"Lightfoot Solomon Michaux" (November 7,1884-October 20,1968)

Radio evangelists born the son of John Michaux a fish peddler and grocer,and Mary Blanche.Solomon whose ancestry was African,Indian,and French Jewish,spent his formative years in Newyork News among Jewish and white gentile merchants  on Jefferson Avenue,the main commercial street where the Michauxs lived in quarters above the family's store.He attended the Twenty-second Street School,quiting after the fourth grade to become a seafood peddler.Impressed with the town's commercial atmosphere,he aspired to be a successful businessman.While engage in one business venture,he met Mary Eliza Pauline,an orphan of mixed raced.They married in 1906;they had no children of their own but helped raised raise his two younger sisters.
During World War I,Solomon obtained government contracts to furnish food to defense establishments.With the profits from his enterprises he moved his business to Hopewell,Virginia,in 1917.Finding no churches in that wartime boomtown,Solomon & Eliza joined with a Filipino evangelist to found a church there.His wife subsequently convinced him to accept the call to preach,and in 1918 he was licensed and ordained in the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. He returned to Newport News in 1919,went into business with his daddy,and launched a tent revival.The first 150 of Solomon's converts formed a congregation within the Church of Christ denomination.In 1921  the Michaux congregation seceded from the Church of Christ of God.This Church,along with its other releated operations, was incorporated under an umbrella grouping known as the Gospel Spreading Tabernacle Association.In 1922 Solomon and several of his members were arrested for singing on the streets of Newport News during early-morning hours while inviting townsfolk to join the church.When Solomon was fined,he unsuccessfully appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court,contending that his actions were based on a directive from God.In 1924 he began to  establish branch churches in cities along the East Coast as he followed members who had migrated north to find jobs during the postwar recession.Solomon began his radio ministry in 1929 at station WJSV in Washington,D.C.and became famous as a radio evangelists.The broadcast moved to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1932,the eve of radio's golden era.As a result of the radio program's syncopated signature song,"Happy Am I," Solomon became known from coast to coast and overseas as the "Happy AM I Preacher." His aphorisms and fundamentalist-like sermons of hope and good neighborliness and caught the attention of millions.His wife,an exhorter and the premier broadcast soloist,was a regular on the radio program.Solomon's radio program was so popular that American and foreign dignitaries
flocked to his live,theatrically staged radio broadcasts.The British Bradcasting Corporation contracted with him for two broadcasts in the British Empire,in 1936 and 1938.Booking agents and moviemakers offered him contracts.In 1924 he collaborated with Jack Goldberg to make one commercial film,We've Come a Long,Long Way.
During the Great Depression,Solomon used his radio pulpit to offer free housing and employment services to the African American & white indigent,and he invited the hungry to sell copies of the church's Happy News paper in exchange for meals in the Happy News Café..After President Herbert Hoover evicted the Bonus Army (fifteen thousand unemployed World War I veterans and their families who converged on the capital in 1932 to demand immediate payment of bonuses that were not due until 1945) for which Solomon had been holding worship services,he used his radio pulpit to campaign for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932,1936, and 1940.For this reason,observers  credit Solomon with influencing the first African Americans to leave the Republican Party and enter the Democratic fold in
1932.Political observers were baffled therefore when,in 1952,Solomon campaigned as vigorously for the Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower as he had for Roosevelt & Harry Truman.Crowds attended Solomon's annual baptisms,which he moved from the Potomac River Bank in 1938 and held in Griffith Stadium until 1961.These patriotically festooned stadium services were full of pageantry,fireworks,enthralling
precision drills and choral singing from the 156-voice Cross Choir.Vocal renditions were supported by the syncopated instrumentation of the church band,while hundreds were baptized annually in a canvas-covered tank at center field.About Solomon and baptismal services,Bill Sunday,quipped that "any man who had to hire a national baseball park,
seating 35,000 to hold... meetings is the man to preach the gospel."One
reporter observed that Solomon should "not be passed off as just another gospel spreader...but should  be regarded as a shrewd businessman."Solomon had made lucrative deals in real estate,such as the beachfront in Jamestown,Virginia,where intended to develop a National Memorial to the Progress  of the Colored Race of America.His plans for selling investments shares fell through when lawsuits that alleged mismanagement of money were filled against him.Around 1940 he purchased the Old Benning Race Track in Washington and receive $3.5 million from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to construct Mayfair Manisons,a 594-unit housing development,which was completed in 1946,Despite allegations on Capitol Hill in the 1950s of favoritism from federal lending agencies,in 1964 he acquired &6 million in FHA loans to build Paradise Manor,a 617-apartment complex adjacent to Mayfair Manisons.These successes were due in part to his friendship with prominent Washingtonians,some of whom were honorary members of the "Radio Church."
While Solomon initially espoused race consciousness and proclaimed the brotherhood of all races,he became increasingly conservative in his later years.In the 1960s he criticized the civil rights and African American nationalist movements and alleged that the activities of Elijah Muhammad & Martin Luther King Jr.
were contributing to racial polarization.
Because of his successful radio ministry in the nation's capital,Solomon had moved the church's headquarters there in 1929 and had renamed and reincorporated it several times.During the forty-nine years of his career he established seven churches and several branches and attracted a membership that numbered in the thousands.Solomon amassed and bequeathed to the church an estate,consisting of temples,apartment dwellings,cafes,tracts of land,-and private residences in several cities, that was estimated to be in excess of &20 million in 1968. When Solomon died in Washington, D.C.,his radio program was estimated to be the longest continuous broadcast in radio annals.Continuing to operate under the name Church of God, the institution founded by Solomon had thre thousands members and eleven churches by the mid 1990s. He most significant contribution was in religious broadcasting,where he pioneered in the use of electronic and print media for worldwide evangelism.