In 1934, the Washington Post called Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux the "best known" Black man in America. They weren't wrong. By that year, Michaux, preacher and founder of the Gospel Spreading Church of God, had been delivering his religious message to more than 25 million radio listeners each week, according to Suzanne Smith, a historian at George Mason University.
Michaux was known as the "Happy Am I" preacher because of his cheerful demeanor, gospel-filled services and his jaunty theme song of the same name.
He started preaching in 1917 in Hopewell and Newport News, Va., according to a biography about his life, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux: His Social and Political Interests and Influence by Lillian Ashcraft-Eason. He preached a message of positivity and racial harmony. In 1926, he was arrested for performing integrated baptisms in Virginia.
This was also during the Great Migration when more than six million Black Americans left the South and headed North — subsequently, his church in Virginia grew.
"When I was a little boy and my father took me to the church, there were so many people in there, there were no seats," Joseph Sturdivant, a longtime member of the Church of God congregation, told Radio Diaries.
In 1928, Michaux established a permanent Church of God location on Washington D.C.'s Georgia Avenue. He began broadcasting his services for an hour a week on an independent station, WJSV. When WJSV was sold to CBS in 1932, Michaux's radio program went national.
Sturdivant, who was part of the backing band for the Church of God choir, recalled visitors from other cities traveling to Washington to see Michaux's broadcast church services.
"Sometimes you would have busloads of people, white people, that would come from different cities just for that broadcast," Sturdivant said.
Ashcraft-Eason, a Newport News native, was a member of the church in the 1940s and often traveled to Washington to view the broadcast services.
"There were other good preachers, but the Church of God made you feel special," Ashcraft-Eason told Radio Diaries.
In 1933, Michaux started a philanthropic program called the Good Neighbor League, which provided food and housing for evicted persons in the Washington, D.C. area. The church also started the Happy News Café, a restaurant with cheap or free meals.
"Your friends, your associates, were all members of the Church of God," Ashcraft-Eason said. "That was your family. Elder Michaux was like your father."
As a prominent preacher in the nation's capital, it wasn't long before Michaux's influence reached the political sphere. In 1940, Ashcraft-Eason wrote in her book that Michaux spoke in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Democratic National Convention. He was later seen at the White House with Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
"The presidents [saw] him as someone who is a national voice that African Americans listen to, that if he endorses them in any way in his broadcasts, it will get African Americans to vote for them," Smith, who's working on a biography about the preacher, told Radio Diaries.
"He knew how to find favor with white people," Smith says. "That was his strategy throughout his life for trying to uplift his race."
The rift between King and Michaux
It was his proximity to politics that placed Michaux on the radar of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1940s.
"Hoover is trying to cultivate his relationships with religious leaders to shore up support for his own investigative missions and just his general power in the government," Smith says.
Lerone A. Martin, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, explored declassified documents detailing communication between Michaux and the FBI for a scholarly article. Memos detail outreach from Michaux to the FBI as early as the 1930s.
"Michaux says that I'm a Christian, I know that the FBI is a Christian organization, and together, we can make sure that communism doesn't get a foothold in this country," Martin told Radio Diaries.
But according to Martin, Michaux's communication with the FBI "heat[ed] up" once another preacher began rising to prominence: Martin Luther King, Jr.
King's leadership during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s launched him onto the national scene. However, King's activism also sounded alarms at the FBI.
"[Hoover] believes that there is a communist conspiracy at root within the Civil Rights Movement, and particularly with Martin Luther King Jr.," Martin says.
Just a year after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the FBI began its Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, to disrupt the Communist Party in the United States. By the 1960s, this program was targeting Civil Rights leaders like King.
"That's the moment where the FBI is plotting and thinking that Michaux may be useful," Martin told Radio Diaries. "They will call Michaux into service. Anytime they need someone to launder information for them, they'll call in Michaux and he'll do so on his radio broadcast."
As King became more public with his grievances against Hoover, Michaux went more public with his grievances against King. Michaux made headlines in 1964 for writing a letter to King, calling on him to apologize to Hoover for creating a "feud that now threatens America." The following year, Michaux and his followers picketed one of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference meetings. Speaking to the New York Times, Michaux argued that King's demands, such as an economic boycott of the state of Alabama, could "destroy the progress the Negro has made."
"Don't worry about 'em in Alabama or anywhere else, all of us are going to die," Michaux preached in a 1963 broadcast. "But what we have to do is make sure when we do die, we got a home in the sky. And don't let malice, or envy, don't let the newspapers, nor the radios stir you up. Just get on your knees and pray for 'em."
"Michaux is saying, all this protest, all this nonsense, all this jostling for rights is absurd," Martin says. "He goes about saying that racial equality is a worthy thing to pursue but it's never going to materialize until God establishes his rule in people's hearts. Martin Luther King's dream is just silly."
The rift between King and Michaux left some church members torn.
"I remember feeling a conflict," says Ashcraft-Eason. "There was the Civil Rights Movement, that was good. There was the Church of God, that was good. So, how do you live with those two forces?"
Black newspapers criticized Michaux's antagonism towards King. Responding to the Church of God's picket of King's meetings, the Baltimore Afro-American wrote that given Michaux has been a "vigorous campaigner for equal rights," they "regret to see him on the side of the oddballs."
"You had entertainers of the day, popular entertainers of the day who were coming out in support of Civil Rights," says Martin. "He didn't adjust. He stayed with the 'Happy Am I' formula. And I think many Americans at this time, especially Black Americans, began to not really enjoy the form."
Michaux died of a heart attack in October of 1968, just months after King's assassination.
"People often don't want to acknowledge that [Michaux] had such a popular following because his politics now, in retrospect, were on the wrong side of history," Martin says.
Michaux's church, the Gospel Spreading Church of God, still stands on Georgia Avenue, across from Howard University Hospital. The congregation is smaller now, but they still meet for services on the first and third Sunday of each month. Now in his 90s, Sturdivant is still a member. He helps publish the church's paper, The Happy News. Michaux's sermons are still often printed in that paper.
"There was only one Elder Michaux," Sturdivant says. "We just try to live according to the gospel that he preached. What he taught us is still true. He's not here, but the gospel is still here."
This story was produced by Mycah Hazel and the team at Radio Diaries. It was edited by Deborah George, Joe Richman and Ben Shapiro. You can find more stories on the Radio Diaries Podcast.
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