideal. Although physically adjacent to Detroit’s western boundary, the station’s weak signal could not reach all the neighborhoods east of Woodward. While the agent with whom C. L. worked promised to move him to a Detroit station at the first opportunity, the continued spotty reception created a growing financial deficit for the program. There were no sponsors to cover production costs, and the poor signal limited the pool of potential new church attendees and their contributions. Quickly, a $900 debt accumulated. Worried church officers approached their minister, concerned that the debt could only grow and threaten New Bethel’s financial stability, and they requested that their pastor terminate the broadcast. Their concern was real, but C. L. saw in it a potential opportunity. Irked at the “constant grumbling and complaining” he heard throughout the congregation and possessed of a supreme confidence in his abilities, C. L. countered the delegation’s request with an offer of his own. “You just turn Sunday night over to me,” he paraphrased his words twenty-five years later. “I will liquidate the indebtedness, and the church will be relieved of any responsibility for this deficit, or any responsibility involving the broadcast.” As Deacon Willie Todd, a soloist in the Radio Choir in 1951, remembered: “So they granted him, told him he could have the broadcast and all the proceeds.”29
Whether he knew what was to come next or not, C. L.’s assumption of all responsibility came at a most opportune time. A week later, the agent moved the program to Detroit’s WJLB, at the time the major transmitter of black music in the city. Since 1946, it offered programs of jazz, gospel, blues, and rhythm and blues; since 1950, the station’s enormously popular disc jockey, Leroy (Rocking with Leroy) White, dominated the black music market. Immediately, Franklin was a hit. “I started preaching, and the people seemed as it were to come up out of the ground,” he remembered. Many who listened were stunned. The radio service—broadcast live from New Bethel, complete with a narrator, announcements of interest, and a 150-voice choir including, for a time, the talented gospel singer and future popular performer Wynona Carr—“was an outright production,” said Samuel Billy Kyles, the then-teenage son of C. L.’s Mississippi friend, appreciated as much for its entertainment as its spiritual value. Franklin’s sermon, usually between twenty-six and twenty-eight minutes long, was the centerpiece, but solos by Little Sammy Bryant, Lucy Branch, Willie Todd, and the preacher himself, backed by the extremely talented choir, were greatly anticipated. This presentation captivated Detroit, Benjamin Hooks explained: “Nobody . . . commanded the number of people he commanded on his Sunday night broadcast.” The impact on church attendance was electric. Some, like Dr. Claud Young, cousin to Coleman and the future personal physician to C. L., tuned his car
radio one night while driving about Detroit, encountered Franklin in mid-sermon, and found his way to New Bethel the following Sunday evening. Others who first heard C. L. in their cars immediately drove to New Bethel, radio pulsating with Franklin’s rhythms, to catch the conclusion in person. Yet others, listening at home, resolved to attend in person another Sunday. C. L.’s sermons sometimes went beyond the program’s allotted time because, Kyles thought, “he wanted to go off the air while he was still preaching.” That may have reflected C. L.’s sense of style—a disdain for leaving the audience with silence—but, whatever its design, it was very effective. “And that would make somebody say,” Kyles remarked wryly, “‘I gotta go over there next Sunday or something.’”30
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