Black State Funerals and African American History

Aretha Franklin’s funeral last week was, in a variety of ways, the equivalent of an African American state funeral. The dignitaries who were there were a who’s who of the African American community, including politicians, preachers, and a variety of other dignitaries. In a sense, Franklin’s funeral was yet another gathering—of which we’ve had too many in recent years—designed to celebrate another African American legend of the 1960s who has passed on. In short, it was a funeral that honored yet another matriarch of the Civil Rights/Black Power era in American history. Aretha Franklin’s funeral should be compared to several others in recent years that, like hers, celebrate the diversity and the history of the African American community.

Other funerals have served a similar purpose. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in 1968, or that of Malcolm X in 1965, were certainly what could be referred to as a “Black State Funeral.” In this sense, I’m talking about a funeral where the African American population of the United States has a chance to reflect on its history—and where it is going—via the celebration of the life of a revered figure. Now these state funerals, as it were, could include figures who are embraced by the mainstream—or they may not. Regardless, these are funerals for people who meant a great deal to African Americans.

The recent funerals of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King are also examples of Black state funerals. For both of them, however, the fact that the nation embraced who they were and what they purportedly stood for—despite historians such as Jeanne Theoharis and David Stein complicating their stories—made these funerals have distinct meanings for different groups of Americans. For professional politicians, they were an opportunity to celebrate a sanitized and glorified version of the Civil Rights Movement. But for many African Americans, they were an opportunity to reflect on how far African Americans have come in just sixty years, and how much more work is left to be done.

With Aretha Franklin’s funeral there is a realization that we are losing, every day, our connection to the activists and celebrities who were engaged in the Civil Rights and Black Power revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. We’ve lost Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, along with historians such as Vincent Harding and Lerone Bennett. Such funerals should provide us with moments to consider what we’ve lost—and whether such people can be truly replaced. In the realm of intellectual history, it’s perhaps the closest we come to an ultimate representation of civil religion—that anomalous idea that animates so much public discourse in modern American society. For the idea of African American civil religion, certainly, these funerals play a vital role.