He was senior pastor at the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, California from 1961 until his death; under his leadership, it became one of the largest African-American congregations in the US.
Despite being born into poverty, he managed to obtain a four-year scholarship to Prairie View A&M University near Houston to study Agronomy.
He also became active in social issues, lobbying for government programs to provide housing and other basic amenities to poor, often rural blacks.
In early 1961 he moved to Los Angeles to pastor the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, which went on to become a hotspot of political and social activism in the city.
Other evangelists with whom he aligned himself included Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, whom he supported during their respective sex scandals in the 1980s.
In 1998 he publicly defended the National Baptist Convention's embattled president Henry Lyons, who was ultimately forced to resign following charges of racketeering.