St. Petersburg Times (Florida), February 20, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Times Publishing Company
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

February 20, 2005 Sunday

SECTION: PERSPECTIVE; Pg. 5P

HEADLINE: God and man in Motown

SERIES: BOOKS

BYLINE: JIM HASKINS

BODY:
SINGING IN A STRANGE LAND: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America
By Nick Salvatore
Little, Brown, $27.95, 419 pp

Reviewed by JIM HASKINS
Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America delivers on the promise of its title. Nick Salvatore smoothly interweaves the biography of the Rev. C.L. Franklin with the stories of the Great Migration, the coming-of-age of the black church as a significant force in the struggle for equality and the sea change in American society wrought by the largely preacher-led direct-action civil rights movement. Crucial subthemes are the evolution of gospel music and its effects on the traditional black church and the importance of new technologies in the development of modern religious practice.
Clarence LaVaughn Franklin was born in Sunflower, Miss., in 1915, and grew up under the segregation, violence and intimidation of that era in that region that denied him an education but somehow failed to extinguish his fierce drive to be someone. The church seemed to offer promise, and at a young age he was preaching to the plow mule as he worked the family farm.
Sixteen when he received the call to preach, Franklin was a circuit preacher by age 18. He attended Greenville Industrial College, which, though unaccredited, provided the academic structure denied him as a youth and set him on a lifelong path of self-education. His first full-time pastorship, in 1939, was at New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis, then the blackest major city in the United States.
In terms of preaching style, Franklin was a "whooper," a performer of the word, not just a reader or speaker of it. But Franklin invested his performance with ideas. Enrolling at LeMoyne College in Memphis, he continued his education and was exposed to new interpretations of the Bible. He had been taught to believe in the literal truth of biblical writings; in Memphis, he began to understand them as metaphorical. His preaching style, according to Salvatore, possessed a "blues sensibility." He played his voice like a guitar. He attracted more members to his own church and invitations to guest-preach at other churches.
In the summer of 1942, Franklin began a weekly radio broadcast. He was not the first black preacher to broadcast his sermons, but he may have been the first to broadcast directly from his church.
For all his growing reputation, Franklin in Memphis could never be more than "boy," and when the opportunity to move to Buffalo came in 1944, he happily accepted the pastorship of that city's Friendship Baptist Church. He soon became the first black resident of Buffalo to have a radio program. By 1946, he had moved on to Detroit, taking over the pastorship of New Bethel Baptist Church, and there he remained, but for the period later in his career when he divided his time between churches in Detroit and Los Angeles.
In Detroit, home of Motown, C.L. Franklin practically presided over the change in religious culture that brought gospel into the sanctuary (the religious experience could be entertaining as well as enlightening, he argued) and that popularized the sermon well beyond the sanctuary (he had a regular Sunday evening program on WLAC and was a pioneer in recording his sermons for sale by record companies).
C.L. Franklin was a star. He traveled widely, often on the same circuits as blues and gospel entertainers, and often shared similar appetites for booze, dope and women as the entertainers with whom he so often came into contact. Married twice, he was a known womanizer for most of his adult life, which caused some consternation among his parishioners but never seriously jeopardized his livelihood the way his creative bookkeeping did when the IRS got wind of it.
Franklin's fully developed theology brought forth a God who intervened in the affairs of men. An activist preacher and a militant integrationist, he was a friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and of Albert B. Cleage, the Detroit Congregationalist minister who presided over the marriage between the black church and black nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. He even allowed the Republic of New Africa, a black nationalist organization formed in Detroit after the 1967 riots, to rent his church for a meeting that resulted in a shootout with police, and refused to apologize for it.
By the mid 1970s, when he was in his 60s, C.L. Franklin lost his place in the pantheon of black leadership. His style was regarded as old-fashioned by the more sophisticated urban black theology movement. Membership in New Bethel was dwindling and invitations to guest-preach were declining when Franklin shot at and was in turn shot by would-be robbers in his home and went into a coma from which he never regained consciousness.
The Rev. Franklin's famous daughter, Aretha, is not a significant presence in this story, and her relative absence is hardly noticeable. It is her father's turn to have his story told, and prize-winning historian Nick Salvatore does so admirably.
Jim Haskins is professor of English at the University of Florida. Among his latest books is Keeping the Faith: African American Sermons of Liberation (Welcome Rain Publishers).