by
The massive “March to Freedom” on Woodward Avenue 50 years ago was one of the extraordinary events of Detroit’s recent past. It has achieved legendary status and will be commemorated Saturday with another march on Woodward.
The march remains a touchstone. At the time, it was the largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history. It featured the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered a speech afterward at Cobo Arena that foreshadowed his “I Have a Dream” speech at the even bigger march in Washington D.C. two months later, though it was not the first time King had used the “dream” allusions when speaking in public.
And the march also displayed the growing assertiveness of Detroit’s black community at a time when its members held few political offices or important positions in citywide business or culture groups.
Much has been forgotten, though, about the origins: How did two black leaders outside the mainstream of local civil rights groups come up with the idea and push it, despite political infighting and ego that almost derailed the event? How did 125,000 to 200,000 people finally happen to walk down Woodward on Sunday, June 23, 1963? What did it mean for Detroit?
Virtually all principal march organizers have died, but the answers to those questions can be found in books, biographies, documents, microfilm and the archives of libraries in Detroit and Ann Arbor.
The march in Detroit had its roots in Birmingham, Ala. Several weeks earlier, at the height of the civil rights movement in the South, protests by young African Americans in Birmingham had been met by Police Chief Bull Connor’s fire hoses, police dogs and mass arrests. To keep the momentum going, King desperately needed to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to pay bonds, legal fees and even to buy food.
So King turned to supporters with national reputations in black America.
In Detroit, that person was C.L. Franklin, charismatic pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church and father of an up-and-coming 21-year-old singer named Aretha.
Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, the son of sharecroppers from Sunflower County, Miss., was one of the best-known black ministers in America, thanks to his multi-state radio show, albums of his sermons, national tours and the way he chanted or “whooped” when preaching.
Franklin, then 48, dressed sharply, liked jewelry and drove Cadillacs with big tail fins.
Local critics, including fellow clergy, derided his flamboyant style, called him the “Jitterbug Preacher” and even poked fun at his processed hair. But King loved him, having followed his career and received his help as King’s southern campaign picked up steam.
At first, Franklin concentrated on helping gospel singer Mahalia Jackson organize a rally in Chicago May 27 that featured, among other entertainers, Aretha Franklin.
The March Takes Shape and Back-Biting Begins
In Detroit on May 10, Franklin and a member of the New Bethel congregation, prominent mortician Benjamin McFall, called an invitation-only meeting of 800 people to plan the Chicago event. Franklin emerged as chairman of a new organization, the Detroit Council for Human Rights.
The council raised alarms among members of the city’s established civil rights organizations. Franklin was perceived as a rival, as he had criticized the black establishment for moving too slowly in fighting discrimination.
Franklin’s biographer, Nick Salvatore, writes that representatives of the city’s five major civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, failed to show up for the May 10 meeting Franklin called. Five days later, those groups called their own meeting, to which Franklin was not invited.
George Crockett, a Detroit lawyer who later became an important criminal court judge and congressman, demanded that Franklin step down from the top position of the new human rights council. He argued that Franklin did not possess the necessary leadership skills and image to succeed in getting help for King.
John Conyers, then a young attorney, now an 84-year-old congressman, resigned from Franklin’s group after Franklin refused to quit, Salvatore writes.
On May 17, Franklin’s council for human rights went far beyond supporting the Chicago rally. It announced plans for a march on Woodward and scheduled it for June 11, with King as the featured guest. The council’s ambitions were huge.
“I respectfully request permission to hold a parade . . . which would facilitate an estimated 100,000 marchers on foot,” Franklin wrote in his permit application.
Planning shifted into high gear, as did the bickering. The NAACP withheld its endorsement and caused the march to be pushed back to June 23.
The Baptist Ministerial Alliance, the city’s largest group of black clergy, at first supported Franklin’s plan, then announced it would not take part. Many alliance members resented the success of Franklin, who had largely ignored the group, and they felt one of their members should be in charge. Alliance members also expressed concern that the “Negro character” of the planned demonstration would turn off white congregations that wanted to be involved.
Quarreling grew so pronounced that accounts surfaced in both the white and black press. Franklin was forced to address the issue on his Sunday radio show, saying he was not about to criticize the leaders of other groups and urging unity for the “historic mission” -- the struggle for first-class citizenship for black Americans.
That struggle, the so-called “Negro revolt,” was in full throttle in June 1963. Across the nation, black residents staged demonstrations in hundreds of cities and towns. On June 11, as Alabama Gov. George Wallace made his unsuccessful stand “in the schoolhouse door” against an attempt to integrate the University of Alabama, President John F. Kennedy gave a hastily arranged speech that called the revolution for equal rights a “moral issue” and announced he soon would introduce civil rights legislation.
Shortly after midnight, a white segregationist assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi.
Franklin's Radical Co-Organizer
In Detroit that June, the black community was increasingly demanding access to the same jobs, education and housing that white Detroiters enjoyed. A report by the city of Detroit’s human relations department noted blacks – more than 30 percent of the population -- made up only 6.7 percent of the police department and 3 percent of the fire department.
The report added: “It is almost impossible for Negroes to buy housing in many areas of Detroit and in most suburbs.”
Despite the squabbling over the march, Franklin charged ahead. In addition to raising $100,000 for King, he made it clear the purpose of the march was to protest segregation in the South as well as the “unequal treatment of Negroes” in Detroit.
In switching the march to June 23, Franklin noted the date would be the 20th anniversary of the 1943 civil disturbance in Detroit, which was a true race riot in which vicious hand-to-hand combat between blacks and whites left 34 dead and more 1,000 injured in a little more than two days. Most of the dead were black men shot by police.
“Fear and frustration spawned the tragic riots in 1943,” Franklin told The Detroit News before the march. “They are still here.
“Our demonstration will serve as a warning to the city that what has transpired in the past is no longer acceptable to the Negro community. We want complete amelioration of all injustices.”
Franklin might have sounded militant for the time, but his politics were hardly as radical as those of one of the other chief march organizers.
The Rev. Albert Cleage Jr., (left, at Cobo Arena) pastor of Central Congregational Church near Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church on Linwood, was an outspoken advocate of black power and would go on to form the black nationalist Shrine of the Black Madonna in 1970 and change his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman. When King was assassinated, Cleage wrote his death proved “non-violence will never work in a violent, white racist society.”
In 1963, Cleage, then 52, was a master orator and organizer who had been a constant critic of such black establishment organizations as the NAACP and the Urban League, as well as white liberals, calling the black leaders Uncle Toms for what he viewed as their timidity in combating inequality. Despite his disdain for moderates, Cleage, a member of the board of directors of Franklin’s new group, and the person who reportedly came up with its name, supported Franklin and urged readers of the paper Cleage published, Illustrated News, to join the march.
But Cleage, according to University of Michigan professor Angela Dillard, wanted the march to be as black and radical as possible, and he protested as Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and UAW President Walter Reuther became involved. Cleage did not believe such white liberals would work to truly liberate blacks. But their presence, Dillard writes, was the price that the NAACP extracted for ending its threat to boycott the march.
The late Arthur Johnson, executive secretary of the Detroit branch of the NAACP in 1963, told historian Sidney Fine in 1984 that the NAACP was caught by surprise that a mass demonstration featuring King could be orchestrated by outsiders like Franklin and Cleage, “whose credentials were not as clean as you would like them to be.”
Reuther, perhaps more than any other labor leader in the nation, backed the civil rights movement in a personal way and provided King with significant amounts of UAW money. In Detroit, Reuther issued a memo to the UAW's local presidents urging them to mobilize their membership for the march. Behind the scenes, black UAW leaders negotiated with Franklin over Reuther’s role, Salvatore writes. Franklin and others feared the aggressive Reuther – at the peak of his power nationally -- would take over the march if not checked.
In the end, as June 23 approached, there were more backbiting and attacks on Franklin from other black leaders. Things became so contentious, writes Taylor Branch in his history of the civil rights era, that U.S. Rep. Charles Diggs of Detroit came close to suggesting King make a “graceful withdrawal” from the planned march in Washington because the one in Detroit appeared to be unraveling.
But Franklin remained in charge, because of one main reason: King never wavered in supporting him. In a conference call in early June, King told some of Franklin’s critics that Detroit ministers were to send Franklin telegrams that signaled their support, and Franklin would forward them to King.
The March
June 23, 1963, was a warm, sunny day in Detroit. Any problems in organizing the march were quickly forgotten – for the day, at least.
As tens of thousands of people gathered on Woodward near Vernor – which crossed the city’s main street before I-75 was cut through -- King arrived at Metro Airport from Washington D.C. He was met by Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards, who assured him “you’ll see no dogs or fire hoses here.”
The Detroit Police band led the march, which started early, heaving down Woodward. King didn’t actually lead the march; because of the crush of people, it stepped off early, and King and the lines of dignitaries snaked in behind a number of marchers who already had headed down the canyon of buildings toward the river. King marched arm and arm with Franklin. Reuther, McFall, Cavanagh and Cleage walked nearby.
Fearing the mighty NAACP had been relegated to the sidelines, Johnson, the executive secretary, quietly had 1,000 signs printed that said “NAACP” in big letters, and the signs are prominent in photographs of the march.
The vibe was festive, and the remarkable numbers of people and the physical surge of the crowd startled participants. Marchers burst into excerpts of “We Shall Overcome” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A group of youngsters marched with a dog whose coat carried the word “Freedom.” Despite the talk of unity, the crowd was overwhelmingly black; most reports put the number of whites at about 10 percent.
From above, the marchers covered 10 lanes of Woodward for dozens of blocks. Organizers believed they had attracted more than the widely used figure of 125,000.
“The chief of police was on the stage,” Franklin recalled a decade later. “And he said to us that there were 200,000 people in the streets. And, of course, the papers played it down to 125,000.”
Only about 20,000 could fit into Cobo Arena, where they heard the music from Four Tops, Erma Franklin, Ramsey Lewis and Dinah Washington, plus speeches by Cavanagh, Reuther and Cleage, who bypassed the celebration of unity that day and urged Detroiters to picket supermarkets that refused to hire blacks.
King walked to the lectern and started by thanking C.L. Franklin, “my good friend.” He touched upon the Emancipation Proclamation, issued 100 years earlier, noting black Americans were still not free. “Segregation is a cancer on the body politic,” King said.
King addresses the post-march throng at Cobo Arena. [Photo/AP]
King is remembered, of course, for discussing his visions.
“I have a dream this afternoon that one day, right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them, and they will be able to get a job.
”This afternoon I have a dream,” King told the crowd, his voice soaring. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. . . . I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children — that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." [Full text is here.]
Those portions of the speech have gone down in history, in Detroit, at least, as the first time King used the “dream” allusions. But that’s not accurate, according to Drew D. Hansen’s study of King’s famous speech later that summer in Washington.
His use of the “I have a dream” set piece first appeared in his speeches in 1962, Hansen writes. The earliest known transcription comes from a speech in Rocky Mount, N.C., Nov. 27, 1962, in which King spoke many of the same “dream” lines as he spoke in Cobo Arena, though in Detroit King added elements about an end to economic inequality and violence against civil rights demonstrators.
“In the spring and summer of 1963, ‘I have a dream’ became one of King’s most frequently delivered set pieces,” Hansen writes.
Aftermath
The march left many black Detroiters with feelings of joy, solidarity and even amazement, according to media reports at the time. People who had walked down Woodward clearly had the sense they had participated in a history-making event. A new wave of militancy became evident, as pickets hit businesses that were perceived to be discriminating. In August, Motown Records released a recording of King’s speech.
But appearances deceived, writes Salvatore, Franklin’s biographer: “Behind the scenes, vicious infighting persisted.”
Cleague continued on his black nationalist path as more moderate leaders tried to marginalize him and undermine Franklin’s Detroit Council for Human Rights. Franklin and Cleage had a falling out in the fall of 1963 over the direction of the civil rights movement.
Malcolm X, speaking at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit in November, ridiculed the March to Freedom as a circus, “with clowns leading it, white clowns and black clowns.”
Over the coming years, black Detroiters gradually secured additional positions in city government and business. A decade later, Coleman Young was elected Detroit’s first black mayor. But the city’s job market, already on a downslide in 1963, continued to deteriorate, limiting opportunities.
Cavanagh and Edwards, perhaps the most liberal mayor and police commissioner in big city America, never managed to control the police department, and police brutality was one of the biggest complaints of black Detroiters after the 1967 riot/rebellion. Less than two weeks after the march, a Detroit police officer shot a black prostitute in the back and was exonerated by the Wayne County prosecutor.
In the years after the march crime increasingly became a concern in Detroit. In 1979, burglars shot Franklin in his LaSalle Boulevard home. He fell into a coma, and lingered for more than five years, fed by a stomach tube. He died July 27, 1984.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Saturday's 50th anniversary march: Kicks off at Woodward and Forest, near WSU, at 9 a.m. and proceeds to Hart Plaza, for a rally.
Photo credits: King and Franklin marching, "Walk to Freedom" poster and Cleage speaking: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
King speaking inside Cobo Arena: AP.
Sources: Papers of Walter P. Reuther and Papers of the Detroit Commission on Community Relations in the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University; "Race and Remembrance," the autobiography of Arthur Johnson; "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years," by Taylor Branch; "Singing in a Strange Land," the biography of C.L. Franklin, by Nick Salvatore; Bridging the River of Hatred, biography of George Edwards, by Mary M. Stolberg; "Sweet Land of Liberty," by Thomas Sugrue; "The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit," biography of Walter Reuther, by Nelson Lichtenstein; "From the Reverend Charles A. Hill to the Reverent Albert B. Cleage Jr.: Change and Continuity in the Patterns of Civil Rights Mobilizations in Detroit, 1935-1967," Ph.D dissertation, Angela Dillard; "The Dream," Drew D. Hansen; Detroit News; Detroit Free Press; Michigan Chronicle; Papers of C.L. Franklin and Papers of Albert Cleage, Bentley Library, University of Michigan; Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
