The Franklins moved to Detroit in 1946, three years after the race riots that tore the city apart. “Hate strikes”—whites refusing to work alongside blacks in the auto industry—led to mounting tensions that exploded into full-scale rioting over two days and left thirty-five dead. Aretha remembered next-door neighbors Richard Ross and his family discussing the disturbances in dramatic detail.
“My brother Vaughn used to talk about the discrimination he had encountered in Buffalo,” said Cecil, “but until Detroit we hadn’t experienced any real racial animus. Detroit turned out to be a hotbed of political, social, and racial unrest. The stories we heard about the riots centered on the violent anger whites were feeling for blacks who’d moved from the South looking for work—looking, in the view of many whites, for their work. When I went to college at Morehouse, I did a paper on the riots that helped me understand what, at age six, I couldn’t begin to grasp.
“Just before the riots, Packard had put a few black workers next to white men on the assembly line. Right after that, twenty-five thousand whites walked off the job. Remember, this was the middle of World War Two, when no patriotic American wanted to slow down production. Anyway, one of the protesters got on the PA system and screamed, ‘I’d rather have Hitler win the war than work next to a nigger!’
“There was also the housing mess. Aside from the Brewster Projects—that’s where Diana Ross grew up—public apartment buildings were white-only. Blacks were ripped off right and left, overcharged for filthy and unsafe living quarters. For a whole generation of blacks in cities like Chicago and Detroit, the Great Migration became the Great Nightmare.
“The spark that lit the fire happened on Belle Isle, a picnic spot in the middle of the Detroit River. The incident had sexual undertones. A white man said a black man made a pass at his girl. They began fighting and soon the fight spread. Rumors started racing. Blacks heard that a white man had thrown a black woman and her baby off Belle Isle Bridge. Whites and blacks went after each other for three days. Mobs attacked mobs. It ended only when President Roosevelt called in troops. By then thirty-five people were killed. Twenty-five of those were blacks. Of the twenty-five black deaths, seventeen died at the hands of the police. It was all-out racial warfare.
“As a college kid studying history, I asked Dad about how it felt back in the forties to move to a city where racial hatred ran so high.
“‘I saw it as a challenge,’ he told me. ‘The NAACP was falsely being charged with instigating the trouble. And in the black community, the white establishment was being charged with neglecting our needs. My job was to tend to the spiritual needs of the black community, but I also saw the need to raise everyone’s political consciousness. Back in Buffalo, I had invited A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to speak at church. Brother Randolph eloquently and unequivocally called for equal treatment of blacks in the workplace. He energized our congregants and me as well. I saw then that the life of a true Christian cannot be restricted to interpreting scripture. Moral justice and social justice cannot be separated.’”
Anna Gordy, sister of Berry Gordy and first wife of Marvin Gaye, knew C.L. well. When she and I spoke about him, she said, “Our relationship was far deeper than a mere friendship.” She remembered meeting him in the late forties when she was twenty-five and he was thirty-three. She also remembered his preaching “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” and relating it to the race riots of 1943.
“I felt he was the most dynamic man in the city,” said Anna. “His sheer brilliance attracted many people who were not regular churchgoers. The man was a poet and a healer. When I first heard him, we were still feeling the aftershocks of the riots. Everyone in Detroit was still on edge. Reverend Franklin helped take off the edge by explaining how God uses history for man’s good. If I understood him correctly, God was the eagle, and history was the nest. Reverend pointed out how disturbances can lead to progress. That’s the eagle stirring the nest. When the status quo is exploded, change is possible—change for the good. At a time when Detroit was filled with animosity and uncertainty, this minister reassured us that out of chaos can come a higher and more just order. Later, in the fifties and sixties, he would prove to be a great civil rights leader, but even as a young man we felt that Reverend was wise beyond his years.”
Cecil, who heard the “Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” sermon countless times, said he never tired of the message.
“That was Dad’s favorite metaphor,” he said. “When he invoked that eagle, he really soared. If you look at the language closely, you’ll understand that he’s using it to show that, no matter how circumstances seem to be disrupting our lives, God is in control. And God is directing us to a better path. When we’re moving in the direction that God wants us to move, when we’re doing His will, we’re flying high like the eagle. Dad’s style was a combination of speaking, shouting—we called it whopping—and then singing. He’d go back and forth between those three modes until his message was hammered home and all the saints in church were up and praising God.”
No doubt, after the loss of her mother, Aretha gravitated to the strength of her father.
“We all did,” said Cecil. “And because Dad was a natural patriarch—both of his church and [of] our family—we were drawn to his side. He was our great protector. The difference between Aretha and the rest of his children, though, was this: Early on, she became his partner. She became part of his service and also part of his traveling ministry. Later on, I learned to preach, and I did preach in his church. Later on, Erma sang and sang beautifully in his church and on records. So did Carolyn and cousin Brenda. We realized we were all anointed with talent. We were blessed with the precious genes of our musical ancestors. But Aretha manifested that talent at an ungodly early age.”
Smokey Robinson was another eyewitness. “Cecil and I were kids when we met,” he told me. “We grew up on the same love of music—not just gospel, but jazz. The first great voice that influenced me was Sarah Vaughan. I don’t think Cecil and I were ten when we started digging progressive jazz.
“Aretha was always around, a shy girl who came alive when we started playing records. I heard her singing along with Sarah in a way that scared me. Sarah’s riffs are the most complex of any singer, yet Aretha shadowed them like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We’d pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I’d recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.”
Charlie Parker was blessed to be born in Kansas City when a variety of rich musical currents were converging. Dinah Washington came as a child to Chicago, a city whose impassioned gospel, jazz, and blues nourished her soul and informed her singular style. Aretha was a providential product of Detroit, a vibrant urban center, like Chicago, whose culture in the forties and fifties was shaped by the Great Migration of southern blacks looking to move up to greater income and status in a city largely hostile to their aspirations.
The tension caused by that hostility only intensified artistic expression. Blues singers—such as John Lee Hooker, who, like C. L. Franklin, had made the move from Mississippi to Detroit—were excited by the hope of social mobility. Down south, John Lee had sung on street corners and flatbed trucks. In Detroit, he sang in bars. It was also in Detroit that John Lee—as well as C.L.—started making records.
“When I first saw John Lee in Detroit,” B.B. King told me, “he said that the white man had raised the rent on a couple of the bars where he’d been playing. When the bars closed down, John Lee went looking for nightclubs—which is how he wound up on Hastings Street.”
Hastings Street is ground zero for the Aretha Franklin story. Her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church was at 4210 Hastings, steps from the heart of the black entertainment district. It was the point where Saturday night merged into Sunday morning and sin met salvation at the crossroads of African American musical culture. High on the Holy Ghost, dancing in the aisles of New Bethel, the saints celebrated the love of Christ. High on wine and weed, the party people celebrated the love of the flesh. Was it the grinding grooves of the club that got into the church, or was it the sensuous beat of the church that got into the club? Did C. L. Franklin get his blues cry from Muddy Waters the same way Bobby Bland borrowed his blues cry from C.L.?
On Hastings Street, heavy commerce moved in both directions—saintly blues at night, bluesy gospel in the morning.
“When I first visited Detroit from Chicago,” said Buddy Guy, “it was later in the fifties. I had to see two people. The first was Reverend C. L. Franklin, ’cause B.B. had told me he could preach better than Howlin’ Wolf could sing. B. was right. Then I had to go to Hastings Street to see John Lee Hooker. The song that turned me into an aspiring bluesman was ‘Boogie Chillen’.’ It was the big hit in 1948 when I was still on the plantation in Louisiana. John Lee sang about ‘walkin’ down Hastings Street where everyone was talking about the Henry Swing Club.’ In Louisiana, I imagined Hastings Street as something glamorous. I imagined big fancy cars and fine women, music blasting and couples grinding on each other to John Lee’s sex blues. When I got to Hastings and saw it in person, though, it was even more amazing than what I’d imagined. The churches and the clubs were right next to each other. You’d see church singers singing in a jazzy style while jazz groups used the church organist in their rhythm sections. In both cases, the job was the same. Gospel music made folks happy. Blues made folks lose their blues. I didn’t see that much difference between the two, even if preachers did claim it was the difference between Jesus and the devil. B.B. King loved C. L. Franklin because he didn’t say that. He didn’t pit one against the other. He said all good music came from God.”
Aretha stressed that her father was interested in the good life and taught that goodness was not restricted to the church. In the late forties, C.L. also concluded that the good life required a grand house.
“Daddy’s demand before moving to Detroit,” said sister Erma, “was that the church construct a new sanctuary and buy him a parsonage. The old New Bethel, a reformed bowling alley, was a sight for sore eyes. The new one, built on the same plot on Hastings, was modern and attractive. Our parsonage, at six forty-nine East Boston Boulevard, was really a stately mansion. This was on the city’s north end, a few miles from New Bethel but a different world altogether. The neighborhood was integrated, but there were more black families than whites. The blacks were mainly light-skinned professionals—doctors and lawyers and political leaders. If Daddy hadn’t been an up-and-coming minister with a large congregation, his dark skin would have kept him off Boston Boulevard. But there was no denying Daddy. He knew his place was among the city’s elite.”
Describing the home on Boston Boulevard, Aretha said that she felt like a fairy-tale princess living in a castle. The house was situated on the corner of Boston and Oakland, the major street that divided the neighborhood into economic/social classes. The Boston class was the highest. Boston was a genuine boulevard, not a street, with an island in the center filled with beautiful plants and shrubs. She spoke proudly of her neighbors—Charles Diggs Sr., a congressman, and Dr. Harold Stitts, a physician. She remembered the color of the drapes in her living room (dark purple) and of the plush wall-to-wall carpeting (emerald green). The grand piano sat by the window. She was the first of her friends to have a television—a large Emerson on which she and her dad watched the boxing matches sponsored by Gillette razor blades.
“Our mother leaving and our mother dying were the two great traumas of our childhood,” said Erma. “The third happened when we lost Lola Moore, our second mother.”
Lola Moore moved in with C.L. and his children in the early fifties, shortly after Barbara Siggers died. Aretha saw her as a woman with a great flair for fashion, a wonderful sense of humor, and, to top it all off, extraordinary culinary skills. When Aretha and her siblings traveled to Chicago to meet Lola’s family, she was certain that C.L. had every intention of marrying Lola. But it wasn’t meant to be.
In From These Roots, Aretha narrates C.L. and Lola’s breakup and Lola’s subsequent departure from the Franklin household. She describes how Cecil was so devastated that he chased after Lola’s cab and tried to stop her from leaving. But when Erma and Cecil told me the story, they both remembered that it was Aretha who nearly fell apart when Lola headed back to Chicago.
“I thought she was going to throw herself in front of that taxicab,” said Erma. “She was inconsolable. We were all sad because we wanted a mother to replace the one we had just lost. I cried, Carolyn cried, and Cecil cried, but Aretha was inconsolable. It took her days to come out of her room and face the reality that we had lost Lola.”
“The difficult part,” Cecil explained, “was that we all wanted to plead our case to Daddy. We wanted to tell him that Lola was perfect, that he should marry her and complete our incomplete family. I recall Aretha coming and asking me to intervene on our behalf. ‘Tell him we need a mom,’ she said. ‘Tell him we want Lola.’ ‘I can’t do that, Ree,’ I said. ‘Daddy won’t listen.’ ‘He’ll listen to you, Cecil.’ ‘No, he won’t. I’m not saying a word.’ And I didn’t.
“Even after Lola had left for Chicago, Aretha wanted to ask Daddy to bring her back to Detroit. But she knew better. Erma might challenge Daddy or question his decisions—Erma was a very strong young woman—but Aretha would do nothing to displease him.”
“None of us knew why Lola left,” said Carolyn, “but looking back at the situation and putting together certain dates, it seems clear that while Lola was living with us, Daddy had also started his romantic relationship with Clara Ward. I’m sure that Lola couldn’t have been too happy about that.”
Clara Ward’s entrance into C.L.’s life rewired the emotional circuitry of the Franklin household. The romance began as early as 1949 and, despite many breakups and makeups, didn’t abate until Clara’s death, in 1973, with C.L. by her bedside.
“We saw Clara and Frank,” said Reverend James Cleveland, referring to Reverend Franklin, “as the church’s version of Ike and Tina. Of course, we didn’t say that out loud, but among ourselves we knew what was happening. They didn’t even try to hide it. And there was no reason they should have. They were our royalty—he our greatest preacher, she our greatest singer—a couple beyond reproach.”
Aretha never admitted that her dad and Clara were lovers. She preferred to view them strictly as friends. She praised Clara’s full-throated gospel style, her extravagant manner of dressing, and her sky-high coifs. She praised her hats. She even praised the way she ate chicken. She described how Clara had taught her to eat a chicken leg. It was a matter of taking dainty, baby-size bites. She called Clara a great lady and spoke of how she wished Clara had married her dad.
“Every little girl needs a mother,” Carolyn Franklin told me, “and we were no different. Big Mama, of course, was a major presence in our lives. She was a force to be reckoned with. She was a loving, no-nonsense, dipping snuff–loving lady who spared no rod and took no prisoners. Big Mama was wonderful, but she was Daddy’s mom. Her son was the center of her world. We were on the margins of that world. We all desperately needed a woman—a mother—to hold us to her heart and call us her babies. Aretha had this need in the worst way because of her introverted nature. When our mother left and then died, Ree became even more introverted. But then she suffered the loss of another mother when Lola left. That’s when she told me that Clara was going to be our mother. Every winter she’d predict that Daddy and Clara would marry in June. She’d fantasize about their storybook wedding. When it didn’t happen—and continued not to happen—Aretha was crushed.
“Daddy tried his best to reassure her but, given his gifts and obligations, he was distracted. When Aretha began singing in church, she caught his attention, but that only covered up her insecurities. It actually buried them. In truth, they never went away.”