By MÁRIO MAESTRI*
The Nation of Islam suffered the consequences of the crime it committed in assassinating Malcolm X, stagnating as a sectarian religious group, as it remains to this day.
Origin and end unknown
We know little about the origins and death of Wallace D. Fard, founder of the Nation of Islam. He was born on February 26, 1877, in Egypt, New Zealand, or even the United States. After 1934, we lost any reliable information about him. Testimonies and photos of Wallace Fard show him to be a white man, or a very fair-skinned mixed-race man, short, with straight black hair, perhaps of Asian origin, and of a fragile physical build. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p.190.] He arrived in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930 or 1931, at the age of 54, with a life that was practically unknown behind him.
In the early 1930s, the Depression was putting pressure on American society, and the Great Migration of the black population from the South to the North began on the eve of the First World War in 1914. In 1930, the city of Detroit had a population of one and a half million, including 120 blacks. In 1910, they accounted for only 1,23% of the city's inhabitants. With the migratory flow, in 2010, the black community would exceed 80% of the urban population, in a state of severe depopulation. [CENSUS, 2020.]
In Detroit, Wallace Fard worked in black neighborhoods, selling oriental silks and exotic objects door-to-door, proposing that the fabrics he offered were those used in the holy city of Mecca, where he claimed he and the ancestors of African-Americans came from. And, with the fabrics, he distributed religious, moral and nutritional information. As he expanded his audience, he began to minister his teachings in small groups and, when he obtained the necessary support, he opened a place of worship, the “Temple of Allah of Islam”, the original name of the Nation of Islam. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 230 et seq.]
Occupying empty space
Wallace Fard began his preaching at a favorable time. The previous year, Timothy Drew, founder, under the name Noble Drew Ali, of the “Temple of Moorish Science,” a highly successful religion, very active in Detroit, aimed at the black community, had died. Initially, Wallace Fard had presented himself as the reincarnation of that Prophet, who had died in 1929. [MARSH, 2000, p. 63.]
In 1927, four years before Wallace Fard disembarked and began his preaching in Detroit, Jamaican Marcus Garvey, the most successful black American leader, had been exiled to his country and his organization, the UNIA, had entered into crisis. [MAESTRI, 21/09/2024.] And the Great Depression, already in place, exacerbated the disorientation of workers, especially blacks, who had recently arrived and were under the weight of racism, favoring the spread of creeds and sects.
Wallace Fard preached a syncretic and bastardized Islamic cult, initially relying on Bible, and then in the Quran, using the preaching model of southern black Christian pastors. He instructed a healthy diet; prohibited the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and drugs; recommended that the faithful seek economic independence and that they assume Muslim surnames, keeping their first name, as he himself had done.
Frank S. Cherry and the black american jews
Wallace Fard Muhammad's preaching was not inspired by heaven, but it came very close to him. At the end of the 19th century, churches, itinerant pastors, and various prophets were springing up throughout the United States, proposing diverse cults among the black population, pointing out paths to salvation in this life and the next.
In the 1900s, among the good news announced, it was proposed that African-Americans were, in fact, Ethiopian Hebrews, brought as slaves to the United States. Around 1915, Frank S. Cherry [c.1875-1963], a former railroad worker and long-haul sailor, dark-skinned, born in the Deep South, announced that he had received the divine mission to guide the black population while he was abroad. This he would do, in Philadelphia, in the state of Pennsylvania, that year, when he organized the “Church of the Living God, the Pillar of Truth for All Nations.”
FS Cherry revealed that Adam and Eve, Jesus Christ, and God himself were black. The first white man was Gehazi, who was made white by a curse after sinning gravely. The yellow race arose when he had children with black women. The “Church of the Living God” did not accept Caucasians, but mainly blacks. The Prophet said that the South, where he was born, was “worse than hell.” FS Cherry revealed that black Americans were descended from members of the Israelite tribe expelled from Babylon to Central and East Africa, from where they were sold as captives by the Romans. Contemporary white Israelites were false Jews who did not even recognize the holiness of Jesus Christ.
Naturally bad
The Prophet argued that white people were naturally evil and disliked by God, and that civilization would only improve with the elevation of black Jews to rule. The world would last six thousand years, beginning a new phase every two thousand years. In 2000, Jesus Christ - a black man - would return to Earth, starting a racial war that would lead to the extinction of the white race.
The “Church of the Living God” did not call its temples synagogues and did not collect funds, but charged tithes. It prohibited the eating of pork and permitted the drinking of wine, and imposed strict morals, allowing only marriages between believers. The worship did not require special attire, and the Prophet preached in his usual, unrefined clothes.
Without perhaps ever having attended school, FS Cherry had studied Yiddish, citing the talmud, considered superior to Bible, also a holy book. He supported Marcus Garvey's black nationalist and separatist movement. After his death in 1963, his son replaced him as head of the “Church of the Living God,” which had several divisions. In the USA, we still have “black Hebrews” without any contact with the false Hebrews of Israel. [FAUSET, 2002, p. 31-40; DRAPER, 1971, p. 71-72.]
Timothy Drew and the American Moorish Blacks
Wallace Fard was directly influenced by, or even participated in, the Black Moorish Church founded by Thomas or Timothy Drew, of whom he may have initially presented himself as a reincarnation. Timothy Drew was described as a “tall, slender, dark-skinned Negro,” believed to have been born in 1886 in North Carolina or Virginia. In 1913, at the age of 27, while preaching on the streets of Newark, New Jersey, near New York, he founded what would be the first well-known Black American Muslim cult. [MARSH, 2000, p.96.]
Moorish Jews
Timothy Drew achieved greater success than J. S. Cherry and the proposal of the black Jews. In 1928, his creed was expanding rapidly, especially in Chicago, in the northern state of Illinois, where he established himself, consolidating the “Temple of Moorish Science in America”. [DRAPER, 1971, p. 77-81] Seventeen “Temples” were opened in Detroit, New York [Harlem], Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland and in cities in the South. The religion reached 20 to 35 thousand followers during its founder’s lifetime.
Authors suggest that, impressed by the absence of references to race in Eastern philosophy and religion, Timothy Drew found, in the identification of black Africans with the East, an overcoming of the handicap imposed on that community by the dominant racist culture. [LINCOLN, 1963, p. 51 et seq.] Recent readings present a more complex interpretation of the “Time of Moorish Science”.
In addition to the reference to Islam, Timothy Drew proposed that Jesus Christ and his disciples were Asians, like African-Americans, who were ethnically descended from Moors of the ancient Moabite tribe, having forgotten their original language, Arabic, and their religion, Islam. It was up to the “Temple of Moorish Science” to show African-Americans their true origin, religion and language.
Moors, simply
Timothy Drew rejected as unfounded the terms “Negroes,” “Colored Men,” “Ethiopians,” and “Africans.” African-Americans should identify themselves as “American Moors.” He therefore advised his followers to add Islamic-Moorish references to their names, thus expressing their true identity. nationality. Timothy had called himself Noble Drew Ali.
Members of the “Temple of Moorish Science” wore colorful Moorish costumes and turbans, and men were required to wear a red Moroccan-style fez at all times. To prove their true nationality, the Temple issued members with an “identity and nationality card.”
The document bore an Islamic symbol (a star and a crescent moon); an image of intertwined hands; a number “7” in a circle; and it was written that the bearer honored “all the divine prophets, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha,” under the blessings of our God, Allah, who is therefore superior to all of them. This reaffirmed the belief in Islam of the bearer of the identity card, integrating him into the national body, as emphasized in the document, which was signed by Noble Drew Ali, the Prophet.
In search of lost nationality
Timothy Drew proposed that each community was inserted into its own religious, cultural, historical, etc. complex, which determined its nationality. The black population found itself stripped of this quality, without even a name to define it. It would acquire the original nationality that it had lost and not recognized, by claiming the Moorish ethnicity, the Arabic language, the Muslim belief and adopting a name specific to its origin. Thus, it integrated itself, like the other communities, into the American nationality. [LINCOLN, 1963, p. 54 et seq; MARSH, 2000, p. 63.].
The “Time of Moorish Science” was not open to “Europeans”, Jews, Hindus, Japanese, etc. because they already had a nationality: religion, language, culture, ethnic name. All these communities, like the Moors, should be welcomed as citizens, in this case, of the United States of America. Everyone would thus have two flags, and two loyalties, without contradictions.
Noble Drew Ali's two-part conception of nationality and citizenship led him to never propose migration to North Africa in general, and to Morocco in particular, the nation from which they were said to be natives. This was a qualitative break with the black national separatism embraced by Marcus Garvey's UNIA and, later, by Wallace Fard's Nation of Islam.
All Americans
Noble Drew Ali advised the faithful not to enter into conflict with the authorities and with the “Europeans”, proposing that they could and should swear allegiance to the flag of the United States. [DEW, 2019, p. 178.] Even though Morocco was the motherland, the root of the nationality of the “American Moors”, they were full American citizens.
The Prophet wrote Holy Quran of the Moorish Temple of Ciêance from America [ "Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America”], 64 pages long, in which he presents himself as an envoy of Allah and refers to the concepts of belief. The book, which contains almost nothing from the Koran, was secret and could only be read by believers. [FAUSET, 2002, p. 46-48.]
It is said that the Moorish creed had a little pronounced millenarian element, when it proposed that the “Europeans” would be destroyed, without a set date, by divine action, when the sign of a star appeared in the sky against a crescent moon. A magical-religious promise that interpreted the desires not only of the black “Moors” to free themselves from the people who had been and were their executioners.
No Caucasians
The day of rest was Friday, and the faithful were required to pray daily at sunrise, at noon, and at sunset, facing Mecca, as in Islam. Worship was held in the Temple, preferably on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, with strict observance of the start and end times. Men and women sat separately.
Strict morality was required. Polygamy was not accepted and divorce was frowned upon. Believers, vegetarians, could not eat meat or eggs, drink, smoke, dance or use cosmetics. The man was responsible for maintaining the house and the woman remained under his obedience, taking care of the children.
Despite the leniency of the preaching of the Moorish Temple, where his followers were numerous, he encouraged increased self-esteem and autonomous behavior among the “Moors”, commonly breaking with the submissive ways of blacks considered normal and required by the dominant racist culture. This motivated a reaction, especially from the police, who were particularly racist.
Noble Drew Ali called his followers to remain calm, reminding them that he preached above all the moral and religious elevation of the country as a whole, in search of the days of moral and religious redemption, when the United States would have one of “the greatest civilized and prosperous governments in the world.” [DEW, 2019, p.3.]
With the donkeys full
As the movement grew, the Prophet appointed direct assistants, called sheikhs, to lead the various Temples. Very soon, fierce disputes arose over his leadership of the Moorish Temple. In Chicago, in 1929, the Prophet's leadership was questioned by Sheikh Claude Green, a former butler who was murdered in March of that year. Although he was not in the city during the crime, Noble Drew Ali was accused of the murder, imprisoned and possibly beaten, despite having tuberculosis.
Police mistreatment aggravated the Prophet's health, causing his death on July 20, 1929. The headless Moorish Temple of Sciences lost strength, fragmenting into hundreds of black groups and thinkers who continue to claim and revere Noble Drew Ali as an intellectual reference or prophet sent by Allah to the United States. [MARSH, 2000, p. 59-71; DEW, 2019, p.3, 36; DRAPER, 1971, p. 69-71; FAUSET, 2002, p. 41-51.]
When the Nation of Islam emerged, many “Moors” transferred themselves, bag and baggage, to the cult of Wallace Fard, mutatis mutandis, a near continuation of the one founded by Noble Drew Ali, which had already been supported by the Black Jewish Temple, by FS Cherry. The Nation of Islam took its hatred of white people to extremes, considering them the “devil” of black people, to be destroyed soon. This would be a source of attraction among the believers of the Moorish Science Temple.
Wallace Fard and the Origins of the Nation of Islam
Wallace Fard Muhammad's preaching was progressing, especially in the city of Detroit, when, on November 20, 1932, Robert Harris, a mentally ill man, carried out a ritual murder in front of members, like himself, of the "Temple of Allah of Islam", the original name of the Nation of Islam, as we have seen. After the crime was reported by neighbors, Robert Harris, the murderer, Wallace Fard, the Prophet, and his first secretary, Ugan Ali, were arrested.
Robert Harris was sent to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane as a lunatic, and Wallace Fard and his assistant were released after psychiatric examinations. Ugan Ali, like Judas, is said to have renounced his faith and pledged to contribute to its dissolution. Wallace Fard, in turn, was forced to leave Detroit forever. On December 7, 1932, the Prophet boarded a train under police escort for the nearby city of Chicago.
Due to the scandal, the cult was renamed the Nation of Islam and Wallace Fard placed Elijah Poole, a black mechanic who was unemployed at the time and originally from the state of Georgia in the southern United States, where he had an unbridled hold on the church, at the head of the Detroit Temple. apartheid. He had been given the Muslim surname of Karrem. It is alleged that he had organized a successful demonstration in front of the court, with about two hundred participants, demanding the freedom of the two detainees. At that time, the Nation of Islam was just one of many black American creeds, with a few hundred or so adherents.
Back in jail again
On May 25, 1933, back in Detroit, Wallace Fard, known for preaching on street corners, was arrested and expelled from the city once again. On September 25, he was arrested again, this time in Chicago, while preaching in a rented room, without any major consequences. With perhaps five thousand followers, the Prophet began to institutionalize the movement.
Among other initiatives, he founded an Islamic school attached to the Temples, where a curriculum that emphasized mathematics, astronomy and the study of civilizations was taught to school-age students. In schools for girls, domestic tasks were taught and adults participated in a paramilitary corps, the “Fruits of Islam”.
In January 1934, Detroit received an alert about the evasion of compulsory schooling by children of Nation of Islam members. In March or April, the “University of Islam” was raided, Wallace Fard was arrested, released on parole, and charged with operating an educational institution without a proper license.
In Chicago, Elijah Poole met with the Prophet and arranged for his rise as a public figure, renaming himself with the same surname as Wallace Fard, that is, Muhammad. Perhaps, the disappearance of the founder of the “black Muslims” was also organized. After 1934, there was no more precise news of Wallace Fard. It is speculated that he left the country under pressure from the FBI. It was the end of an era. [CLEGG III, 1997, p. 119.]
End of an era
Wallace Fard, a white man, had not rejected the black character of the African-American, as Noble Drew Ali And differentiating himself from him and Frank S. Cherry, he used, with greater emphasis, radical anti-white preaching to spread his creed especially among the poor population that arrived from the South, in serious difficulties, during the years of the Depression. A population that had known hell on earth, during slavery, and after it, during the Apartheid.
A community whose main political and religious references were BT Washington, who died in 1915, and Marcus Garvey, who was expelled from the country in 1927. Neither of them left a political and religious heir. Wallace Fard referred to the “white devil” in his theology, without emphasizing it. His successor, Elijah Poole, a black man who had come from the Deep South, would set out on this path with fury and success. In the South, the term “black man’s devil” perfectly suited the white man. [CLEGG III, 1997, p. 71; MAESTRI, 21/09/2024; 12/07/2024.]
We know little for sure about Wallace Fard's preaching in the three or four years in which he began his preaching, gained his first followers, presented himself as a Prophet, laid the foundations of the Nation of Islam, and disappeared from the scene forever. Elijah Poole, his Prophet, and other witnesses of lesser caliber speak about him.
Wallace Fard wrote some texts, with wide dissonance with the dominant currents of Islam, about which he had little information. He published a canonical book during his lifetime, Teaching about the lost and found nation of Islam by a méall mathático"[Teachings for the Lost-Found Nation in a Mathematical Way]. And he would have dictated an orally transmitted document –Secret ritual of the Nation of Islam.
New Times
Elijah Poole Muhammad, the organization’s second-ranking leader, ended up winning the fierce power struggle that began with the eclipse of Wallace Fard in 1934, leading the Nation of Islam until his death in 1975, as we shall see. During this long period, he undertook a literal deification of Wallace Fard, presenting him as the incarnation of God, that is, of Allah. He proposed asking Wallace Fard directly “who he was and what his real name was.” He responded that this was what had been expected for two thousand years: “My name is Mahadi; I am God.”
According to this narrative by Elijah Poole, he became the sole prophet and the intermediary between Allah and his flock of the Nation of Islam. After 1934, Wallace Fard’s teachings were possibly re-elaborated and re-interpreted by Elijah Poole, who presented himself as having been chosen by Allah himself as “prime minister of Islam”. According to Malcolm X, who would in turn become Elijah Poole’s right-hand man, the latter proposed that he “heard from Fard’s lips things that he ‘had revealed to no one else’” [MUHAMMAD, 1973, chap. 8; MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 232].
Presenting himself as an unquestionable source of divine revelation, Elijah Poole would have the authority to present his theological proposals as emanating from God himself. And, as proposed, the leap in quality between the two builders of the Nation of Islam was radical. Wallace Fard was white, who had never experienced American racism firsthand. His successor and prophet, Elijah Poole, a black man, came from Georgia, where the slave owner's whip had very quickly been replaced by the slave owner's heel. Apartheid, to live, in the North, the endless consequences of discrimination and racial violence.
Elijah Muhammad: A Pilgrimage Began in Georgia
Elijah Robert Poole was born on October 7, 1897, in Sandersville, a small town in the state of Georgia, into a family of thirteen children, and his father was a Baptist preacher. From his earliest childhood, he was fed by biblical accounts commonly interpreted according to a liberating Christian eschatology by a black community seeking their liberation, on earth and in heaven.
After completing his education until the fourth grade, Elijah Poole worked as a child in manual labor to help support his family. He was not very strong, and left his father's home at the age of sixteen. In 1917, he married Clara Evans, with whom he had eight children. In addition to several other natural children, he had them when his power in the Nation of Islam was consolidated.
Since 1916, the migration of the black community from Georgia to the industrial North had become a mass phenomenon. Meanwhile, in that state, the racist dictatorship continued, largely to try to stop the departure of the exploited black workforce. Elijah Robert himself would say that he had witnessed the lynching of three black men. In 1923, he, his wife, children and relatives packed up their belongings and left for the North.
A new life
In Detroit, Elijah Poole worked as an industrial worker, in menial jobs, and participated in black political and religious movements. In 1931, under the scourge of the Depression, permanently semi-employed, at his wife's suggestion, he went to hear Wallace Fard preach. Like his brothers, he joined the cult of the “Temple of Allah of Islam”, and was renamed Elijah Karriem. [CLEGG III, 1997, p. 47 et passim.]
Due to his dedication to the creed he embraced without restraint, his deep knowledge of Bible, Since he was the son of a pastor, and certainly believed in the political-religious emancipation of black people, Elijah Poole fell into the graces of Wallace Fard, beginning his rise in the then rustic nomenclature of the future Nation of Islam.
As a sign of confidence in him and his abilities as a preacher and administrator, Wallace Fard gave him the leadership of Temple No. 2 in Chicago and, very soon, the leadership of the faith in that city, as it progressed. One of his brothers took command of the “Fruit of Islam” group, a kind of praetorian guard of the Prophet. Despite his lack of eloquence, he soon became Wallace Fard’s right-hand man.
After Allah's departure
In 1934, with the disappearance of Wallace Fard, Elijah Poole took over the leadership of Temple No. 1 in Detroit, in the context of a fierce dispute for leadership of the movement, even claimed by his brother. Under his initiative, the publication was launched Final Call to Islam, with little success, and later founded the “Muhammad University of Islam”, which still exists today, initially in strong conflict with the school authorities of Detroit and Chicago.
Elijah Poole's proposal that Wallace Drew was Allah in human form was not generally accepted, since it transformed him into a prophet, advancing him in the fierce struggle for power, which was taking place in arid terrain. The movement continued to experience police attacks, the persecution of "black Christians" and the difficulties posed by the economic crisis.
Due to a successful internal rebellion and threats to his life, Elijah Poole left Detroit, moving to Chicago, home of Temple No. 2. He then traveled to Milwaukee, at Wisconsin, just 150 miles from Chicago, where he founded Temple No. 3, supported by a tiny group of local followers. Finally, with the Nation of Islam under control, he settled in Washington, D.C., where he founded the fourth temple of the Nation of Islam and devoted himself to intense reading in the magnificent Library of Congress. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 232; III p. 121 et seq.]
Full steam ahead
Elijah Poole was the true builder of the Nation of Islam by defining and codifying the creed, practices and objectives of the political-religious movement. As Marcus Garvey's UNIA had proposed for the Nation of Islam, black Americans were foreign to the United States. Therefore, they should ignore the struggle for civil and political rights and only worry about creating a black nation-state.
However, contrary to what was proposed by the Jamaican, who had invested in Liberia as the American black homeland, Elijah Poole never worried about defining its location. [MAESTRI, 21/09/2024.] Elijah Poole referred to territories in Asia and Africa, and claimed regions of the United States and the subsidy, for 25 years, for the installation of the black population in them.
The Nation of Islam purchased 700 acres in 1966 in Dawson, Georgia, and smaller parcels of land in Alabama and Michigan to raise livestock and grow vegetables for its restaurants and supermarkets. The Nation of Islam encouraged black capitalist entrepreneurship, like the UNIA, but it successfully established its own businesses, restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, barber shops, etc., and had a controlling interest in a Texas bank, the Guaranty Bank and Trust Co.
Good example
In the 1970s, the Nation of Islam, a wealthy and powerful political-religious corporation, had around seventy schools throughout the country, attached to the Temples. The members of the Nation were supposed to behave as living examples for the black community. They were not allowed to drink, take drugs, dance, or gamble. Elijah Poole wrote two books recommending one meal a day and telling what “black Muslims” should and could not eat successfully. “[…] VEGETABLES, MILK, AND BUTTER are the right foods to eat […].” And, above all, they were not supposed to follow the eating habits of the “white devils,” which would make them sick. [MUHAMMAD, 1960, p. 29.]
Members of the Nation of Islam were expected to behave politely and with composure and to seek individual cultural and professional advancement. Men wore black clothing with white shirts and bow ties, which became almost a uniform of the movement. Women were expected to obey their husbands, fathers, and brothers and to take care of their homes and children as a priority. They were expected to be modest and moral, and not to behave like the immoral white devils who wore “dresses above the knee.” Women did not occupy a prominent role in the Nation of Islam. Members of the movement were expected to visit poor neighborhoods and prisons to obtain new adherents through proselytism. [MUHAMMAD, 1960, p. 28-31.]
Islamic Eschatological Theology of Elijah Muhammed
From 1934 onwards, black supremacist and anti-white racist preaching was consolidated in the Nation of Islam. And, like BT Washington and Marcus Garvey, the “black Muslims” ended up supporting the Apartheid and explicitly opposing the fight for civil and political rights of the black community. Elijah Poole's collaborationism would follow, with greater discretion, the sinister path of Marcus Garvey, when negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Ku Klux Klam. [MAESTRI, 12/10/2024; MALCOLM X, 2019.]
Elijah advanced a fluid black theology that claimed to be direct revelation from Wallace Fard, the embodiment of Allah. The dominant narrative referred to dark-skinned, straight-haired, Arabic-speaking mortal gods who lived some 66 trillion years ago. When an evil scientist exploded the Earth from the Moon, the tribe led by Shabazz, the sole survivor, settled on Earth, giving rise to the human race.
On Earth, the Shabazz tribe, a dark-skinned, not black, people with straight hair, had lived in the Nile Valley and in Mecca. Shabazz had led part of his tribe to Central Africa to strengthen its members who, due to the harsh climate, had had their hair hardened and their skin blackened. Meanwhile, among the 24 black wise men of the tribe, one, a deviant named Yakub, with an enormous head, would ruin everything.
Invention of the white race
Yakub, banished for his evil deeds to the Greek island of Patmos, some 6.600 years ago, was accompanied by his “fifty” nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine disciples. In revenge, Yakub began the creation of a “devilish race”, “colorless, white”, by genetic selection, killing the darker babies and crossing the whiter ones, when they grew up. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 188.]
His disciples continued the selective process for six hundred years until the white race with blue eyes emerged, made up of violent and lying beings, true demons, without the inner sanctity of the blacks. The non-black races were born from this selective process.
The white race had lived in exile in Europe, like true animals, after having tried and failed to conquer Mecca. By perfecting deception and trickery, they had freed themselves and enslaved the faction of the Shabazz tribe established in Central Africa, taking them to the United States as slaves. [BERG, 2017.]
Return to the origins
Wallace Fard, the embodiment of Allah, had left Mecca to begin the return of the black people, enslaved in America, “the chosen people,” back to their language, their religion, and their lost nation. Astronomy and advanced mathematics were prominent parts of the culture to be recovered. In fulfilling his mission, he left Elijah Poole as his prophet. [MUHAMMAD, 2013, p.87.]
For the Nation of Islam, the end of the present times was not in some uncertain future. It would occur in a few years, with the “rise” of the “non-white peoples of the earth” and the total extinction of the race of “devils.” [MUHAMMAD, 2013, p.251.] The racial war would be announced by the arrival of a “Mother Ship,” bringing in its wake Allah, who would usher in the reign of a perfect black people, supported by freedom, justice, and equality.
During his lifetime, Elijah Poole published a wealth of literature on what he proposed to be the teachings of Wallace Poole, Allah, and on other theses and interpretations of the Nation of Islam. This literature highlights the presentation and defense of anti-Semitic theses, denying the Holocaust and extremeizing the participation of Jews in the international slave trade. [MALCOLM X, 2019, p. 191; THRD, 2016; MUHAMMAD, 1973, Ch. 5 et passim.]
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
In May 1942, Elijah Poole was arrested in Washington, DC, for refusing to enlist in the army during World War II. Once paroled, he returned to Chicago, where he was arrested for the same reason and for instructing his followers to do the same. The FBI spread the information that the Nation of Islam, then little known, was a Japanese “fifth column.” During the war, the United States experienced a violent Revival national anti-black pogroms. [CLEGG III, 1997, p.220.]
Elijah Poole served his sentence from 1942 to 1946 in a federal prison in Michigan, directing the Nation of Islam from prison, mainly through his wife. When he was released, the “black Muslims” had dwindled to about three hundred and Temple No. 1 in Detroit was in crisis. The Nation of Islam would soon regain momentum and receive the membership of a member who would determine its future – Malcolm X. [MALCOLN X, 2019, p. 233.]
Malcolm Little was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, a northern state with a small black population and a lot of racism. He was raised in institutions and foster families after his father, a carpenter, pastor and UNIA activist, was possibly murdered by a racist and his mother fell seriously ill. At the age of 16, living with an aunt in New York, he became involved in drug trafficking, pimping and burglary in Harlem. Arrested and tried, he was sentenced to eleven years in prison.
In 1947, in prison on the outskirts of Boston, he continued to take drugs. In late 1948, when he was transferred to an experimental penitentiary colony, he received visits and a wealth of family correspondence urging him to join the Nation of Islam, the “natural religion of the black man,” which revealed that white people were the “devil.” He embraced the creed, corresponded with the prophet Elijah Poole, and immersed himself in readings on black history, world civilization, and other topics. [CLEGG III, 1997, 308; MALCOLM X, 2019.]
In freedom
In 1952, after being released, he began working and spreading the new faith in Detroit, home of Temple No. 1, renamed Malcolm X. During his monthly pilgrimages to Temple No. 2 in Chicago, he met the Prophet personally, who gave him increasing responsibilities for his ability and dedication. As he progressed, he became the director of Temple No. 7 in New York and became the movement's spokesperson. Slim, 1m tall, charismatic, and an exceptional orator, he focused his preaching on hatred of white men and, without proposing violence as an objective, defended the need for self-defense for the victim.
In the 1950s, the Nation of Islam was gaining temples, followers, and resources. In 1959, a television channel aired the program “Hate Came from Hate,” about the movement, which was highly negative and led to a flood of negative reports. Malcolm X achieved national prominence by defending the Prophet and the movement. The media exposure was favorable to the Nation of Islam, which targeted a specific audience.
The “Black Muslim” rallies drew tens of thousands of participants, the Prophet traveled by private plane, the collections filled the coffers, and Malcolm X continued to rise in the organization. In the early 1960s, anti-colonial struggles raged in Asia and Africa, and the Cuban Revolution had defined itself as socialist. Elijah Poole sent Malcolm X on a trip to Africa, and in 1960, during the UN General Assembly, he met with African nationalist leaders and held a private conversation with Fidel Castro.
More politics, less religion
In 1963, Malcolm X began to diverge from Elijah Poole, due to his lack of participation in the fight for civil rights and against racism, which was becoming more intense. The Prophet ordered sixty days of silence for Malcolm X. In April 1964, in full dissent, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, converted to orthodox Sunni Islam and changed his view on the racial issue when he met, according to him, pilgrims of “all colors, from blonds with blue eyes to black Africans”.
In 1965, due to the Prophet’s life of luxury and debauchery, the conservatism of the Nation of Islam and its political evolution, Malcolm X broke with Elijah Poole, who intensified the slanders against him and dismissed him from his posts. On February 15, 1965, in New York, Malcolm X founded the “Organization for Afro-American Unity”, “non-religious and non-sectarian”. It separated religion and politics and embraced social and political revolution. [III. p. 549 et seq.]
Malcolm X began to propose an alliance with other black leaders, recommended that blacks vote, and defended the right to self-defense. He established himself as an international spokesperson for the radicalized black movement in the United States, with growing influence on the left of the civil rights movement and the white student movement mobilized against the Vietnam War.
The long arm of the FBI
The Nation of Islam was already discussing the physical elimination of Malcolm X, and at least one assassination attempt failed. He was protected by activists from the Organization for Afro-American Unity and by the police after his house was set on fire on February 14, 1965. On February 21, in Manhattan, New York, he was assassinated by Nation of Islam activists as he was preparing to give a speech. It is more than credible that he was ordered by Elijah Poole.
The FBI had been manipulating the Nation of Islam for years, and it certainly decided to assassinate Malcolm X, who was defined as one of the main internal enemies of the American state. His assassination interrupted his trajectory and radicalization, during which, as he himself recalled, he spoke more and more about politics and less about religion. [CLEGG III, 1997, p. 623.]
The Nation of Islam suffered the consequences of the crime it had committed, stagnating as a sectarian religious group, as it remains to this day. Symptomatically, its prestige plummeted among the black prisoners, whom it had once dominated, tired of the postponement, year after year, of the announced eschatological advent that never arrived.
Above all, the multitudes of black prisoners who had joined and left the Nation of Islam never forgave the assassination of Malcolm X, a black man and ex-convict like themselves, who spoke their language. The assassination of Malcolm X silenced the greatest black leftist leader the United States has ever known. [CLEAVER, 1970, p. 39-43.][1]
* Mario Maestri is a historian. Author, among other books, of Sons of Ham, sons of the dog. The enslaved worker in Brazilian historiography (FCM Editora).
References
BERG, Herbert. Elijah Muhammad's Prophets. From the White Adam to the Black Jesus. Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilization, Volume 2, Issue 1 / 2017
CLEGG III, Claude Andrew. The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad. North Caroline: University of North Caroline, 1997.
DEW, Spencer. The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.
DRAPER, Theodore. The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism. London: Redwood Press, 1971.
CLEAVER, Eldridge. Black Panther: after prison. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1970.
FAUSET, Arthur Huff. Black Gods of the Metropolis. Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
LINCOLN, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. [1961] Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. MARSH, Clifton. The Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
MAESTRI, Mario. Marcus Garbvey. the earth is round, 21/09/2024. https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/marcus-garvey/
MAESTRI, Mario. Booker T. Washington. the earth is round, 12/07/2024. https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/booker-t-washington/
MALCOLM X, An autobiography told by Alex Haley. Madrid: Captain Swing, 1964.
MUHAMMAD, Elijah. Message to the Blackman in America. [1965] Phoenix: MEMPS, 1973.
MUHAMMAD, Elijah. How to Eat to Live. II. Newark: Nation of Islam, 1960.
MUHAMMAD, Elijah. The Future Master Fard Muhammad. Newark: Nation of Islam, 2013.
MUHAMMAD, Elijah. The fall of America. Newark: Nation of Islam, 1973.
SAHIB, Hatim A. (1995) The Nation of Islam, Contributions in Black Studies: Vol. 13, Article 3. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol13/iss1/3
[THRD] The Historical Research Department. The Nation of Islam. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. 1. 1991. SL: Latimer Associates, 2015.
Note
[1] Thanks for reading the linguist Florence Carboni.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
