Award-winning best-selling author Nick Salvatore will discuss his latest book titled "Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America," at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Thursday, Feb. 10, 5-7 p.m., on Wayne State University's main campus. Salvatore also will conduct a book signing.

The event is free and open to the general public but reservations are required. The Walter P. Reuther Library is located at 5401 Cass Avenue in Detroit.

Chronicling the life of Rev. C.L. Franklin and the legacy his family has left to the nation and particularly Detroit, the book has received outstanding reviews. "The New York Times Book Review" said the book "is an absorbing study of a fascinating figure and the author...seems to have absorbed much of the city's distinctive political history, and to have tapped into the soul that moved Franklin in song and sermon and that thrived beneath the beat of Motown." References to Franklin's daughter, Aretha, referred to as the "Queen of Soul," are included throughout the book.

Born in the Mississippi Delta in 1915, C. L. Franklin worked the cotton crop with his parents and two sisters on the family's rented farmland. Feeling a calling at age 16 to the ministry, he became a "circuit rider" preaching in four churches on successive Sundays until accepting a call to lead New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis in 1939.

In 1946 Franklin moved to New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, where he would remain until his death in 1984. In less than a decade, he became one of the most famous and preeminent preaches in black America. A close friend with both Martin Luther King, Jr., and his father, King, Sr., for years, Franklin led more than 125,000 people down Woodward Avenue in June 1963 during the famous "March to Freedom."

Salvatore, a Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, is the author of other award-winning books including the Bancroft Prize in History, John H. Dunning Prize and News England History Association's Outstanding Book Prize. He has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale University.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Salvatore earned a bachelor's degree in history from Lehman Hunter College (now Lehman College), and master's and doctoral degrees in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught American History at the College of the Holy Cross and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.

The Reuther is home to the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs and the Wayne State University Archives. It collects, preserves and provides access to the heritage of the American labor movement and related reform movements of the 20th century. The collection also includes urban affairs, with particular focus on the history of metropolitan Detroit. The Reuther is part of the College of Labor, Urban and Metropolitan Affairs (CULMA) at Wayne State University.

Wayne State University is a premier institution of higher education offering more than 350 academic programs through 12 schools and colleges to more than 33,000 students in metropolitan Detroit.