Document Type
Articles
Abstract
Southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas experienced a series of disturbingly similar ax murders from November 1909 to August 1912. In nearly every case, a black family living within a mile of the Sunset Limited line of the Southern Pacific Railroad was brutally slaughtered in their own home, victims of a surreptitious assailant. Eventually, a young black woman would take credit for some of the crimes, ushering in the language of “religious fanaticism” as a potential motive. This confession sparked an intense period of criminalization of black male preachers, with a particular focus on Pentecostal leaders in southwestern Louisiana. This article examines the arrest of these clergymen, arguing that the white media’s willingness to manufacture them into cult leaders unwittingly recognized the power of black preachers within black communities. The construction of black ministers as criminalized figureheads relied on racist and pejorative stereotypes about black religiosity, but it also required black pastors to be imagined as atypically influential. Ultimately, these men were detained because their status as religious leaders was manufactured as too powerful—and therefore too dangerous—to ignore.
Recommended Citation
Henley, Lauren N.
(2026)
"Powerful Pulpits: Black Preachers as Cultish Leaders in the Axman Murders, 1909-1912,"
Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies: Vol. 4, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/ijls/vol4/iss2/4
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, New Religious Movements Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons