Day: August 19, 2018

Fans and worshippers celebrated the life of Aretha Franklin at her father’s Baptist church in Detroit on Sunday, with her powerful voice again ringing out within its walls in tribute to her spectacular career.

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, greeted by a standing ovation, sent the several hundred parishioners into raptures with his eulogy and rousing prayers for his old friend, the “Queen of Soul.”

The New Bethel Baptist Church — located in a down-at-heel, quiet neighborhood of Detroit — has been the focus of tributes to Franklin, who passed away from advanced pancreatic cancer on Thursday at age 76.

“On Thursday morning, Earth lost her music. Heaven gained her music,” Jackson told the congregation.

“Right now, the gospel choir in heaven has a lead singer. Detroit lost something, but heaven gained something.”

Franklin’s recording of “Precious Lord (Take My Hand)” — one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite gospel tracks which she sang at his funeral in 1968 — filled the church as a woman dressed in black and red danced.

The high-energy service was packed with music belted out by chief Pastor Robert Smith Jr.

“We are sad that Aretha has gone,” Smith said. “We’re happy that she’s free from the shackles of time.”

In his lengthy address, the now frail Jackson recounted Franklin’s life in the context of the civil rights movement, from her birth into the segregation of the American south to singing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Jackson, a Baptist minister and former Democratic presidential candidate, told the church that during the year of Franklin’s birth “in a shack on the Mississippi River” in Tennessee, “225 blacks were lynched.”

Her father, C.L. Franklin, was a prominent Baptist preacher and civil rights activist, who in June 1963 helped King organize the Walk to Freedom through downtown Detroit, only two months before King’s historic March on Washington and “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I remember one time Dr King was facing bankruptcy… and Aretha did an 11-city tour and gave all the money to Dr King,” said Jackson, who was a close aide to the slain activist.

“She was a rose that grew tall in a garden of weeds,” he said.

‘A mighty tribute to the Queen’

Franklin recorded the album “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism” at the church, where she performed over the years, and also served dinners to worshippers and the homeless at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Talking about his final visit with Franklin last Wednesday, Jackson told the church that he walked into the room calling out “Re, Re, Re.”

“She opened her eyes and pressed my arms, and we began to pray,” he said.

His eulogy had worshippers on their feet. Smartly dressed women raised their arms into the air and swayed to the music, as a few wiped away tears, with Jackson leading them in prayers and song.

Worshippers spilled out of the service, invigorated by what they called a celebration of the music icon’s life and legacy.

“It was beautiful and it spoke to all of us,” said Denise Redmon, a 57-year-old Indiana bus driver on a weekend coach trip to Detroit.

“I thought it was excellent. A mighty tribute to the Queen,” agreed Esther Birden, 60, on the same two-day “Aretha Franklin soul weekend, joining in all the festivities and being a part of history.”

“I remember listening to Aretha when I was eight years old and dancing to her music,” she said.

“We have nothing to be sad about because she gave us so much. She gave us secular, she gave us gospel, she gave us opera… and you don’t find too many that can fit in every arena like that.”

‘Freedom fighter’

Ralph Godbee, a former Detroit police chief turned pastor, led the congregation in a rousing hand clap for Franklin.

He recalled how she had once called to complain about a relative who had been mistreated by the police department, telling him that no one — regardless of their family — should be treated in such a way.

“There’s something about when the queen calls,” he said, hailing her as a “freedom fighter” and “demanding justice for everybody from the back row to the front pew.”

He said the revival of the Motor City — the home of the US auto industry that has turned a corner after years of economic depression and high crime — was “on the back of the spirit of the Queen of Soul.”

Outside the pale brick church, mourners have left helium balloons, bouquets of flowers, teddy bears and hand-written tributes.

“Aretha Will Always be My Queen. Nothing But Respect!!” read one home-made poster adored with cut-out, black-and-white newspaper pictures of the musical icon in her prime.

“You will always be in my heart,” said another. “Your voice will always ring in my heart and soul. I hear it all of the time, soothing me.”
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Women still lag far behind men when it comes to careers in the fastest growing technology fields. Recent studies show fewer than 20 percent of women will pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or STEM for short. Two sisters in Maryland have started their own summer camp to get more women interested in STEM careers. Cristina Caicedo Smit reports.
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Tucked away in an industrial block in the New York City borough of Queens is an ordinary-looking warehouse containing an extraordinary treasure: a quarter-million sheets, shards and pieces of multicolored and iridescent glass that together make up the largest collection of Tiffany glass, The Neustadt Tiffany Glass Archive.

​Magnificent windows

While stained glass has been produced since ancient times, the colorful cathedral windows created during the 15th century of the Renaissance period are perhaps the best known. But the art was transformed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Louis Comfort Tiffany, an American artist and designer who used his unique talent to essentially create paintings out of glass.

Lindsy Parrott, executive director and curator of the collection, holds up a medium-sized piece of glass as she explains its uniqueness. 

“This is called dichroic, rippled glass and so it’s one color — this greenish color — in reflected light. But then look at this,” she says, as she holds it up to the window. “When you illuminate it, it becomes a wonderful reddish-yellow glass.”

And that’s what is significant bout The Neustadt Tiffany Glass Archive, she says. “It documents this unbelievable chapter in the history of stained glass, by introducing all of these incredible colors and textures, various patterns, different opacities of glass.”

​Distinctive style of glass

Tiffany glass derives its name from the distinctive style of glass produced by Tiffany and his team of designers from 1878 to 1933. Working out of the Tiffany Studios in New York, Tiffany became famous for the color-infused, leaded glass lampshades and stained glass windows that have come to define his name.

The Neustadt Collection was founded in 1969 by collector Egon Neustadt and his wife, Hildegard, who discovered their first Tiffany lamp in 1935. That $12.50 purchase inspired a lifelong passion.

“This one wonderful daffodil lamp kicked off an entire collection,” Parrott says. The Neustadts became deeply passionate about Tiffany lamps after that initial purchase, transfixed by their beauty, and spent the rest of their life building a massive collection.

A passion for Tiffany glass

The couple would eventually amass more than 200 Tiffany lamps, each one unique, including the purchase in 1967 of a huge cache of Tiffany glass left when the company’s furnaces finally closed in 1937.

“Tiffany’s furnaces were originally located in Corona, Queens, and so much of the glass that you see here was made here in New York City,” Parrott says.

The collection represents a variety of forms of glass, from drapery glass meant to mimic a flowing robe, rippled glass meant to represent water, and pressed glass jewels and 3D glass jewels to adorn lamps, mosaics and windows, all carefully sorted and ordered by color, size, texture and type.

The warehouse containing the Tiffany Glass Archive will open to the public for exclusive monthly tours later this year. And The Neustadt will provide a sneak preview of some of these glass treasures in a new exhibition in their dedicated gallery at the Queens Museum, opening October 7.
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About 250,000 pieces of multicolored and iridescent glass sit in a warehouse on an industrial block in Long Island City, Queens, which houses the largest collection of Tiffany glass. It’s a welcome tribute to Louis Tiffany, an American artist who many believe transformed the history of stained glass with his unique artistry — essentially creating paintings out of glass. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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