The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest', one of C.L. Franklin's best-known sermons, off ers a critique of the United States, a nation predicated as much on exploitation and oppression as on liberty and democracy. The eagle of the title is not only the central image of the sermon, but emblem of the American Republic, and metaphor of divine presence and protection. The piece begins as exegesis, listing, then expounding the characteristics shared by the eagle and the divine: strength, speed and vision. It subsequently slips into an apparently unrelated folk narrative of a captive eagle being raised on a poultry farm. His difference from the rest of the birds is soon evident, and the eagle is confined to a cage in order to prevent his escape. As the eagle ages, he begins to outgrow his cage, as he does all subsequent cages built for him, until finally, in pity, he is released by the farmer. The correspondence with the initial biblical tale becomes clear in a final analogy between the eagle's release and a Christian prophecy of freedom and resurrection:

The eagle of the folk tale, of course, provides a metaphor for the captivity of the African American subject in the United States, a representation at odds with the eagle's official designation as divine protector and symbol of American democratic idealism. Confined, not merely by successive cages, as the story explains, but, less obviously perhaps, by the vernacular forms in which the story is inscribed, the captive eagle becomes symptom and symbol of its own failure as a trope of liberty and the ideals of the state. As such, the text, its performance, and the symbol itself are marked out as zones of contest, in which the meaning, stability and viability of icons of national identity come under scrutiny, and are ultimately found to be wanting.