QUEEN OF SOUL LEAVES
Franklin used powerful voice for positive change
Aretha Franklin’s legacy isn’t just in her uniquely powerful voice. It’s in how she used it to amplify the civil rights and women’s empowerment movements, in the process becoming a sociopolitical icon in her own right.
“She was the vocalization of the burgeoning 20th century movements for civil rights and black power and women’s power,” said Daphne Brooks, Yale University professor of African American Studies and Theater Studies.
Activism ran in Franklin’s blood as the daughter of Detroit pastor C.L. Franklin — a civil rights advocate and close ally of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — who organized the Detroit Walk to Freedom where King delivered an early version of what would become his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
Those roots were evident in her music. She took Otis Redding’s song “Respect,” and transformed it, stripping it of its misogynistic tones and using her musical arrangement skills and powerful voice to turn it into an anthem of feminism. She even spelled it out for emphasis in a line that would become her signature: “R-E-S-P-EC-T.”
Franklin herself was active in the civil rights movement, sometimes quietly by sending money to the Kings’ Southern Christian Leadership Conference during turbulent financial times. “She helped us make payroll,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the Detroit Free Press.
Other times she took a more prominent stance, like when she defied her father’s advice and offered to post as much as $250,000 to bail out jailed activist Angela Davis in 1970 because, Franklin said, “she’s a black woman and she wants freedom for black people.” Davis was held on charges in connection with a deadly police shootout and was ultimately acquitted.
“I’ve been locked up,” Franklin told Jet Magazine at the time, referencing her arrest in Detroit for disturbing the peace, “and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.”
“That is what she did,” Brooks said. “Her voice was in many ways a disturbance of the peace.”
Her music became the soundtrack of the civil rights movements for generations. In 2009, when Barack Obama, the first black president-elect, was asked who he wanted to perform at his inauguration, the first artist he asked for was Franklin. She performed at both his inaugurations.
Yesterday Obama remembered Franklin’s voice as well as her activist spirit that “helped define the American experience.”
“In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect,” Obama said in a statement.
Without her, civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis said, “the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”