D.C.’s Gunslinging Preacher

In 1953, Reverend Genora Augustus Taylor, 44 years old, was having a rough time of his mission to convert the desperate characters in his Northwest D.C. neighborhood. His makeshift church in a former pawnshop was shut down for the rather unusual reason of only having one bathroom, so he had to preach wherever he could. That included the T&T Restaurant, which he partly owned. Located at 1213 7th St. NW, but now demolished, the all-night restaurant was a “gathering place of streetwalkers, dope addicts, sidewalk drunks and brawlers.” Speaking to a reporter about his troubles, he admitted that he hadn’t had much success in conversion, but he got some “rough drunks, two or three hustlers and one dope addict to go to church,” although “I never got any of them turned completely around.” His ministry hit a hiccup on August 8, when he ordered 21-year-old James Cooper out of his restaurant for an unspecified offense. Words were exchanged, Cooper threw an empty whiskey bottle at Taylor, and Taylor responded by bringing out a 20-gauge shotgun and shooting Cooper in the right arm. Both men faced a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, but the outcome of the case is unclear. Local roughs obviously didn’t get the message not to mess with the Reverend, for on the night of September 11, Romeo McKenney (McKinney in some accounts), 32, started to violently argue with his common-law wife in Taylor’s restaurant. “[A] brawler of some repute and a known police character,” McKenney had a police record stretching back 21 years and including a 6-year prison stint. Taylor had previously managed to get him to promise to go to church, and he was apparently one of the few people who could talk McKenney down when he got angry. Taylor later said that “I tried to quiet him, but that was one time he wouldn’t listen to me.” McKenney paused from beating his wife to throw a chair at her, then took out a knife and stabbed her. (She survived.) Seeing enough, Reverend Taylor pulled a .32 caliber pistol from under the counter and opened fire. Taylor said that “I intended to hit him in the fleshy part of the leg,” but his aim wasn’t very good and he hit him in the left side of his chest, killing him. As a reporter ruefully noted, Taylor had “killed one of his best prospects” for conversion. Fortunately for Taylor, a coroner’s jury convened the next day and swiftly declared the killing to be a justifiable homicide. Taylor was back at work at his restaurant that very night. Newspapers contain no more mentions of Reverend Taylor, so evidently other neighborhood characters realized that he was one man of God they did not want to trifle with.