James David Manning

New York City authorities claim that ATLAH owes $1.02 million in unpaid taxes and unpaid water bills. In 2016 the church was due to be sold at a public auction, and The Ali Forney Center, a nonprofit organization providing transitional homes for homeless LGBT youth raised money to purchase it, reaching its target of $200,000 to buy the church. In September 2016, a judge vacated the foreclosure and sale order, ruling the property cannot be forced to be sold until such time that ATLAH is found to actually owe the taxes the city claims it owes. After the court ruling, Manning threatened to publicly burn the rainbow flag as a celebration, which caused the Ali Forney Center to organize a protest outside of the church. The case remains in the courts as of 2022.

On August 4, 2014, he prognosticated that Obama and Vladimir Putin would be outed as gay within 100 days.

In May 2010 Manning staged a show trial of Barack Obama at ATLAH for wire fraud, with Manning acting as prosecutor. Although the treason and sedition charges had been deleted from consideration at the trial, Manning expressed the opinion that Obama should be hanged.

Manning continued his criticisms of Obama after his election, frequently calling him a criminal and "long-legged mack daddy." He produced a video in summer 2009 in which he predicted that there would be a white backlash against Obama, complete with riots, and he attended one of the first "birther" events. In an interview with the Israeli radio station Arutz Sheva, Manning asserted that Obama had chosen to befriend Muslims instead of Jews; he also offered praise of Meir Kahane.

Manning came to public attention during the 2008 presidential election after ATLAH posted several sermons of his on YouTube that were harshly critical of Obama. Among other accusations, he called Obama's mother "white trash" for becoming pregnant by a black man out of wedlock, an issue he discussed during a press conference at the National Press Club on December 8, 2008.

Manning is fiercely opposed to the gentrification of Harlem and calls for its residents to boycott its shops, restaurants, doctors, banks and churches. That action, combined with a general rent strike, would force all property owners out of Harlem, he said, leaving the neighborhood to its rightful inheritors: black people. Manning said the intent of the boycott was to return Harlem to its pre-gentrification days of 1990, without the crack cocaine, crime, and boarded-up buildings. His hope, he says, is that declining property values will make housing affordable for black people.

He became pastor at Bethelite Missionary Baptist Church several years after prison. After 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. In 1991, he changed his church's name to ATLAH, an acronym for “All the Land Anointed Holy”.

James David Manning (born February 20, 1947) is an American pastor at the ATLAH World Missionary Church. Manning grew up in Red Springs, North Carolina, and has been with ATLAH since 1981. ATLAH stands for All The Land Anointed Holy, which is Manning's name for Harlem.

James David Manning was born on February 20, 1947, in Red Springs, North Carolina. He grew up in the town, which was then segregated. He picked cotton and pulled tobacco as a child, then took a bus to New York the day he graduated from high school. He worked as a marketing representative for Procter & Gamble. He became radicalized in the 1960s and said he was driven by his hatred of white people. As a younger man, Manning burglarized 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 .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}3+1⁄2 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.