Between his duties at New Bethel, his incessant touring, and his responsibilities in the Baptist Convention, C. L.’s schedule grew immensely complicated. In part because of this, C. L. flew to his engagements while his “group,” leaving a day or two earlier, drove his car, usually a new Lincoln or a Cadillac Eldorado. This arrangement conserved the harried pastor’s time, but it also limited his exposure to a part of America that fiercely defended segregation. The black-only boarding houses and hotels they regularly stayed in were particularly comforting, but C. L. narrowed the time spent traveling the roads of the South to a minimum. His anger at the indignities already suffered in his life remained palpable, and although he diverted his fury at racist insults away from open confrontations with whites, he occasionally did so in ways potentially dangerous. Reverend Kyles recalled C. L. telling him of a trip through one southern city when his car broke down. A mechanic was not immediately available or simply would not work on the car, and a crowd of whites encircled this fashionably dressed, handsome black man, calling him “boy,” laughing, seeking to provoke. Franklin contained himself, as he had that day a decade earlier when confronted with the commonplace taunts of a Memphis policeman. Instead of responding, he walked through the mocking crowd to an auto dealership “and bought a brand new car and paid cash for it on the spot. . . . Just pulled his money out, bought a car on the spot.” For a well-attired black man, with an entourage in a late-model, expensive car (no matter its mechanical difficulties) and a money clip bursting with large bills, to thwart so publicly the pretensions to superiority of that white crowd, in a manner reminiscent of a Jack Johnson folktale, was both daring and dangerous. Black males during the 1950s had been lynched and murdered for far less.31
Despite his efforts to limit his absences, C. L. left New Bethel in the hands of assistant ministers on more Sundays than many in the congregation desired. He tried to get back for Sunday services, flying in on Saturday, preaching Sunday morning with perhaps a guest preacher for the evening radio service, if he had to leave for his next engagement that afternoon. Some in the congregation grew restive with this, and attendance did drop in his absence. Margaret Branch, whose mother, Lucy Branch Layten, often traveled with the Franklin group in the 1950s, heard parishioners complain to the pastor about his frequent absences. His response, as blunt as his earlier confrontation with his deacons over his Detroit radio show, was brief. “But he’d turn around and tell them this, simply this,” Branch remembered. “‘Ya’ll don’t pay me enough money to sit here every Sunday. I have to go elsewhere and make money.’” This flippant dismissal of his pastoral duties reflected the appeal of a celebrity culture that increasingly drew C. L. closer. And make money he did. In his early years on tour, C. L. might command a guarantee as high as $700 for an appearance, though the figure more often was closer to $500. But as his fame grew and the crowds increased, he wondered whether promoters might not be taking advantage of him. In Houston in 1955, for example, Gertrude Ward, Clara’s mother and a gospel promoter known for her sharp financial dealings, promised C. L. $500 to preach at the city auditorium. When he got to Houston, a local preacher and disk jockey commented that ticket sales had been enormous “because we’ve been really burning your records up down here.” He joked with C. L. that his fee must be “a bundle.” The next morning at the hotel, the maids gathered at his door to meet him and confirmed that before he joined the program the Ward Singers had always sung at churches with far less capacity. Franklin confronted Gertrude Ward backstage, demanded $1,500, and when she resisted, pulled out his plane ticket and told her he would return home immediately. He got his fee that day, and he understood more clearly from then on just how much of a celebrity he was among African Americans. Shortly after this experience, he commanded $4,000 for each appearance, an enormous sum at the time for one gospel performer. (Elvis Presley received $7,500 for one television appearance in 1956.) But promoters were only too happy to pay C. L.32
In 1956, two technological developments catapulted C. L. into an unrivaled position among Afro-Baptist and, indeed, all black preachers, regardless of denomination. Joe Von Battle initiated the first event that spring when he approached his friend Leonard Chess with a business proposal. Chess and his brother, Phil, who were white and ran Chicago’s independent rhythm-and-blues record label, Chess Records, had signed such blues artists as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Etta James, and John Lee Hooker. Leonard Chess had long desired to expand into the potentially highly profitable, black religious market. Von Battle, who owned the recording rights to the sermons of the nation’s premier black preacher, anticipated a financial windfall by leasing those rights to Chess. C. L., for his part, welcomed the greater recognition the Chess label allowed, as he did the 6-8 percent return anticipated on each album. Using JVB’s master tapes, Chess pressed new recordings for nationwide distribution, and the company’s distribution network brought C. L.’s voice to hundreds of record stores across the nation Von Battle could never reach. This alone multiplied the potential audience for the touring gospel programs. Chess also dramatically improved the technical quality of the recordings. C. L.’s first sermons on JVB had appeared on 78-rpm records, with a cumbersome technology that required three or four records to present a half-hour sermon. Chess issued the new sermons on a forty-minute LP with much improved technical sound. Beyond the enhanced audience, Franklin’s association with Chess revealed a preacher standing alone atop the mountain, without any serious ministerial competition for national, popular prominence. Most preachers who recorded sermons between 1945 and 1970—far fewer than before the war—usually released but a handful, many only one or two. C. L. was the preeminent exception. He continued to record new sermons into the 1970s, while Chess reissued additional original JVB recordings in a more technologically advanced format. Franklin’s success in this medium was without parallel, at that time or in the history of preachers, black or white.33
One consequence of the arrangement with Chess records was that C. L.’s radio presence also took a dramatic turn. In 1956, a creative Nashville disc jockey paired with an enterprising record-store owner and sponsor in Gallatin, Tennessee, just outside the city, created an even wider audience when they began airing a Franklin sermon every Sunday evening at ten o’clock. While most radio stations not affiliated with a national network had a broadcast radius of less than fifty miles, Nashville’s WLAC, a 50,000-watt, clear-signal station, had a range closer to 1,000 miles. And after nine in the evening, when most other stations went off the air, WLAC’s reach stretched nationwide and then some. John Lewis heard it in Troy, Alabama; the aspiring singer James Brown heard it in Augusta, Georgia; the poet Al Young caught it on the Mississippi Gulf; and Ruth Brown, already a star on the rhythm-and-blues circuit on her way to international acclaim, listened to it “all the way from California to Virginia.” Some even claimed that the signal reached Korea, Iceland, and Australia when the atmospherics were just right. What made WLAC special was what the station programmed with the power it possessed. Three white deejays—Bill “Hoss” Allen, Gene Nobles, and John “John R.” Richbourg—who programmed rhythm and blues and gospel for African American audiences, were wildly successful with blacks and young whites during the 1940s and 1950s. B. B. King sat, “enthralled,” listening to blues over the station in the late 1940s, when he was on the cusp of beginning his own career; Al Young tagged Gene Nobles an “Afro-Caucasian,” for the “vein of patter,” the verbal improvisation, that flooded the airwaves on his program. Bernie Besman, John Lee Hooker’s first producer, credited Nobles with turning Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” into an overnight national hit. Nobles had turned to programming for black audiences originally at the request of a group of African American college students in Nashville and proved so successful that his fellow disc jockeys soon followed his lead. Nobles had needed a financial backer, however, for the station managers remained dubious. He had asked a friend, Randy Wood, who owned a record shop and the small independent label Dot R
ecords, to underwrite these shows at a cost of $6 per night. It was, perhaps, the savviest investment Wood ever made.34
The purpose of the show was to sell records, and Randy’s Record Mart developed into one of music radio’s most successful mail-order businesses, a model of aggressive entrepreneurship. Randy’s sold a large volume of blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues recordings, in addition to C. L.’s sermons. The recording companies and, to a lesser extent, the artists received their share from the sales. Perhaps even more important for Franklin and for such recording artists as T-Bone Walker, Bobby Blue Bland, and the young Etta James, the exposure drew listeners nationwide to their live performances. WLAC’s programming also influenced popular musical culture, when black American music, especially rhythm and blues, increasingly appealed to white audiences in the form of rock and roll. “Can’t tell you how many white people have told me,” B. B. King stated, “they got hip to black music ’cause of Randy’s.” That dynamic, as much sociological as musical, caught even the Chess family by surprise. On a 1953 trip to Gallatin, Marshall Chess, Leonard’s eleven-year-old son, and his father both exclaimed in surprise as they watched white teens buying rhythm-and-blues records at Randy’s. It was a glimpse of a potential new audience for the records they then marketed almost exclusively to black audiences.35
Soon, Sunday evening at ten o’clock on WLAC was a profound religious moment, anticipated during the week by a vast radio audience. The devoutly faithful, such as John Lewis and his family, filled church pews Sunday mornings and afternoons, “and then you come home on Sunday night and it’s radio worship” on WLAC, with gospel hymns and C. L.’s powerful preaching. Others less devout also found welcome inspiration and uplift. These weekly, recorded sermons led preachers to think of C. L. as a friend, a confidant, to talk of “Frank” in a fashion that joined them to him in their common, sacred task. John Lewis and Jasper Williams were only two of an unknown number of teenage boys, intent on a ministerial career, who huddled around the radio Sunday evening to hear the most accomplished preacher in the African American tradition. In his room at his parents’ house in Memphis, Williams would surreptitiously get “under the bed” with his radio when C. L. came on, “because I didn’t want to offend my father.” Williams’s father and C. L.’s friend, Jasper Williams, Sr., did not whoop, preaching instead from a manuscript. But preachers young and old studied Franklin’s sermons, imitating his pacing, his growls, and his cadence so obviously that the standing joke among ministers and laity alike was that C. L. had brought more preachers to perdition than Satan himself, in despair at their inability to emulate the New Bethel master. C. L. himself never foresaw such a response: “I had thought of [the initial JVB records] in terms of recording on the spot, recording live at the church, right out of a regular service, and the record sales more or less for people to hear them. I didn’t know that they would respond the way they did.” This was only twelve years since Franklin had ascended the pulpit at Friendship Baptist, where he first used a microphone regularly. His voice and its message, amplified by modern technology, now reached from sea to sea.36
Himself a product of this transformation from a southern, rural world, Franklin’s amplified voice and the congregation’s responses continued to encourage others to find theirs. As he did from his New Bethel pulpit, Franklin projected on national radio a model of black religious commitment that engaged the secular world, his faith resonating deeply within the collective, cultural experience of African American people. With no exaggeration Reverend Jesse Jackson once asked: “Did not our ears perk up for years before we had a television or an elected official in America, if we could just hear WLAC, Nashville, Tennessee, Randy’s, on a Sunday night? Sunday night, New Bethel, Hastings Street, was the common frame of reference for the black church prototype.”37
C. L.’s effort to insert himself into the political life of black Detroit while touring incessantly—a near-impossible task in itself—was strained further by a growing tension within the National Baptist Convention. Struggle for control of the organization turned ugly in 1956-57, and the growing prominence of C. L.’s friend Martin Luther King Jr. became the flashpoint of a more complex battle that demanded Franklin’s attention.
Formed in 1894 by a merger of three black Baptist organizations, the National Baptist Convention, Incorporated, USA, as it was formally known, claimed a membership of nearly 3 million members in 1916. Forty years later, that figure surpassed 4.5 million. Whatever the precise accuracy of the reported numbers, two points were clear to all observers. The National Baptist Convention represented a significant majority of all black Americans who reported religious membership, and it was the largest mass organization, sacred or secular, black Americans possessed. The presidency of the convention was an office highly sought and fiercely defended, for in a thoroughly segregated America, its leader was among the most influential public men in the black world. Elias Camp Morris, born to slave parents in Georgia in 1855, held the office between 1894 and his death in 1921. His successor, Lacy Kirk Williams, held power from 1922 until 1940, when an accident took his life. D. V. Jemison followed in 1941. It was widely understood that all three of these men would serve for life and resign only for health reasons. Open challenges such as the one Chicago’s J. C. Austin organized against Williams in 1930 were rare. Centralization of power in the hands of the president limited the possibility of a serious challenge, and the promise of patronage kept most national and state officials well within the incumbent’s realm.38
A momentary breakdown of this autocratic system made the convention’s 1953 election unusual. Postwar expectations had created restlessness in this institution as in other areas of African American life, and more ministers bristled at the prospect of continued one-man rule than ever before. At the 1952 convention, a coalition of primarily younger ministers spearheaded a successful reform of the constitution to limit the president’s tenure to no more than four consecutive one-year terms and mandated the selection of an executive secretary to share some of the president’s duties. These changes would open the way, as Reverends Marshall L. Shephard and Gardner C. Taylor enthusiastically proclaimed in their reform journal, Baptist Layman, “for bringing to the front young men of merit.” As D. V. Jemison announced his health-related retirement effective with the conclusion of the 1953 meeting, the presidential election that year in Miami proved the most fiercely contested in decades. Five candidates presented themselves, all professing allegiance to the recent reforms, and Joseph H. Jackson, pastor of Chicago’s Mt. Olivet Baptist, won decisively.39
Born in Mississippi in 1900, Jackson received his license to preach at age fourteen, attended Jackson College (now Jackson State University) while he rode a rural Mississippi circuit of four churches, and in 1927 accepted a call from Bethel Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1932, he received his bachelor of divinity degree from Colgate Rochester Divinity School in upstate New York. Like so many other ministers, this smart, intense, and ambitious man regarded the convention as the organizational expression of his faith and as the vehicle for his advancement. As he became more and more involved in convention politics, he simultaneously accepted calls from ever more prestigious churches: Philadelphia’s Monumental Baptist Church in 1934 and, seven years later, Mt. Olivet Baptist in Chicago. Jackson had never been a civil rights activist. During the 1930s, as William Holmes Borders and Martin Luther King Sr. led their congregations in demonstrations for racial equality in Atlanta, Jackson exhibited the caution that marked many Afro-Baptist ministers at that time. In an interview in 1932, while still a student in Rochester, Jackson stated proudly that in the area of race progress, whatever “we have achieved has been done under the protection of the Stars and Stripes.” Jackson took a critical approach to the culture of his people. “As a group,” he insisted, “we must develop a higher standard of culture.” Literacy was necessary but by no means sufficient, he explained. “We must know how to appreciate the finer things of life such as those in which they [i.e., white pe
ople] have attained distinction.” Two decades later, Jackson merged his concerns with black patriotism and cultural progress with a general commitment to work for equality. The new tone owed more to timing than to transformed conviction.40
By 1956, the emerging civil rights movement had captured the imagination of many. As a national leader, Jackson had to reflect a sensitivity to these trends—he sent a contribution to King to aid the Montgomery boycott—even if he sought to direct them toward a more cautious goal. What propelled Jackson’s particular urgency, however, was the manner in which a boycott of the segregated public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, elevated a new contender for national black leadership. Martin Luther King Jr. was only twenty-seven in 1956, but his distinctive public voice, grounded in a familiar biblical expression, touched large crowds at nightly mass meetings and soon won him national recognition. Jackson did not fear an immediate challenge from the young minister. King Sr. was a Jackson supporter, for one, and Jackson considered the son too young, too inexperienced in the convention’s byzantine politics, to mount a successful challenge. The rise to prominence of the younger King was a threat nonetheless, for it challenged Jackson’s position as the preeminent black spokesman. To complicate matters further, King’s emergence in the national spotlight in spring 1956 came only a year before Jackson’s tenure as president was to end. Jackson had no intention of ceding power, and the preelection maneuvering already generated bitter debate over whether the 1952 reforms were valid. His critics saw an attempt to reinstate the pattern of lifetime tenure. In the maneuvering at the 1956 Denver convention, Martin Luther King Sr., William H. Brewster of Memphis, and C. L. Franklin all took the floor to argue against tenure limitations on behalf of President Jackson.41
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