IN THE SPOTLIGHT
you picked, you always owed the man.”
After Franklin found success, she began to make money. “I was intent on enjoying it,” she said. “I tithed and gave to many charities, including Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket, the NAACP, Operation PUSH, UNICEF, and Easter Seals.”
Franklin hit the scene as soul and rhythm and blues had supplanted jazz as the preferred music of young African Americans. Performers like Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald, though respected and admired, were falling out of favor among the younger generation. As a leader in the new soul movement, Franklin gain credibility and Democratic groups and civil rights organizations sought her out for performances that eventually landed her in Washington or near political centers of power.
In 1968, Democrats asked her to sing the national anthem at the Democratic convention in Chicago. As she prepared to sing, police and antiVietnam war protesters clashed in the street. Franklin performed although she famously forgot a few lines.
Then the disco era came, and sales of her albums fell. Like soul singers Ray Charles and Nina Simone, she performed overseas in places like Paris and London.
Franklin returned to the spotlight in 1977 during nationally broadcast “Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Gala” in Washington. In her first performance for a president, she sang “God Bless America.”