Pastor Manning grew up outside the town of Red Springs, North Carolina, which was then segregated. He picked cotton and tobacco as a boy, and took a bus to New York the day he graduated from high school. He became radicalized in the 1960s and said he was driven by his hatred of white people.
As a younger man, Manning burgled homes, mostly on Long Island. Between 1969 and 1974, he said, he broke into as many as 100 houses, and once threatened an associate with a loaded shotgun. He spent about three and a half years in prison in New York and Florida for burglary, robbery, larceny, criminal possession of a weapon, and other charges before his release in 1978. While in prison, he became a devout Christian. Manning has said that his past life of crime and then incarceration have helped to shape his wider perspective upon life, and that he doesn't shy away from discussing it.
Beginning study in 1982, Manning graduated from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York where he was awarded a Master of Divinity in 1985. During his graduate studies, Manning went on a religious study tour to Latin America, and later to Africa.
Manning came to public attention in the 2008 presidential election after ATLAH posted several sermons of his that were harshly critical of Democratic candidate Barack Obama on the website YouTube.
Manning defended his sermons in an interview on Fox News, saying that "we also have to talk about his character."
In his sermons and in video messages posted on his church's Web site and on YouTube, Pastor Manning has denounced the influence of Charles Rangel, Al Sharpton, Cornel West and Jay-Z.
