Franklin was brought up in Sunflower Country, Mississippi near Indianola. His mom's name was Willie Ann Pitman. His granddad, who had been a slave, was a minister named Elijah J. Pitman. His dad departed the family not long after coming back from WWI, and C.L. took the last name of his adopted father after his mother remarried. He grew up in poverty and later recalled his mother crying because she had no money to buy toys for her children at Christmas. He got his education in Doddsville, where the schools for black children were very standard, usually relegated to one room in a church, and instructed by educates without even a secondary school degree. While he went to school he was regularly exploited by tricks and racial insults by white kids. …show more content…
At just 16, he reported his calling to preach to his mother after having a vision the previous night in which he heard a voice that said "Go and preach the gospel to all the nations." He was soon ordained as a minister and became the associate pastor of St. Peter's Rock Baptist Church in Cleveland, Mississippi. He later pastored a church in Clarksdale and then moved to Greenville, where he was able to research theology in a fundamentalist seminary run by the National Baptist Convention. He worked as an preacher who traveled place to place before settling in Memphis, Tennessee, where he studied at LeMoyne College. Now, he started to test his own fundamentalist perspectives as he was presented to more contemporary ways to biblical …show more content…
In 1961, the growing New Bethel Baptist Church moved to a converted movie theater with a seating capacity of up to 3000. During the Civil Rights Movement, Franklin was a friend and ally of Martin Luther King, Jr., who usually attended Franklin's church when visiting Detroit. In 1963, Franklin helped organize a march to end racial discrimination in Detroit which Franklin and King led together. He was also actively involved in the Urban League and NAACP, and served on the executive board of the Southern Christian Leadership