Singing in a Strange Land by Nick Salvatore

Author:Nick Salvatore [SALVATORE, NICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316030779
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Despite the pressure of his schedule, Franklin tried again in 1959 to build a citywide organization that would offer him a secular platform comparable to his pulpit. The Metropolitan Civic League for Legal Action began with another critique of established black organizations whose efforts to curtail police brutality and job discrimination, Franklin thought, were never aggressive enough. Since Mayor Louis Miriani won election two years earlier, relations between the police and black Detroit, never very good, had deteriorated further. Franklin’s league appealed to those who so often were on the receiving end of the police club or the indiscriminate police raid: the league announced it would provide legal and medical assistance for victims and hold a series of public meetings to protest the mayor’s public support of current police practice. C. L. was the founding president, but as before, neither his travel schedule nor his personality particularly recommended him for organizational leadership. Instead, two other Detroit Baptist clergy, William J. Bishop and J. H. Bruce, actually ran the group. The league’s achievements remain obscure, as there is no evidence it represented any victim of police actions. Although it claimed seven hundred members in 1961, the league soon disbanded in an acrimonious public dispute when it supported the reelection of the Wayne County prosecutor, Samuel H. Olsen, who was widely perceived as hostile to black defendants. By that time, Franklin was no longer associated with it.22

The league was “a flower that want[ed] to bloom,” Arthur Johnson thought, but even had C. L. devoted his considerable energy to the organization, it is doubtful that a different outcome would have emerged. The league offered no compelling alternative politics to distinguish itself, and C. L.’s power, always more prophetic than programmatic, was less suited to developing sustained political programs. He was also away even more than usual in the years following the league’s founding. Urban renewal claimed his church in 1960, as it did Hastings Street itself, replacing the vibrant cultural crossroads with the Chrysler Freeway. Dispossessed a second time in a decade, the congregation wandered again and often had to make do without their famous pastor’s presence. Franklin accepted a call to lead a large new church in Los Angeles, attracted by the weather and the opportunities in the entertainment industry, and he simply stayed in Los Angeles as long as he desired at any one time, without ever resigning his position at New Bethel. So dominant was his control of New Bethel’s governing bodies, and so anxious were members to retain their pastor at whatever cost, that C. L. “just [came] back to New Bethel whenever he got ready,” his friend, Jasper Williams, observed. With a foot in two cities, it would be nearly impossible for Franklin to create a forceful political presence in either.23

Of course, in contrast to Martin Luther King Jr., who by now had implemented an alternative politics constructed around nonviolent civil disobedience—or to less famous ministers, such as Samuel Kyles in Memphis, Kelly Miller Smith in Nashville, or

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