There was yet another tradition within the Afro-Baptist world, a tradition of forgiveness that emphasized the power of that same sacred ritual to offer “a balm in Gilead / that makes the wounded whole.” C. L. taught that, of course, from the pulpit, and he was not the first preacher in American religious history who found a pointed personal meaning in his public words. That quality of forgiveness, moreover, came in many ways. For Bea Buck, that her friend “was kind of a womanizer, anyhow,” was not surprising. Black Baptist ministers, she thought it widely understood, had a reputation for intimate relations with the female members of their congregations, as blues artists had long sarcastically attested. What she thought different for C. L. was his “being in the [national] spotlight.” Others were deeply troubled but found in his very manliness a cause to forgive. “Reverend Franklin was a man,” Robbie McCoy explained with wonderful juxtaposition. “But we surely, truly, did love him.” Willie Todd, the devout choir soloist, heard the rumors and at first thought that C. L. did “just what any man, a natural man, would do.” On reflection, he considered that such an explanation might not “cover the territory” for a minister, and he was very clear that as a leading deacon in New Bethel, he demanded a different moral standard for himself and his fellow deacons. Yet his very faith propelled him to extend a forgiving hand. “Every man is a man,” he mused. “And a man will do a man’s thing, you know. Now that’s something him and God would have to work out.” Others such as Deacon Wallace Malone and C. L.’s former associate pastor, E. L. Branch, also acknowledged his faults, his “personal struggles,” and his troubled “inner issues” but stressed a forgiveness of these human faults, especially in light of his unquestioned positive religious and social impact.71
Carolyn King, the daughter of an early New Bethel member, grew up in the church during the 1960s and served for a time as church secretary while in high school. Without any impropriety intended or implied by her words, she unabashedly admitted that she had idolized him. Some in the congregation, including at least one church trustee, had criticized her for being an uncritical “C. L. Franklin lover,” who dismissed in a gush of religious emotionalism what others considered were debilitating faults. But King understood her pastor and her faith at a deeper level. She, too, acknowledged that C. L. “wasn’t a God, he was a man,” and that there were “things that he did that I didn’t like.” But her deep respect for him, grounded in the power of his sermons and his counsel, created her own moral calculus. She might not tell Franklin what conduct of his she deplored, “but I had enough sense to know the difference between right and wrong.”72
As with many others, Carolyn King’s understanding came only with a struggle over several fundamental questions. Can imperfect people perform good deeds? Can a flawed minister lead others to salvation? C. L. certainly thought so, urging his parishioners to follow his words and not necessarily his actions. As he preached one Sunday in the 1950s, “every now and then” he had to pray over his own conduct. Nor was C. L. the only one so troubled. The extramarital affairs of another Afro-Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., are well known from illegal tapings of them made by the government. Less well known is the deep interest in pornography and promiscuous behavior exhibited throughout his adult life by Paul Tillich, possibly the most influential Protestant theologian and thinker in the twentieth century. This human frailty, even among those anointed to illuminate the path of faith, led Reverend Gardner C. Taylor, a preacher of great renown who knew C. L., to recognize in Franklin an “irreducible core of faith” that coexisted with his deep “secular attachments.” The “magnificent anomaly of preaching,” even the “audacity of preaching,” Taylor once wrote, he found “in the fact that the person who preaches is in need himself or herself of the message which the preacher believes he or she is ordained to utter.”73
This all too human Franklin, with rumors humming sotto voce just beneath the public acclaim, turned his attention back toward politics. It was a sign of the changing consciousness he had partly encouraged, however, that where his public letter following the Emmett Till memorial two years before had positioned him as a critic of established organizations, new voices had emerged that would include C. L. himself as part of the problem he had once criticized.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NEW VOICES
When C. L. had held his eleventh anniversary celebration at the Gotham Hotel in July 1957, T-Bone Walker was a major attraction, but another guest commanded the audience’s full attention. William T. Patrick, a successful lawyer and the child of an upper-middle-class black Detroit family, was a candidate for Detroit’s Common Council. In contrast with Reverend Charles Hill in earlier campaigns, Patrick enjoyed the full support of a more politically engaged black Detroit, the elite organizations as well as the less prominent groups such as New Bethel’s Political Action Guild. Franklin had already endorsed Patrick from the pulpit and had invited the candidate to give the keynote speech at his celebration. Government, Patrick had insisted, required “Christian leadership” in responsible positions to ensure an active moral vision in its deliberations. Patrick’s point was not to create a theocracy, with conversion as the litmus test for election, but rather to insist that the more universal principles of Christianity be applied consistently, particularly concerning civil and human rights. The audience of some two hundred enthusiastically applauded his words.1
Certainly, those in the audience understood Patrick’s meaning within the context of black Detroit’s continuing difficulties. Relations between black residents and the police remained tense, for example, and many African Americans considered the police aggressively hostile toward black residents in almost any interaction. Ethel Watkins’s experience the preceding winter was a recent case in point. The thirty-year-old black seamstress had purchased a home on Cherrylawn Street, in northwest Detroit, an area distinctive for the row after row of workingmen’s cottages that fulfilled many of their owners’ dreams. It was a neighborhood of white working people—good union men and women, church members, too—and the Cherrylawn residents fiercely resisted the prospect of black neighbors. When Watkins moved in that February, she faced howling mobs, vandalism, and threats of further violence for more than a month—all despite a near-constant police presence. The dominant union in Detroit, the United Auto Workers, and particularly its national president, Walter Reuther, had earned a national reputation as advocates of racial equality. The UAW’s support of civil rights nationally, however, did not necessarily mean much in Detroit. One survey of white union members a few years earlier found only a small distinction separating Detroit union members from the 80 percent of whites who opposed or were “neutral, ambiguous” to ending segregation in housing, schools, or jobs. “The slight difference that does appear,” the poll reported, “shows the union people less favorable than others toward accepting Negroes.”2
Although the prospect of Patrick’s victory in November was most welcome, the structure of Common Council—Patrick would be one of nine members—tempered expectations. If elected, Patrick could give voice to black grievances, but regarding the depressed economic condition of many, he would be almost powerless. The days of the hate strikes had passed, but the attitudes held by a majority of whites still presented serious obstacles to workplace equality. In auto plants, for example, the city’s largest industry, African Americans remained concentrated in the worst jobs, few held even minor positions in their local union, and none held national office. A 1960 government investigation found that black workers totaled 38 percent of the UAW Local 228 in Detroit but only 2 percent of its skilled workers. At the enormous Ford Local 600, which carried a heroic reputation in union circles for its militancy during the struggle to establish the union in the 1930s, blacks comprised more than 41 percent of the nearly thirty thousand members but only 3 percent of its skilled workforce. The exclusion at General Motors was even more thorough: of the more than eleven thousand skilled union workers throughout that giant corporation, only sixty-seven were black, as were barely 1 percent of
the more than one thousand apprentices in the system. At the hearings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Detroit in 1960, Horace Sheffield pointed out that African American apprentices in the skilled trades “are not even sufficient in number to replace Negro skilled workers already employed.”3
These patterns were not accidental. Since 1945, black workers had demanded the union support an antidiscrimination clause in its contract proposals. In an era when no federal law effectively prevented discriminatory treatment, such a clause was essential if equality were to be attained. Wary of the expected resistance from white members and committed to the position that hiring matters remained management’s prerogative, UAW officials refused. The result left these decisions in the hands of a decentralized managerial structure, spanning the social distance from shop-floor foremen to white-collar personnel directors, which proved highly susceptible to the wishes of the majority-white workforce. Asked just before the war to explain why black workers were so disproportionately concentrated in the most onerous and lowest-paying positions, one management official stated: “Yes, some jobs white folks will not do; so they have to take niggers in, particularly in duce work, spraying paint on car bodies. This soon kills a white man.” He then added of black workers: “It shortens their lives, it cuts them down but they’re just niggers.”4
Disenchanted with their union’s tepid approach, a group of dissident black union members challenged this inaction. Led by Robert “Buddy” Battle, Horace Sheffield, Marc Stepp, Nelson Jack Edwards, and others, they founded in 1957 a black caucus within the UAW, the Trade Union Leadership Council. TULC was not antiunion: despite the racism in the union, supporter Milton Hall explained, “You needs a union. You needs a backup.” Rather, these black working people demanded the union bring black workers into leadership positions and open training programs to allow more blacks into the skilled positions on the shop floor. The formation of TULC, with its more aggressive public demands, marked another turning point in black Detroit’s mobilization. The caucus introduced a more militant tone into the debate within the black community and with the politicians who ran the city. It was another sign that the era when one organization’s vision and resources dominated black protest in Detroit was fast coming to a close. Franklin, a strong union supporter and still a critic of the NAACP’s approach, publicly encouraged his trustee and TULC cofounder, Nelson Jack Edwards.5
Predictably, the creation of TULC produced an immediate backlash in the larger union. Carl Stellato, president of Ford Local 600, publicly attacked Sheffield as being antiwhite and, along with a majority of white union officers in locals and at international headquarters, demanded that Sheffield and other union staff members involved with TULC be fired. There was “significant opposition from white trade unionists” at all levels throughout the union, Douglas Fraser remembered, and Reuther’s initial support was lukewarm at best. Emil Mazey, the union’s national secretary-treasurer, publicly denounced the group and its NAACP allies for “its criticism of labor for actions which were obviously the sins of management.” (And this from someone who represented a progressive, at times militant, tendency within the union, one that supported civil rights in other contexts beyond the union hall.) Resistance by white unionists remained strong. Many of these men and women were the same people who, joining with family, neighbors, and friends, defended by force if necessary the whiteness of their parishes, schools, and residential communities.6
As summer edged toward fall that year, Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr. took possession of his new church on the city’s West Side, giving black Detroit yet another alternative to the voices of the community’s traditional leaders. Cleage came from a privileged northern background. The oldest of seven children, he was born in 1911 in Indianapolis, while his father was completing his medical training at Indiana University. The family moved to Kalamazoo and then Detroit when he was still a toddler. In Detroit, they lived on the West Side, in the Tireman area, the elite enclave of black businessmen and professionals where Berry Gordy’s family also had their home. The Cleage family prided itself on its nearly white complexion and worshiped at Horace White’s Plymouth Congregational Church, where church culture valued lighter skin as a social marker for entrée into elite circles. Educated at Wayne State and then at Oberlin’s School of Theology, Cleage became an ordained Congregational minister and, in 1946, accepted a position at the racially mixed St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield, Massachusetts. Five years later, he returned to Detroit as the new pastor with St. Mark’s United Presbyterian Community Church, at Twelfth Street and Atkinson on the city’s West Side. In accepting the position, Cleage agreed to abide by the discipline of the Presbyterian tradition.7
Two years later, however, resistance to Cleage’s emphasis on social problems led to his removal from the pulpit. Undaunted, Cleage returned to his original denominational affiliation, formed Central Congregational Church, and reaffirmed his mixture of faith and social activism. Although C. L. Franklin professed a similar vision, the two ministers had at best a passing relationship at this time. It was in 1957 that Cleage’s congregation moved into a large, well-appointed building at Linwood and Hogarth, on the West Side.8
Shortly after taking possession of the new building, Cleage organized a special service to pray for “the People of Little Rock,” Arkansas, a city occupied by federal troops that September to force compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision mandating school integration. He was by no means the only black pastor who so prayed, but the tone of his service touched a different chord than the one usually heard in public. The violence, “the obscene racial hatred” shown by white Little Rock toward the nine black high school students, we would like to call “unbelievable,” Cleage began. “But we are not surprised . . . because all of us, in one way or another, wherever we live, experience this same fear, hatred and contempt every day of our lives.” Those “hate filled [white] faces which line the streets of Little Rock” are very familiar to black Americans. “We’ve seen them in employment offices when we search for work in New York City,” on teachers’ faces in Detroit schools, and “everywhere” on politicians, policemen, and common pedestrians alike. “Little Rock,” he insisted, in a tone as hard as it was realistic, “is the face and heart of a nation unmasked.” Cleage expressed hope in the democratic potential of the white majority but warned that a “new Negro” was now emerging, conscious of rights, steeled against white intimidation, and willing to accept nothing “less than complete citizenship.” It was this “new Negro” that the Little Rock “mob in its insane frenzy” sensed and whose very presence fueled “in some measure a part of its frustrated anger.” Cleage’s blunt analysis, delivered with an unmistakably militant edge, appealed to many already weary of the slow tempo of change. His church’s membership grew quickly, attracting those already in motion politically, and provided Cleage with an increasingly viable base for political activities.9
William Patrick won election that November and assumed his seat on Common Council the following January. It was a decided victory for black Detroit, but by no stretch of the imagination did anyone think that New Bethel’s Guild, its pastor, or even TULC brokered Patrick’s election. Rather, Patrick’s candidacy joined together the city’s black electorate under the leadership of traditionally powerful organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, the Nacirema and Cotillion Clubs, and the United Auto Workers, the dominant liberal political power group in the city, to forge a winning alliance. Despite a black population approaching 30 percent of the city’s total, an African American candidate could only be elected in 1957 with progressive white support. The newer voices heard in union halls and church pulpits were then but modest pieces of the coalition. In the excitement over Patrick’s election, few paused over the news that Louis C. Miriani, the UAW-backed mayoralty candidate, had also won.10
Franklin was one of those alternative voices, but he had achieved little success in translating the power of his sermons into effective political action. In
part his pastoral duties, combined with incessant travel and continued concern with the tensions still swirling about the National Baptist Convention, demanded his time. New Bethel’s Political Action Guild had proved quite important for his congregants in their reach toward a more public voice but was not the vehicle to carry C. L. to citywide political prominence. Neither the guild’s institutional reach nor its titular leader’s interest in actual political organizing were sufficient to achieve such a goal. C. L. continued to relish the spotlight that followed his every move, an attraction that largely precluded the unspectacular, sustained effort essential to organizing. There was as well another demand on his time that he could no longer put off: he was the single father of a very complex family whom he reared largely in the glare thrown by that spotlight.
And his family was often on his mind. In a late 1950s sermon, “Hannah, the Ideal Mother,” concerned that contemporary parents were “detouring from the path of the traditional patterns of motherhood,” C. L. charged that “the twentieth-century mothers,” these “atomic age mothers . . . are not acting like mothers.” Divorce was prevalent, marriage taken too lightly, and “some people” would have done better “if they did not have children.” Echoing attitudes broadly held throughout American society across racial, economic, and cultural divides, Franklin preached that in the act of giving birth, women “are performing thereby a divine duty and responsibility,” one that comes with additional “responsibilities and obligations. Whether you like it or not, God has so endowed you and has enabled you to bring forth children into the world, and you become the steward, the God-appointed guardian over those children.” Reflecting a nineteenth-century code of female domesticity, C. L. emphasized the mother’s role in teaching the child language and, through words and example, “the first things that they know about God.” Lest anyone misunderstand, Franklin stated clearly that a woman’s role was indeed special, for mothers were “a little bit closer than father” to their children. He urged his congregants to reject the modern trend of limiting family size to one or two children and underscored his belief in the necessity of discipline. He then retold the story of his mother (who was in the congregation that Mother’s Day) punishing him for the poor speech he had delivered three decades earlier in Mississippi. Rachel, he inferred, was the contemporary embodiment of the biblical Hannah.11
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