PERSPECTIVES: Ben Franklin and Martin Luther King

Above, the sign promised but the weather gods had other ideas; leading principal speaker for the Ben Franklin Book Week museum event, Jim Johnston, to cancel along with most of the audience. Johnston hopes to approach the topic again in the coming  weeks -- weather permitting. In the meantime, however, he very kindly provided his prepared remarks, readable in full, below.

James C. Johnston Jr.

There have been in the Tide of Times a fair number of outstanding people born in the not-so-merry month of January. Two of these historic figures, who have had a great impact on my life and thinking, were Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King Jr. Their lives were separated by a span of 139 years, but they shared and embraced the principle of the great imperative for societal change. They both knew that they were not living in any manner of the “Good Old Days”. Both of these men knew strife, and conflict, and a struggle to bring about the common good.

Ben Franklin’s world of 1706 Massachusetts was constricted by Puritan Philosophy dominated by a clergy and intellectual infrastructure that was certain of its interpretation of the rightness of things as they were in the theocratic Commonwealth of Massachusetts where the Puritan God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world in Queen Anne’s Royal Colony of 1706. “Predestination” was at the root of religious, and therefore civic thought where a majority of the public still believed in the Calvinistic precept of “Predestination” and that meant that the individual was chosen by God for redemption or damnation before birth, and nothing could alter that. If a person lived well, it was a sign of holy preferment.

Good works, charity, kindness, and decency could not save a soul from damnation in the Puritan world of Massachusetts that had only fourteen years before seen in Salem Village, or Danvers, nineteen people hanged, and one unfortunate man-who decided not to answer the charges brought against him, one Giles Corey-pressed to death under half-a-ton of stone, and hundreds of others jailed for the crime of witchcraft all in the name of holy religion.

But the winds of change were blowing, and the old theocracy had been begun breaking down after Massachusetts became a royal colony in 1691 now incorporating Massachusetts and Plymouth into one unit. Things had moved slowly at first. It took a little time for the first colonial governor, and great hunter of treasure, Sir William Phipps to get a grasp on the nature of things, but by 1693, when the Witch-Convicting-Girls of Salem Village pointed an accusing finger at the governor’s mother-in-law, Sir William reacted quite decisively.

Sir William told the deluded girls that they were mistaken, and he shut down their deliberations and speculations along with the witch-convicting court. All persons still imprisoned and charged with witchcraft were set free, and some victims even won cash judgements and settlements against the Commonwealth for the prosecutorial crimes of the overzealous and condemning courts which had found so many individuals guilty of the pernicious crime of witchcraft. Indeed, a dozen years later, victim of the malicious persecutions, Sarah Cloyce, received three gold sovereigns in damages for herself and her hanged sisters Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty. This was but a token amount, but it also validated the innocence of the three women who had been charged with witchcraft. Sarah died and was buried shortly thereafter with her three symbolic sovereigns.

Judge Samuel Sewell publicly apologized for the part he had played in the witchcraft delusion of 1692 and 93, and today Samuel Sewell is well remembered for his journal which he kept for many years and which is as entertaining a read today as it was three centuries ago. But Sewell found a greater cause to focus his attention on in these early years of the new Eighteenth Century, “Slavery”.

His great seminal work, The Selling of Joseph, published around 1700, tells the true story of a slave of African origins named Adam and his wife who were promised freedom, after seven years if good service had been rendered, by their owner, merchant, and magistrate John Saffin. Saffin was not only a magistrate, but the sole judge in what would constitute the judgement of the quality of Adam’s work. After seven years, he reneged on his agreement with Adam, and he continued to hold him in bondage.

On learning about this, Sewell wrote about this case in The Selling of Joseph which was one of the most was widely read pamphlets of the day. Copies were shared around in the greater Boston community, and today only one original copy is known to exist. And this was the world of Massachusetts into which Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706.

Benjamin Franklin’s father, Josiah Franklin, who had been born in England in 1657, and migrated to America and Boston to seek a better chance for a better life, twice married and produced a huge family. Josiah wanted his brood to be successful in life and sought to provide them with every chance for a good education, apprenticeship, and the achievement of success that he could manage. There can be no doubt that Josiah was one of the most intellectual makers of tallow candles who ever lived in the tide of times. He invited the most intelligent people he could find to dine with his family for the purpose of engaging them in conversation on topics of interest of the day. Josiah encouraged his children to question and challenge those ideas presented to them by the guests at table. His son James became a controversial publisher and journalist who was to spend time in jail for challenging the opinions, policies, and character of the Royal Governor.

Today James Franklin is remembered as the brutal master and tyrant over his younger and smarter, and apprenticed brother Benjamin, but giving James his due, he was a fighter for freedom of the press which is always in danger. James was a champion of free speech and deserves credit for standing up to the colonial authority which tried to curtail it. No doubt young Ben sat at his father’s table absorbing conversation, forming his own opinions, and then I am sure that he shared his thoughts with the company assembled there. Josiah Franklin was a very advanced thinker in his own right, and his children are the proof of his good efforts. Several of his sons and daughters, whose work with a pen survives, is proof-positive of the efficacy of Josiah’s methods of educating his children.

No doubt Samuel Sewell’s pamphlet was discussed, and maybe the Franklins even knew Sewell. The Boston area community was smaller than is the community of our own Town/City today. I think that it would have been impossible for young Ben not to have been exposed to discussions of the ethical questions revolving around the question of Black-African-Slavery in the Eighteenth Century.

Slavery was not widely popular in Massachusetts, but it did exist until 1783, and the final judgement on what became the “Peculiar Institution” of the great “Southern Cause” of eighty years later came down in Massachusetts in the Quock Walker Cases. Quock Walker was Black infant bought by James Caldwell as a baby in 1754. Quock was promised his freedom at age 25, but his master died and he was passed on to his master’s wife and other relatives who failed to honor this promise. In 1781, Quock ran away from the Jennisons, who had inherited him, was returned to them, and beaten for his offense. Massachusetts lawyer, Levi Lincoln, took up Quock Walker’s case, won his freedom, and got him damages of 25 Pounds or $12,500.00 in today’s money.

The Jennisons, who had claimed to still own Walker, appealed to The Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and lost. Chief Justice William Cushing ruled that under the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all men are born free and equal, and that every subject [citizen] is entitled to liberty. Slavery was thus abolished by this decision in April of 1783 when Mr. Justice Cushing wrote that Slavery was incompatible with the New Massachusetts Constitution.

This decision came down seven years before Ben Franklin’s death in 1790. Franklin as a young man freed himself from his brother James who held him in virtual slavery by means of his apprenticeship to him. Ben ran away to Philadelphia, and the rest is virtually history and the quintessentially Great American Success Story nonpareil.

It is true that Franklin did own some domestic slaves, who in time were freed, and he did run advertisements for slave sales in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. It is also true that he personally became very conflicted over the subject of slavery. No doubt this was due to the awful apprenticeship he was forced to serve under his brother who only published him when Ben’s true identity as the published writer was unknown.

Franklin later published abolitionist pamphlets by prominent Quakers, and he condemned slavery in his extensive private correspondence. By 1775, Franklin openly became an abolitionist and joined many anti-slavery societies thus lending his name, influence, and considerable prestige to the cause of universal manumission of slaves.

We must also consider that not only was Benjamin Franklin a true son of the Great Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, but he was also influenced by “The Great Awakening” or renewed interest in religion as both a loving, and sometimes more intellectual, relationship with God.Ben, for a short time, was particularly influenced, by Methodism. Methodism, as seen by its founder, John Wesley and its greatest disciple, George Whitefield, as a great contrast to the frightening and savage Puritanism that dominated the Massachusetts of Franklin’s early years. Contrast Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 fiery sermon of damnation, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, with the gentle precepts of Wesley’s Methodism of, “Do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God.”

Methodism was based on charity, love of God, your fellow being, and living a clean and just life. When Franklin returned home after listening to the greatest and most powerful voice of The Great Awakening, George Whitfield, preach outside of Philadelphia, Franklin took up his pen and wrote of how overwhelmed he was to have heard such a message of kindness and love. Franklin concluded his remarks with the words, “Listening to him with such profound pleasure that he [Whitfield] did give my heart a pain.”

Northern Methodists were to become a significant part of the backbone of Abolitionism before the Civil War, and in all fairness, the successors to the Puritans, the Congregationalists who were greatly moderated their views over the succeeding generations, became a kinder and gentler faith as it morphed into the Congregationalism which has been in the vanguard of social reform and progress long since the days that Jonathan Edwards preached in Northfield and then exhibited the intrinsic glories of his titanic intellect as the last representative of his rather unforgiving theology. The Congregationalists indeed were leaders in the abolitionist moment against slavery.

There were many forces that shaped Ben Franklin’s life and attitudes against slavery. It had been a long evolutionary process for him, but in the end, Ben got there. By the time of his funeral, all Philadelphia and the surrounding countryside openly and publicly mourned his passing. Every Protestant denomination in and around the city turned out for his funeral as did all the Catholic Churches in the city, as well as the Synagogues. It was the largest funeral ever seen in the country up to that time.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in January of 1929 into a world which prided itself on being the world’s greatest democracy presided over by the notoriously do-nothing presidential administration of Calvin Coolidge, and soon to be President, Herbert Clark Hoover, who was to encounter an economic challenge called “The Great Depression” that required the imaginative and innovative quality of mind that he just did not possess to counter the horrific results of the fact of the total economic melt-down of October 1929.

These were in so many ways, these two different worlds of Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King Jr., which were separated by almost a century and a half of mortal time. Yet did they share relevance? These two eras had much in common. In what was to become The United States on July 4, 1776, and the U.S.A. of 1929 that was to see the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. That greatest of factors that would divide the nation was the reality of race and color. The great reality was that if you were white, Christian, had some economic standing, and blended well with your community, you could be happy and successful in this America of what some like to think of as the “Good Old Days”. Let me tell you something about the so-called “Good Old Days” drawn from my personal life experience of eight decades. They are a myth.

If you were philosophically different from the prevalent conservative ideology of the day, if you were not Christian, if you were other than white, the world in which you lived was a very different place from conventional mainstream America, and life could be uncertain, dangerous, and devoid of real opportunity, and indeed devoid of basic justice. If you were of the wrong color, in the wrong place at the wrong time, seen as a challenge at any level to the white majority, you might be forced to either run or give up your life. This was the truth of America in the year 1929, and 1939, and 1949, and 1959, and 1969, and even a bit after, and if you are not always aware, this can also be true today.

There are photographs showing hundreds if not thousands of lynching’s of People of Color which took place in the 1920’s. I have personally seem hundreds of these mute witnesses to man’s inhumanity to man during the last sixty-odd-years of my scholarly research. When you see a photograph of a sweet white child, calmly eating an ice-cream cone standing next to his father-clad in a white hooded costume of the Ku Klux Klan draped over his body-you must shudder to also see the charred remains of a dead man of color hanging bare-foot and charred from a burning with a hempen rope fixed around his neck as that sweet child licks his ice-cream cone quite nonchalantly as if a parade of circus clowns was passing by on a sweet summer day. That was the horrific America into which Martin Luther King Jr. was born ninety-five years ago.

I knew a lot of people who were alive then, and I also knew of their ugly racist attitudes which they held frozen in place at that time period, cherished in hatred, with all the nasty bias that they held then toward people of color who were guilty of the terrible crime of “not knowing their place” in the scheme of things. I am very happy to say that Martin Luther King Jr. knew just what his place was. He was a Natural Leader that many of my generation could follow as he raised the clarion call for freedom for all of us. “Martin”, as many of us began to call him, had the guidance of his father, the great preacher Martin Luther King Sr., to follow.

For there is a great tradition in the Southern Black Church of great preaching. That Great Preaching is quiet. Then it is loud. It has a vibration all of its own, and it has an ability to communicate a message pregnant with meaning, feeling, and reason, and this was the training ground for one of the greatest voices of the Twentieth Century, Martin Luther King Jr. His voice was a clarion call to freedom to which I was introduced while I was still in high school by a Unitarian Minister here in Franklin, Mass, the Rev. John “Jack” Daniels of The Universalist-Unitarian Church. Here, in the fall of 1959, my acquaintance with the Civil Rights Movement began in ernest. And it was to grow and become a part of me for the rest of my life.

Dr. King was to receive his graduate education in Boston where he earned his doctorate from Boston University and fell in love with a friend of a friend of mine, Coretta Scott, who was a conservatory classmate of Louise Thibedeau, my next door neighbor who played the piano with the mastery of a Mozart. Louise and Coretta were friends’ way back in the 1940’s and early 1950’s. What a small world we really inhabit.

I followed Martin’s career. He was one of the great inspirations in my life. Although he was so very young, he seemed ageless as so many great people do. His voice, his speech, his justice, his emotion, his voice of love and forgiveness, his declaration of the rightness of the great cause of freedom, his revelation of a great dream that could embrace all of us, his courage, and his sense of mission was a force of nature that was undeniable. I really don’t have adequate language to explain Martin. We did share a tenuous Massachusetts experience which was influenced by and around education.

It is a fact of history that Massachusetts was the only place on earth at that time where public education was mandated by law. In 1647, the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts The Old Satanic Deluder Law which mandated the establishment of primary schools by towns of more than 50 households and grammar schools in towns of more than 100 households. Primary schools were to teach: reading, writing, arithmetic, and The Bible. Grammar schools were to add to the curriculum: Latin, Greek verbs, and whatever else was required to admit the students to The College in Cow’s Yard, a/k/a/ Harvard. This was revolutionary and insured Massachusetts’ status as national education leader for the future, where in spite of Boston’s historic reputation for the practice, we will never ban books.

Massachusetts is the place that education I this great nation was born. Harvard College in Cow’s Yard was founded here in 1636. Massachusetts was the founding place of the Dame’s Schools where rural children held their primitive Horn Books and learned the alphabet and that “A” stood for “Adam” and that “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all”. Also imprinted on the Horn Book was “The Lord’s Prayer” and if you could recite it without error, this was proof positive that you were no witch!

I remember back in August of 1963 on the 28th, I came home from the Unionville Shoddy Mill, once owned by my grandfather Richmond W. Foss, for lunch. I turned on the television, and there was Martin. In those days, I worked in the mill on summer vacation days for ten to twelve hours a day for the huge sum of one-dollar-and-sixty-five-cents an hour. That was for a six day week which allowed me to pay my tuition and board for the academic college year.

My sweet little Grandmother Foss had made my lunch, and I placed myself in front of the T. V. to see the news, and there was Martin just starting his seminal speech. I sat transfixed through my allotted lunch time and beyond totally absorbed by Martin’s speech. I just didn’t give a Tinker’s Damn if I were late for work or not. This was History!

I was transfixed by the majesty of Martin’s language, and I was transported by the message and clarion call to freedom delivered to a needful world by this Prince of Peace who waged a just war for social justice and human rigorousness. Who could break off and go back to work! This was history being made in what would become popularly known as “Real Time”. I sat absorbed and made better by what I was absorbing, and when it was over I wanted more. It was an emotional and intellectual banquet! It was an aspirational reaching out to some great future. It was a challenge to be better, and it moved me more than anything that I had heard before or since. And at the time, I just could not get my head around it.

Somehow or other I pulled myself together and walked the little distance back to work, an hour and a half late. I came into the mill, clocked in my time-card, turned to my boss, Danny Yardisernia and said, “I got impossibly tied up, and that is all there is to that.”

Danny looked at me, nodded, and I went back to catch up with all of the impossible bleached and twisted lengths of heavy scrap cloth left in the bottom of the huge tub that had to be loaded into the big hand-truck making up a weight of 800 pounds to be extracted of water, put on a conveyor belt, and sent up to the next floor. Next I would place all of the damp material on a huge flat wire bed that would go into a machine and dry. The air was over 110 degrees in the drying room, and I hadn’t yet made up the other 800 pound bail of stripped scrap to be shipped out. I worked an extra two hours that night arriving home at about 8:45 P.M. But I hardly noticed. All I thought about was that speech of Martin’s. It became known as the I Have a Dream Speech.

Mankind has been afflicted with this idiotic question of “Racial Superiority” since Biblical Times. Tribal, National, Regional, Aspirational, Economical, and most of all concepts of Racial Superiority seem to have dominated human thought from time immemorial. Is there a simple truth that can be seen that would make sense out of all of this collective stupidity and concern for dominance? I think that there is, and that can only be by looking at and recognizing the fact that there is only one race of people on this planet, and that is the Human Race, or more technically Homo Sapiens.

We are all brothers and sisters of the Continent of Africa where we evolved in Nature’s very own Garden of Eden, and from which we eventually removed ourselves to all parts of this inhabited planet. Our blood is the same, remarkably sharing the characteristics of sea water to a great degree, in slightly different elemental proportions with that self-same sea water, as it courses through our veins. We share intellect which is not favored by the pigmentation of our skin or determined by our superfluous differences of appearance. Yellow, Brown, White, Black, or Red we are one human family who should respect, if not love, our mutual humanity.

James C. Johnston Jr. is a former Franklin selectman, Franklin High School history teacher, and author of "The African Son," a novel , as well as "The Yankee Fleet" and "Odyssey in the Wilderness," (a history of Franklin, Massachusetts). Article copyright James C. Johnston, Jr. 2023, used with permission.