A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Franklin was raised by his great aunt Gertrude, having been abandoned as a baby by his mother. Gertrude collected and resold aluminum cans to raise money for Kirk to take piano lessons from the age of 4. Kirk excelled in music, able to read and write music by ear. He received his first contract offer at the age of 7, which his aunt turned down. He joined the church choir and became music director of the Mt. Rose Baptist Church adult choir, at the age of eleven. Despite his strict religious upbringing, Franklin rebelled in his teenage years, and in an attempt to keep him out of trouble, his great aunt arranged an audition for him at a professional youth conservatory associated with a local university. He was accepted and while his life seemed to be on track for a while, the announcement of a girlfriend’s pregnancy and his eventual expulsion from school for behavioral problems proved otherwise.

After the shooting death of a friend, Franklin returned to the church, where he began to direct the choir once again. He also co-founded a gospel group, The Humble Hearts, which recorded one of Franklin’s compositions and got the attention of gospel music legend Milton Biggham. Impressed, Bigham enlisted him to lead the DFW Mass Choir in a recording of Franklin’s song “Every Day with Jesus.” This led to Bigham hiring Franklin (at just twenty years old) to lead the choir at the 1990 Gospel Music Workshop of America Convention, a major industry gathering.

Photo by Susan H

In some churches, members are find themselves in a sea of unfamiliar faces, outnumbering the congregation itself. Signs have been posted, “No photography, no flip-flops, no exiting during the sermon”.

Tour companies are listing churches for foreign visitors to New York City so they can experience sermons from black preachers and hear black gospel choirs. Pastors see both a blessing and problems.

Struggling to preserve the sanctity of the service visitors are asked not to leave once the sermon has started or not to take pictures during worship, requests that are sometimes ignored. “I understand that you’re visiting and you want to have a memory of it,” said Carlos Smith-Ramsay, who has been a church member for years. “But when we ask you to stop and you continue to do so after the fact, that’s disrespectful.”

Gospel singers by Gloria Bell via Flickr ~ used under CC-BY license

Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church has become an attraction for tourists from all over the world and is the oldest black church in New York state, membership that once included black leaders such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Paul Robeson. On a given Sunday almost 200 seat are filled with visitors and the collection basket with dollars.

In an interview with the Associated Press, The Rev. Gregory Robeson Smith, Mother AME Zion’s pastor, said he refuses to work with tour operators. He doesn’t even like to use the word “tourist,” preferring instead to call them part of his “international congregation.” And he won’t turn anyone away.

“I refuse to commercialize the church worship experience,” he said. “You don’t pay people to experience the Lord, to come and pray. I think that’s unconscionable.”

Near by Abyssinian Baptist Church, another house of worship popular with the tourists, often turns away visitors because the pews are too full.

Options are divided, some would say that people are just coming to see a show, like on TV or in the movies. Others would like to believe the tourists have come to listen to the word of God. Either way the tour guides will continue to lead new visitors to the steps of the church and each visitor will have their own reason for being there.

Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, often called Bishop C. L. Franklin was an American Baptist minister, a civil rights activist, and father of the legendary soul and gospel singer Aretha Franklin.
Born Clarence LaVaughn Walker in Sunflower County, Mississippi, to sharecroppers Willie Walker and Rachel Walker née Pittman. After returned from service in World War I in 1919, Willie Walker abandoned the family shortly thereafter (Clarence was only four years old), and the next year Rachel married Henry Franklin, whose surname the family adopted.

At age 16, he became a preacher, initially working the Black itinerant preaching circuit, before settling at New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, where he remained until May 1944. From there he moved to the pulpit of the Friendship Baptist Church in Buffalo, New York, where he served until June 1946 when he became pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan.

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s his fame grew, and he preached throughout the country while maintaining his pulpit at New Bethel. Known as the man with the “Million Dollar Voice”, Franklin was one of the first ministers to place his sermons on records (which continued into the 1970s), and also to broadcast sermons via radio on Sundays. Among his most famous sermons were “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” and “Dry Bones in the Valley.” In addition to his fame as a preacher, Franklin was known for his fine singing voice. He greatly encouraged his daughter Aretha Franklin in her musical endeavors, and during the 1950s took Aretha with him on speaking tours and musical engagements.

In addition to his ministry, in the 1950s and 1960s as he became involved in the civil rights movement, and worked to end discriminatory practices against black United Auto Workers members in Detroit.
C. L. Franklin was a close friend and supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr., who deeply admired Rev. Franklin, and was also known for his close relationships with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward, two of gospel music’s greatest voices. Mahalia and Clara greatly encouraged his daughter, Aretha, who credits their mentoring and frequent visits to the Franklin home as great influences.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday, June 10, 1979, Franklin was shot twice at point blank range during what was said to be an attempted robbery at his home on Detroit’s West Side. Rev Franklin was taken to Henry Ford Hospital. He remained in a coma for the next five years. The Franklin children moved him back to the house six months after the tragedy and installed a 24-hour nurse at the residence to monitor the minister. He remained at the home until the middle of 1984. He died on July 27, 1984, just one week after being placed in Detroit’s New Light Nursing Home. He was 69 years old.

Franklin was entombed at Detroit’s historic Woodlawn Cemetery on North Woodward Avenue, with his friend, Rev. Jasper Williams Jr., of the Salem Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia, giving the eulogy.
http://blackgospelchoir.com/?p=1388

A collaboration project with the Florida A&M University Gospel Choir called Twinkie Clark-Terrell Presents the Florida A&M University Gospel Choir which also was a mainstay in the Billboard Gospel top 10 in late 1996.

credit:dennyburk.com

Pastor Luter began his career as what he fondly refers to as a street preacher, spending his time preaching on different street corners in New Orleans “Lower Nine” area where he grew up. In 1986, the members of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church elected him pastor even though he had no pastoral experience. Under Pastor Luter’s leadership the church has grown from a membership of 65 members on roll to its current membership of 7000 plus worshipers.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the world’s largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the United States, with over 16 million members as of 2010. The SBC became a separate denomination in 1845 following a regional split with northern Baptists over the issues of slavery. After the American Civil War, another split occurred: most black Baptists in the South separated from white churches and set up their own congregations. Today the once all-white denomination of slaveholders and segregationists, has a membership of 16 million and are one of the most diverse denominations in the United States. Almost 20 percent of Southern Baptist churches are predominantly African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American or other minorities.
“Our election of Fred Luter as the first African American president of the SBC will send a great, hopeful, powerful message to our city, our culture, our convention and our country,” said current president David E. Crosby, pastor of First Baptist Church in New Orleans.

The national convention is scheduled for June in New Orleans.

October 17, 1711 – before 1806
Jupiter Hammon was a Black poet who became the first African-American published writer in America when a poem appeared in print in 1760. He was a slave his entire life, and the date of his death is unknown.

He was living in 1790 at the age of 79, and died by 1806. Hammon was a devout Christian, and is considered one of the founders of African American literature.

Hammon was born a slave and was owned by four generations of the Lloyd family of Queens on Long Island, New York. His parents were both slaves. His father, called Opium, and unlike most slaves could read and write.

On September 24, 1786, He expressed his views on slavery when he delivered his “Address to the Negroes of the State of New York”, also known as the “Hammon Address”, before the African Society. Hammon wrote the speech at age seventy-six after a lifetime of slavery. It contains his famous words, “If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.”

The speech draws heavily on Christian motifs and theology. For example, Hammon said that Black people should maintain their high moral standards precisely because being slaves on Earth had already secured their place in heaven. Hammon’s speech also promoted the idea of a gradual emancipation as a way of ending slavery. It is thought that Hammon stated this plan because he knew that slavery was so entrenched in American society that an immediate emancipation of all slaves would be difficult to achieve. His speech was initially published by the New York Quakers, and was later reprinted by several groups opposed to slavery, including the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, because the strong religious motifs and ideas of gradual emancipation were moderate enough to be taken seriously by whites, but still firmly rooted in abolition.

Hammon’s famous speech and his poetry are often anthologized. The first known African American to publish literature in the US (several years later in 1767, Phillis Wheatley had published her poems, but in England, not the US), Hammon was a favorite servant, clerk, farmhand, and artisan in the Lloyd family business. Hammon was allowed to attend school and was a fervent Christian, as were the Lloyds. His first published poem was written on Christmas Day, 1760. “An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries: Composed by Jupiter Hammon, a Negro belonging to Mr. Lloyd of Queen’s Village, on Long Island, the 25th of December, 1760″ appeared as a broadside in 1761. Three other poems and three sermon essays followed. In Hammon’s “Address to the Negroes of New York, to the African Society,” he said that while he personally had no wish to be free, he did wish others, especially “the young Negroes, were free.”
source:Wikipedia.com

Dr. Patricia Stephens Due died after a long struggle fighting thyroid cancer. She passed away at a skilled nursing facility near Atlanta, where she had moved to be close to her three daughters. She was 72.
At the age of 13 Dr. Due and her sister Priscilla started fighting segregation in Florida by insisting on being served at the “white only” window of their local Dairy Queen, instead of the “colored” window. In the summer of 1959, the sisters attended a nonviolent resistance workshop organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). On Feb. 20, 1960, eleven FAMU students, including Patricia and Priscilla, were arrested for ordering food at a “white only” Woolworth lunch counter. On March 12, dozens of FAMU and Florida State University students who participated in sit-ins at McCrory’s and Woolworth’s were arrested. A thousand students began marching from the FAMU campus toward downtown Tallahassee, but were stopped by Police officers with teargas. At the head of the march, Due was teargassed right in the face, and suffered permanent eye damage.
THE FIRST JAIL-IN
Due and the other sit-in participants were tried and found guilty on March 17, 1960. Eight refused to pay the $300 fine, deciding instead to go to jail. Eight students served 49 days at the Leon County Jail: FAMU students Patricia and Priscilla Stephens, John Broxton, Barbara Broxton and William Larkins, and three other students—Clement Carney, Angelina Nance, and 16-year-old high school student Henry Marion Steele (son of activist pastor Rev. C.K. Steele).

The “jail-in” gained nationwide attention, and the students received a supportive telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Due sent a letter to baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, who published it in a column he wrote. Robinson later sent the jailed students diaries so they could write down their experiences. After the jail-in, Due and the others traveled the country in speaking tours to publicize the civil rights movement. Due met Eleanor Roosevelt, author James Baldwin, and many other activists on those tours. She went on to be jailed multiple times as a leader in the movement.

bio credit:wikipedia.org

April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006

The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Mrs. King’s most prominent role may have been in the years after her husband’s 1968 assassination when she took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality herself and became active in the Women’s Movement.
Scott King was the third of four children born to Obadiah “Obe” Scott (1899–1998) and Bernice McMurray Scott (1904–1996) in Marion, Alabama. The Scott family had owned a farm since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton to help earn money. Ms. King’s father Obe, was the first black person in their neighborhood to own a truck. He had a barber shop in their home. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by white neighbors.
Though lacking formal education themselves, Coretta Scott’s parents intended for all of their children to be educated. Coretta quoted her mother as having said, “My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on.”

Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her mother’s house; the ceremony was performed by Martin Jr.’s father, Martin Luther King, Sr.. Coretta had the vow to obey her husband removed from the ceremony, which was unusual for the time. After completing her degree in voice and piano at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama in September 1954. Mrs. King recalled: “After we married, we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where my husband had accepted an invitation to be the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Before long, we found ourselves in the middle of the Montgomery bus boycott, and Martin was elected leader of the protest movement. As the boycott continued, I had a growing sense that I was involved in something so much greater than myself, something of profound historic importance. I came to the realization that we had been thrust into the forefront of a movement to liberate oppressed people, not only in Montgomery but also throughout our country, and this movement had worldwide implications. I felt blessed to have been called to be a part of such a noble and historic cause.” Coretta Scott King played an extremely important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin wrote of her that, “I am indebted to my wife Coretta, without whose love, sacrifices, and loyalty neither life nor work would bring fulfillment. She has given me words of consolation when I needed them and a well-ordered home where Christian love is a reality.”

Not long after her husband’s assassination in 1968, Coretta approached the African American entertainer and activist Josephine Baker to take her husband’s place as leader of The Civil Rights Movement. After many days of thinking it over Baker declined, stating that her twelve adopted children (known as the “rainbow tribe”) were ” … too young to lose their mother.” Shortly after that Coretta decided to take the helm of the movement herself.
Coretta Scott King broadened her focus to include women’s rights, LGBT rights, economic issues, world peace, and various other causes. As early as December 1968, she called for women to “unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war,” during a Solidarity Day speech.
As leader of the movement, Coretta Scott King founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She served as the center’s president and CEO from its inception until she passed the reins of leadership to son Dexter Scott King.
She published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1969.

Every year after the assassination of her husband in 1968, Coretta attended a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark his birthday on January 15. She fought for years to make it a national holiday. Murray M. Silver, an Atlanta attorney, made the appeal at the services on January 14, 1979. Coretta Scott King later confirmed that it was the “…best, most productive appeal ever…” Coretta Scott King was finally successful in this in 1986, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.

bio source:Wikipedia.org