T. L. Barrett

Thomas Lee Barrett, Jr. (born 1944), better known professionally as Pastor T.L. Barrett and Rev. T.L. Barrett, is an American Pentecostal preacher and gospel musician. Barrett is a preacher on Chicago's South Side who released gospel albums in the 1970s; as a musician, he was largely unknown outside of Chicago until a resurgence in interest in his music occurred in the 2010s.

Barrett was born in New York City, but his family moved to Chicago when he was young. Barrett's father was a gospel musician who was involved with the music at a church run by Barrett's aunt. He attended Wendell Phillips High School, where he was expelled. His father died when Barrett was 16, and he then moved to Queens, New York, where he lived with his uncle and took a job at Flushing Hospital extracting glands from cadavers. At 17 he was arrested for failing to pay child support to a 37-year-old who bore his child. In New York, he worked as a shoeshiner and played piano at parties and at venues such as the Waldorf Astoria and the Village Gate. Eventually, he decided to become a preacher, returning to Chicago and starting his own youth-focused ministry.

His career as a pastor began in 1966. He was pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, in the Washington Park neighborhood of Chicago in the 1970s. After a theological disagreement with the elders of the Mt. Zion church, he left to form his own ministry, the Life Center COGIC church, in the same neighborhood.

Barrett was charged in 1989 with orchestrating a pyramid scheme, by encouraging his congregants to donate to a series of economic development fundraisers which yielded over two million dollars in total. The financial viability of the plan was judged by a court to be infeasible, and Barrett was ordered to place his church's title in receivership as a result. He was ordered to repay 1.2 million dollars by 1998, which he did successfully.

In 1998, the Illinois House of Representatives honored Barrett for contributions to civic life in Chicago. The city of Chicago named a portion of Garfield Boulevard, close to his Mt. Zion church location, in Barrett's honor. In 2007, Barrett's youngest daughter, Kleo, was murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

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