Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America - Hardcover

Salvatore, Nick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316160377 ISBN 13: 9780316160377

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2005

Synopsis

A prizewinning historian pens this biography of C.L. Franklin, the greatest African-American preacher of his generation, father of Aretha, and civil rights pioneer.

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Reviews

C. L. Franklin, father of the "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin, was the original country preacher, embodying the hopes, dreams, and insecurities of southern blacks who sought to survive with dignity in the North. Salvatore recounts Franklin's struggles from sharecropper roots in Mississippi, his early career as a minister in Memphis, and his more than 30 years at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Franklin's life spanned the Depression through the post-civil rights era and reflects the struggle of a generation that moved from rural to urban culture and the parallel struggle within the black Baptist Church from conservatism to social and political activism. Franklin's limited formal education did not stifle his desire to learn and imagine possibilities beyond those promised in eternal salvation. His personal virtues and vices are interwoven in this recollection of the complex religious, political, and commercial life of a city dominated by the automobile industry and a union history with a racist undercurrent. This well-researched and scholarly, but accessible, biography reflects changes wrought by the black church on the broader American society. Vernon Ford
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Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316160377
• ISBN 13: 9780316160377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432