In the mid-twentieth century most African Americans belonged to a church, often Baptist. Congregations ranged from storefronts to megachurches with eleven thousand members. Ministers might exert enormous sway over churchgoers, commanding resources in the millions of dollars, living handsomely, and influencing the black vote through their sought-after endorsements. Unsurprisingly, many clerics jealously guarded their perquisites. Baptist politics were tumultuous and could be violent. A photographer for Jet magazine sued after a burly preacher attacked him during the National Baptist Convention (NBC) meeting in Chicago in 1952. The photographer’s crime was having recorded men of the cloth “quarreling” on stage. Nearly ten years later, the dais remained a site of contestation as competing factions tried to crowd each other off the platform during the Baptist convention in Kansas City. Two men fell off the stage, with one sustaining a skull fracture and lapsing into a coma. As Taylor Branch relates it, “A staircase to the platform collapsed under the weight of the antagonists jammed on it, scattering and bruising dozens of people.” The Kansas City police arrived on the scene to break up skirmishes that had erupted among the expensively tailored pastors.

What would lead the purveyors of Jesus’s message of peace to public brawls? The Chicago Defender slyly intimated that votes for Ike were for sale in the Windy City in 1956. Clergy identified as having supported Eisenhower’s reelection were angered that their names were used but they had not been paid. Sums as large as $30,000 were allegedly on offer.