Aretha Franklin’s civil rights legacy
Death knocked on Aretha Franklin’s door numerous times over the past few years. And she shut the door in his face. She had too much to do.
Some people might have thought it was the supper club she had planned to open not far from where she lived quietly in Riverfront Towers on the Detroit River in Michigan. Some might have thought it was because she had that last album to finish, the one that would feature her friend Stevie Wonder.
But many folks might not know that Ms. Franklin, who died Thursday, had persevered because she also was needed in a civil rights struggle that her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, helped lead, and that she quietly and anonymously helped fund for decades.
“When Dr. King was alive, several times she helped us make payroll,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, her friend of more than 60 years, told me. “Aretha has always been a very socially conscious artist, an inspiration. ... She has shared her points of view from the stage for challenged people, to register to vote, to stand up for decency.”
Jackson and I speak of Ms. Franklin in the present, not discussing obituaries, but tribute.
Not sadness, but triumph. Jackson and other ministers watched Ms. Franklin grow up in the church, becoming an international star while never leaving the church. He said he watched her rise from gospel to rhythm and blues to soul — all while continuing her father’s work.
The family friends who came to her house as a child, and who visited her apartment in recent weeks to pray and reminisce, weren’t just family friends. They were human rights soldiers and civil rights generals and dedicated ministers across the country.
For decades, Ms. Franklin helped the ministers and activists in the streets, doing everything from providing support for the families of jailed patriarchs to bridging the gaps between a rally planned and a rally happening.
She easily stepped into the very large shoes that her father wore as one of the northern tent poles of a movement that was largely based in the South but spread nationwide thanks to the late Rev. C.L. Franklin and others.
Ms. Franklin once explained how the June 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom, the precursor for the March on Washington two months later, almost didn’t happen. That spring, her father worked hard to persuade the city’s traditional community and religious leaders to embrace his idea of a massive demonstration to bring national attention to racial discrimination.
“Many pastors whom he invited to our home to discuss it were not on board,” she told me in 2013. “They didn’t think it was such a good idea.” They didn’t come on board until Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded them.
The singer was living in New York working in the third year of her contract with Columbia Records. But while her entertainment star was rising publicly, something else was happening privately: Aretha Franklin was going to work. Her father’s mission lit a fire under the young singer, who began living parallel lives as global star and private civil rights activist.
She “put her resources where the movement’s needs were,” said the Rev. Jim Holley, pastor of the Little Rock Baptist Church and a friend of Ms. Franklin’s for 45 years. “She really helped people who didn’t have that notoriety but nevertheless were very involved in the struggle.”
Shahida Mausi met Ms. Franklin when Mausi was the executive producer of the celebration at Tiger Stadium during Nelson Mandela’s visit to Detroit in 1990, after he was released from prison. Ms. Franklin performed in the concert that raised $1 million for the African National Congress.
“Aretha’s call for respect has rung and been writ large,” Mausi said. “She called for respect, as a woman, as a businessperson, as an artist of excellence, as a reliable stalwart in human and civil rights. Sometimes, you need a queen. If the cause is just, the Queen answers the call. And she never told a soul. She never said ‘I did this’ or ‘I did that.’ She just did.”
Rochelle Riley is a columnist at the Detroit Free Press, where this column first appeared.