Charles Southall III has been a preacher at the First Emanuel Baptist Church for more than three decades. But on Tuesday, just before a federal court gave him a five-year jail term and ordered him to give back roughly $900,000 he had stolen, he spoke to a small fraction of his flock from a podium in U.S. District Court.
The agreement was reached as federal prosecutors prepared to present a case that, in their opinion, would have demonstrated that the reverend solicited and stole tithes from his parishioners, sold church properties and pocketed the profits, and siphoned for himself funding that had been set aside to build a charter school. Southall, 65, pleaded guilty in October to a single count of money laundering.
In total, Southall gained $889,565 from his efforts, prosecutors said.
From the courtroom podium on Tuesday, Southall turned toward more than two dozen divided parishioners and apologized. “By no means am I perfect,” he said. “For 34 years, I have preached, but I haven’t preached about a perfect Charles Southall. I’ve preached about a perfect Christ.”
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Yet, there was contradicting evidence presented at the sentencing hearing, which was place in Judge Jay Zainey’s courtroom. A video of Southall taken on the day he entered a guilty plea was screened before Zainey gave the punishment. Southall ignored the terms of his written contract in the video, which was recorded during a Zoom Bible study.
“I did not receive anything that was not due to me, in my mind,” Southall said in the recording.
After calling the video a “mockery” of the court, Zainey read aloud, one by one, the crimes of which Southall is accused in the factual basis for his plea agreement, including that: Southall diverted a $10,000 tithe from a parishioner into his own accounts; solicited more than $106,000 for church building improvements, but kept the money for himself; took more than $500,000 from sales of church properties; and, as board president of Edgar P. Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy, a now-shuttered New Orleans charter school, raised funding to build a Baton Rouge-based sister school, but the school was never built.
In signing the document, Southall acknowledged that prosecutors could prove all elements of their case against him. And on Tuesday, he confirmed that he was guilty of each of the offenses.
Parishioner Joseph Dorsey said that he had followed Southall blindly and looked up to him as a “spiritual icon.” Now, Dorsey said, he considers him to be a “scoundrel” motivated by greed.
Ashonta Wyatt, who was principal of Edgar P. Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy, asked Zainey give Southall no leniency. “Everything he got, he got on the backs of poor Black people,” she said. “Please don’t be fooled by him. He is poison.”
In addition to his five-year prison sentence — which fell within the recommended sentencing guidelines, but just shy of the maximum — Zainey ordered Southall to pay restitution of the $889,565 he took. Southall will have to pay approximately $116,000 before he surrenders himself to prison in April.
He will begin making payments on the remainder — nearly $779,000 — from prison, Zainey said.
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