The Boston Globe, February 20, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe

February 20, 2005, Sunday THIRD EDITION



SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. D7


HEADLINE: BLENDING THE SACRED AND SECULAR
AFRICAN-AMERICAN PREACHER SANG OUT FOR FAITH, CIVIL RIGHTS

BYLINE: By James A. Miller

BODY:
Best known outside African-American religious circles as the father of the "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin, the Rev. Clarence LaVaughn "C. L." Franklin was a compelling figure in his own right. At his funeral in August 1984, five years after a shooting during an abortive robbery attempt at his home left him comatose, Franklin was remembered by more than 10,000 people at Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church; the Rev. Jesse Jackson declared him a "prophet." With the cooperation and support of Franklin's eldest daughter, Erma, before she died, Nick Salvatore an award-winning historian and Cornell University professor has recaptured the life of this remarkable man in "Singing in a Strange Land."
Born into a sharecropping family in Sunflower, Miss., in 1915, Franklin was the descendant of slaves whose lives had been shaped by the harsh realities of the plantation economy and the intricate racial etiquette and ever-present violence of Jim Crow. His early life mirrored that of another famous Mississippian, writer Richard Wright, although the trajectory of Franklin's life propelled him in a significantly different direction from the one that ultimately drove Wright out of the United States. Poor, lacking much formal education, and faced with the limited prospects of black youth in the Mississippi Delta, Franklin nevertheless discovered a way to transcend these barriers.

Baptized at the age of 14, he declared that he was called to preach two years later, in the early years of the Depression thus launching a journey that would take him from the Delta to Memphis; Buffalo; the New Bethel Baptist Church, where he served as pastor for 38 years; and to the national arena during the peak years of the modern civil rights movement. In a broad sense his life mirrored that of literally millions of Southern black migrants whose movement from the rural South to the urban North radically transformed the social structure and outlook of the 20th-century black community.
"To explore Franklin's life," Salvatore argues, "is also to examine some of the most important changes in twentieth-century America," and this richly textured biography does a fine job of locating Franklin squarely at the center of these dramatic changes in African-American life.
A product of the rich blues culture of the Delta, a "thick gumbo of musical and spoken words that conveyed both an ethical dimension and, often, a social commentary as well," Franklin drew freely upon these sources as he charted his path to the particular tradition of African-American preaching that defined his ministry. "From the very beginning," Salvatore notes, "he sensed the black sermon's intimate roots in an oral, black folk tradition that, together with blues, tales, and church music, carried the moral and ethical beliefs of a people across generations." Indeed, the hallmark of Franklin's preaching was a deft straddling of rural and urban styles, a skillful synthesis of the sacred and the secular: "Franklin's preaching . . . possessed an undeniable blues sensibility. He 'played' his voice, not a guitar, and he prowled the sanctuary as he preached rather than the stage. But for C.L., as for many other ministers nurtured in southern black culture, both expressions addressed the spiritual and physical pain that daily informed life in the segregated world."
This sensibility and preaching style were linked to a shrewd understanding of how new technologies could extend the reach of his voice and ministry. Beginning with his first radio broadcast from Memphis's New Salem Baptist Church in 1942, Franklin dramatically extended his reach to a national audience when he signed a contract with Chess Records in 1956 to distribute his sermons producing 75 recordings over the course of his career.
By the mid-1950s Franklin had achieved celebrity status, in African-American religious circles and beyond. Salvatore places Franklin's Detroit home at the heart of the post-World War II musical culture, which, in its own way, would play an important role in shaping the outlook of the generation whose coming of age coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement:
"Whether they lived in the neighborhood or first connected with family members at school or church, an impressive group of future national artists who would transform popular American musical culture came through Franklin's home. Smokey Robinson . . . lived nearby, as did Diana Ross. . . . Other friends were Jackie Wilson . . . and most of the youngsters who . . . later would form the Miracles, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and the Spinners."
Salvatore traces the rise of Franklin in intimate detail, not shying away from some of the less saintly dimensions of his life and public career and resisting the impulse to indulge in pop psychology or casual speculation.
Throughout "Singing in a Strange Land," Salvatore is at his best when he is carefully analyzing the "interplay of religious belief, racial identity and social activism in daily life." He deftly interweaves Franklin's life with the swirling undercurrents of the fast-breaking events of the era: the June 1963 civil rights march in Detroit, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an early version of his famous "I Have a Dream" speech; the ideological clashes with the black Christian nationalists and the Republic of New Africa; the Detroit riots of 1967; King's assassination and its bloody aftermath in Detroit and cities throughout the country; and the March 1969 shoot-out involving Detroit police and the Republic of New Africa at Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church.
Through all of these events Franklin never wavered from his belief in the "power of black political and cultural expression to create a fuller American democracy." This faith is aptly captured by the central metaphor of Salvatore's title: "At the center of that struggle he stressed the necessity to sing because of the pain; to nurture one's voice in a strange land was in fact to develop a vision of the possible that countered the debilitating limits others imposed." And so he did.


NOTES:
BOOK REVIEW
Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America
By Nick Salvatore
Little, Brown, 419 pp., illustrated, $27.95
James A. Miller is a professor of English and American studies and director of Africana studies at the George Washington University.