Article content

Aretha Franklin may have been the queen of soul, but at one point during her nine-hour funeral last week, those memorializing her seemed to have forgotten just who it was they were supposed to be honouring.

The televised portion of the ceremony included, most notably, a 50-minute eulogy delivered by Atlanta pastor Reverend Jasper Williams, Jr., that Franklin’s family later called “offensive and distasteful.”

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Aretha Franklin's family was not happy with the 'offensive and distasteful' eulogy that went on forever Back to video

Instead of spending his time at the podium at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple talking about Franklin, Williams orated a critique of black Americans. Among his many controversial statements, the pastor blasted the Black Lives Matter movement, declaring, “Until black people start respecting black lives and stop killing ourselves, black lives can never matter.”

He then slammed single mothers, saying they cannot “raise a black boy to become a man,” labelling a home without a father an “abortion after birth.”

For the record, Franklin was a single mother — to four boys.