Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,687

This is the grave of C.L. Franklin.

Born in 1915 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, Clarence LaVaughn Walker was the son of sharecroppers. His father joined the military in World War I and walked out on the family shortly after he returned. In fact, his son would later say his only memory of his father was teaching him out to salute when he got back. His mother remarried a man named Henry Franklin, who adopted the boy and gave him his last name. Franklin became a preacher and he was very good at it. Extremely charismatic and someone who used a lot of music in his preaching, he soon became a teenage phenom at it. He was itinerant for awhile, which was a way for a young man to make a name for himself. He eventually got a permanent position at a church in Memphis.

Franklin stayed in Memphis until 1944 and then decided to follow so many of his parishioners and others he knew to northern cities. He was in Buffalo for a couple of years before taking over the pastorate at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Here, Franklin became an all-time legend of preaching. The main reason for his fame was his incredible voice. In both speaking and singing, Franklin was top notch. This wasn’t just preaching. This was entertainment. It was something you listened to for fun and if you were a Christian, as most people were, then even better. It was like going to church, even at home. And you could listen at home because Franklin began cutting albums of his best work. In fact, some of those recordings are now part of the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress, which is really quite an impressive fact.

Given his own propensity for self-promotion, it’s hardly surprising that he would encourage his talented family to use their musical powers as well. As I assume readers already know, Rev. C.L. Franklin had a young daughter named Aretha who had, uh, quite the voice. He was strongly encouraging of her career. Other daughters had good careers, including Erma and Carolyn, but Aretha became the Queen of Soul.

Now, to say the least, Franklin was a pretty problematic figure personally. He really loved the high life. He liked money, nice suits, nice cars, and women. He especially liked women and as a powerful, charismatic minister, he had more than his share of them. In fact, the mother of most of his children walked out on him, both because of his violent temper (which I assume meant abuse) and his constant womanizing. The IRS came calling from time to time as well, wondering about these over the top gifts and expenses he had. He was indicted for tax evasion in 1966 and he pleaded no contest the next year, receiving pretty light punishment and of course a large fine. All of this of course had a large effect on Aretha and the other kids, who had, to say the least, a deeply complex relationship with their father. As Aretha said about her father’s womanizing:

“I never discussed it with him, and he never discussed that sort of thing with his children. But as children, we could certainly see that women were kind of aggressively taking off behind him. He was single at the time, and sometimes you might see it with ladies sitting on the front row, a little high, skirts a little high, a little short, you know, when women are interested.”

Franklin was not a great leader in the civil rights era, but he was certainly involved in local struggles in Detroit. He worked to break down discrimination in the United Auto Workers, with which his church shared many members. He had an ally in this in UAW head Walter Reuther, but the rank and file whites were deeply resistant to this. He also helped King lead a giant march against discrimination in Detroit in 1963, one of the first major actions in the North that demonstrated that racism was not just a southern problem. It’s not so surprising then that George Wallace would do so well among Michigan whites in 1968. But mostly he wasn’t a political leader. Some of this is that Franklin wasn’t really all that great at politics. He did try to lead some political movements in Detroit, but they didn’t always go well. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But he was still a big enough deal to be at Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in 1965 and to have been critical to the rise of John Conyers as a political force in Detroit.

As the 1960s went on, Franklin embraced the Black Pride movement, if not exactly Black Power, with a lot of emphasis on economic self-determination and African heritage. In 1968, the cops shot up his church, which was very near where the 1967 riots started in Detroit, when they feared a bunch of armed men. There was only one guy with a gun and he did fire it at the cops when they attacked, but the cops went wild. In fact, a cop died in this incident, but Franklin took the offensive, accused the cops of racism and of massive overreaction that led to a furthering of racial tensions. Ralph Abernathy came to Detroit in solidarity with him.

In 1972, Sidney Pollack decided to film the creation of Amazing Grace, Aretha’s live album from her daddy’s church. His crew really botched the footage, so it wasn’t released until 2018, after painstaking work was done on the sound and after her death since she opposed its release for some reason. In any case, the takeaway about C.L. Franklin I got from it is that it was really his show. Sure, Aretha was the big star, but he was good and damn sure going to let everyone that no one was going to bigfoot him in his own church. Aretha seemed to patiently take it, undoubtedly expecting it.

In 1979, Franklin was at home. Some robbers broke him and trying to rob the place, shot him at point blank. Sad stuff. It did not immediately kill him. In fact, he lived another five years, if you can call that living. He never left the coma. He finally and mercifully died in 1984. He was 69 years old.

The historian Nick Salvatore, best known for his biography of Eugene Debs, has a full biography of Franklin. I haven’t read much of it, but he makes the claim that Franklin is a great way to understand the transformation of the United States during his life and I believe the claim, as well as Salvatore’s ability to pull it off.

C.L. Franklin is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit, Michigan.

Incidentally, I tried to figure out who Eulalia Wilson is, but without success. Usually when people are interred next to each other like this, they are related, but I don’t think that’s the case here.

If you would like this series to visit other legendary Black ministers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Prathia Hall is in Philadelphia and Jarena Lee is in Lawnside, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.