In 1918, a few years after Franklin opened his first medical practice in Evergreen, Alabama, the Spanish flu pandemic broke out. Franklin realized that people were dying because they were being closed in without fresh air and “as soon as he started opening windows and doors, people started getting well,” says Finley.

Health care was segregated at that time so all of Franklin’s patients were Black, until a white farmer brought his dying wife to him. “He heard about a doctor saving people and didn’t care what color he was. My grandfather treated his wife and she got better,” Finley says. “The farmer then went to the townspeople and told them they don’t have to keep dying, there is a doctor that is healing the sick. But when the townspeople found out the doctor was Black, they said they can’t have him touching white women and went to kill him.” Luckily, the farmer got to Franklin first, giving him enough train fare to get himself and his family as far South as Africatown.

There he started his second practice treating Blacks, including Clotilda Africans. Although he arrived penniless, Franklin’s practice grew quickly and in 1954, Ebony magazine featured him in the article “The South’s Richest Negro Doctor”.

Serving the community for over 50 years, he never turned away an indigent patient and his home became a safe haven for Hollywood and sports stars passing through Mobile. “In the Jim Crow South, no matter how famous you were, you could not stay in a hotel if you were Black,” says Finley. Dorothy Dandridge, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson and Sugar Ray Robinson are just a few of the people who signed Franklin’s guestbook, which is now housed in an exhibit at the History Museum of Mobile.

Franklin also built the first multi-story brick structure on Davis Avenue, in Mobile in the 1920s. Considered a cultural nucleus, the Franklin Building housed the offices of John LeFlore (founder of the Non-Partisan Voters League) and attorney Vernon Crawford (who worked most of the civil rights cases in Mobile), as well as his son-in-law’s business—Finley’s Drug Store.

Today, the nonprofit Franklin Memorial Primary Health Clinics are named in honor of Franklin’s philanthropy and dedicated service. With 23 locations in Alabama, the health centers do not require patients to have insurance and fees are charged on a sliding scale. According to the center, “It is Dr. Franklin’s legacy that Franklin honors each day as it serves approximately 40,000 patients per year with the same care, love and commitment to serving people.”