Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), February 13, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The Deseret News Publishing Co.
Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City)

February 13, 2005 Sunday

HEADLINE: Less-known rights activist spotlighted

BYLINE: Dennis Lythgoe Deseret Morning News

BODY:
SINGING IN A STRANGE LAND: C.L. FRANKLIN, THE BLACK CHURCH, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA, by Nick Salvatore, Little, Brown, 419 pages, $27.95.

In an era when Martin Luther King Jr. usually gets the lion's share of publicity for civil-rights activism, it's refreshing to read about C.L. Franklin, "the preacher with the golden voice," a progressive pastor of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church from 1946-79.
Although he was living in a northern city, Franklin became one of the leading figures of the civil-rights movement He was a preacher and performer who was most famous in the 1950s and 1960s, when he traveled the country with his Sunday radio program.
He was well-known for his "blues-style" of preaching, and he could fill up a room with his charisma. (His daughter Aretha was destined to pass her father in fame as she became "the queen of soul.")
Franklin was born in the Mississippi Delta in 1915 and grew up deprived but inspired by the likes of B.B. King, Son House and Charley Patton. He went from sharecropping to "boy preacher" as he became well-known in small congregations around the South. He ended up in Memphis, and then in Detroit, utilizing his colorful, improvisational preaching style.
Nick Salvatore, a Cornell University American Studies professor, revives Franklin's musical and religious reputation and sets him firmly in the category of legend. The reliable vehicle for Franklin's preaching was Sunflower County, Miss., the birth place of the blues. In the book, Franklin is charismatic and very early established the power of influence over those around him.
Franklin's sermons were often repetitive and powerful, after the Martin Luther King model: "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."
In another sermon, Franklin's version of "Dry Bones," he said: "You see, a city may be one thing to one people, or a country may mean one thing to one people, and altogether another thing to another people. When the white Europeans came to this country, embarked upon these shores, America to them was a land of promise, was a mountaintop of possibilities, was a mountaintop of adventure. But to the Negro, when he embarked upon these shores, America to him was a valley: a valley of slave huts, a valley of slavery and oppression, a valley of sorrow; so that often we had to sing: 'One of these days, I'm going to eat at the feasting table/One of these days, the chariot of God will swing low.' "
Franklin had many imperfections, among them being a womanizer and a flashy dresser who seemed to enjoy financial success when it came. Salvatore tells a good story about a man whose fame faded as that of Martin Luther King, Jr. accelerated. E-mail: dennis@desnews.com