Leader of the Nation of Islam
At a Glance…
Assumed Leadership of the Nation of Islam
Promoted Nation’s Tenets
Growing Movement Inspired Debate
Muhammad’s Legacy
Sources
“During our colored and Negro days, he was Black.” So said Jesse Jackson shortly after the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s death on February 25, 1975. Elijah Muhammad was a fearless critic of white America at a time when blacks who questioned the status quo had much to fear. Known as the Messenger of Allah to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America, his Temple of Islam mixed black nationalism with a program of economic self-improvement and the dietary and prayer laws of traditional Islam. Muhammad and his movement pioneered an interest in black history, emphasized black pride, and practiced black entrepreneurship and self-reliance.
Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole on October 7, 1897, in rural Sandersville, Georgia. His parents, Wali and Marie Poole, were former slaves who worked as sharecroppers. His father was a Baptist preacher. Young Elijah went to school through the fourth grade and learned the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic before economic conditions forced him to join the rest of his family working in the fields.
There was little future there for one of thirteen children, so at the age of sixteen he left home. In 1919 he married Clara Evans, and in 1923, he, Clara, and their two young children moved to Detroit, joining a mass of African Americans who migrated north seeking jobs after World War I. There, he held a series of jobs—including a stint on a Chevrolet assembly line—before the Great Depression hit and devastated the U.S. economy.
In 1930 he came under the influence of Wallace D. Fard, the founder and charismatic leader of the Nation of Islam. Fard had appeared in Detroit in the summer of that year, selling raincoats and later silks. He charmed his customers with tales of black history and showed them—through ingenious interpretations of the Bible—that Islam, not Christianity, was the religion of black men in Asia and Africa. Fard’s message struck a chord, and his initial sessions grew to gatherings in homes and then to mass assemblies in a hall that he and his followers hired and named the Temple of Islam.
Each person wishing to join the temple was required to write a letter asking for his original (Islamic) name to replace the slave name the white man gave his ancestors. When Elijah Poole and his two brothers applied for names,
At a Glance…
Born Elijah Poole, October 7, 1897, in Sandersville, GA; name changed to Elijah Muhammad, c. 1931; died of heart and respiratory ailments, February 25, 1975; son of Wall (a Baptist preacher and sharecropper) and Marie (a sharecropper) Poole; married Clara Evans, 1919; children: eight. Religion: Nation of Islam.
Worked as a laborer in Georgia and Detroit, 1913-30; met, worked for, and studied under Wallace D. Fard, 1930-34; established Southside Mosque in Chicago, IL, 1932; became leader of Nation of Islam on Fard’s disappearance, 1934-75; violated Selective Service Act by exhorting followers to avoid the draft, 1942; worked to build self-reliant black enterprise under Nation of Islam banner, mid-1960s-1975. Author of Message to the Black Man in America, published by United Brothers.
Addresses: c/o Nation of Islam, 734 West 79th St., Chicago, IL 60620.
they neglected to indicate that they were related. The prophet—as Fard was called—inadvertently gave them three different surnames: Sharrieff, Karriem, and Muhammad.
Once accepted, Elijah Karriem—as Poole was then called—devoted himself to Fard and the movement. Opposed by moderates, he nevertheless became Fard’s most trusted lieutenant. Fard acknowledged his higher status by renaming him Elijah Muhammad and appointing him chief minister of Islam.
In 1932 Fard sent Muhammad to Chicago to established the Southside Mosque, which was later called Temple No. 2. Muhammad was successful in that venture, but at the same time back in Detroit, Fard was being harassed by the police. C. Eric Lincoln, author of The Black Muslims in America, quoted Muhammad’s recollection of the events: “He [Fard] was persecuted, sent to jail in 1932, and ordered out of Detroit, Michigan, May 26, 1933.... He came to Chicago in the same year, [was] arrested almost immediately and placed behind prison bars. He submitted himself with all humility to his persecutors. Each time he was arrested he sent for me that I... [might] see and learn the price of truth for us (the so-called Negroes).”
Fard was not the only object of police interest. Muhammad himself was arrested in 1934 when he refused to transfer his children from the movement’s school, the University of Islam, to a public school. Tried in Detroit, he was found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and placed on six months’ probation.
Likewise, the police were not the only organization harassing the Nation of Islam. Communists, anti-union, pro-Ethiopian, and pro-Japanese elements all tried to take over the movement for their own ends. Despite these pressures, Fard established effective organization, implemented ritual and worship, founded the University of Islam school for Muslim children, and instituted the Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary organization meant to protect the organization from police and other unbelievers.
Assumed Leadership of the Nation of Islam
When Fard disappeared in June of 1934, most saw Muhammad, his chief minister, as a natural successor. But Detroit was filled with rivals, so Muhammad returned to Chicago and Temple No. 2. There he set up new headquarters and began to reshape the movement under his own highly militant leadership. He equated Fard with “Allah” and instituted prayers and sacrifices to Fard. He also assumed the mantle of “Prophet,” which “Allah” had worn during his mission in Detroit.
The five-foot five-inch tall, thin-voiced Muhammad was physically an unlikely leader of a mass movement. But what he lacked in physical stature he more than made up for in intensity and radicalism. Whites, according to Muhammad, had forced the present intolerable situation on blacks, but the black man had allowed it to continue by remaining “in a land not his own.” According to Muhammad, separation was the only answer. The separation Muhammad was talking about was not the “back to Africa” movement that black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey had proposed a generation previously. Lincoln quoted Muhammad as saying that what he and the Nation of Islam wanted was “some of the land our fathers and mothers paid for in 300 years of slavery.”
According to Muhammad, blacks were the original, superior race of humans on earth. The tribe of Shabazz—the black race—began when an explosion divided the earth and the moon sixty-six trillion years ago. Whites, Muhammad claimed, were created by the evil magician Yakub. Yakub had grafted the weaker of two germs that exist within blacks, and the end product of his biological experiment was the white race. As a result of their unnatural creation, whites were thought to be evil and degraded. Muhammad believed that the white man’s reign on earth was to last 6,000 years before Allah came, at which time the white race would reach its end. The Nation of Islam views the coming of Allah as the coming of the SupremeBlack Man, the Supreme Being among a mighty nation of divine black men.
Promoted Nation’s Tenets
The Nation of Islam became known for fostering black pride and self-sufficiency among its predominantly young, male, lower-class members. Muhammad promoted an effective program of good health, self-improvement, and moral guidelines for members of the movement to follow. Alcohol, tobacco, and the “slave diet” of pork and corn-bread were prohibited; one meal of fresh food was encouraged; male members were required to recruit new followers to the faith; and a strict code of marital fidelity was enforced. Muhammad also encouraged members to improve themselves economically and provided schooling and training in business enterprises to assist them in attaining the goal of financial independence. “Put your brains to thinking for self;” The Black Muslims in America quoted him as saying, “your feet to walking in the direction of self; your hands to working for self and your children.... Stop begging for what others have and help yourself to some of this good earth.... We must go for ourselves.... This calls for the unity of us all to accomplish it!”
Throughout the 1930s, Muhammad and his staff continued to build temples in the heart of the black ghetto, where, according to The Black Muslims in America, “the illusion of a ’Black Nation’ within a surrounding and hostile ’White nation’” takes on a semblance of reality. During World War II the authorities saw the Nation of Islam’s separatist ideology as a threat to the war effort. In 1942 Muhammad was arrested and charged with sedition and violation of the Selective Service Act. Cleared of sedition charges, he was convicted of exhorting his followers to avoid the draft. He spent the remaining years of the war in a federal prison in Milan, Michigan, where he was able to control the movement from his prison quarters.
Small, thin, and suffering from asthma and bronchitis, Muhammad was nevertheless able to keep the movement going. His column in the Pittsburgh Courier was widely read and commented on in the black community. In the late 1940s, Malcolm Little joined the movement while serving in a Massachusetts prison. Renamed Malcolm X, he became Muhammad’s chief disciple and bore Muhammad’s message across the country. According to Newsweek, Malcolm “put the little kingdom of Allah on the map.”
Growing Movement Inspired Debate
By 1960 the Nation of Islam had 69 temples or missions in 27 states. Tiny compared to conventional churches, its growth nevertheless became a worry to both conservatives and liberals. The conservative newsweekly U.S. News & World Report played on racial fears with a 1959 article called “Black Supremacy Cult in U.S.—How Much Of A Threat?” Among liberals, NAACP Chief Council Thurgood Marshall, probably smarting from Nation of Islam criticism, told the New York Times that the movement was “run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure by [Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel] Nasser or some Arab group.”
But while many criticized the Nation of Islam’s rhetoric, its positive effects could not be overlooked. Even Newsweek admitted that behind the discourse on “White devils,” there was an inspirational message. “The real heart of Muhammad’s message was the worth, the competence and the solidarity of Black people. He urged them to express it through a meld of puritan morals (no cigarettes, liquor, drugs or non-marital sex) and Protestant work ethics.”
Despite or maybe because of the movement’s tremendous growth, some say a rift had developed and that Muhammad was looking for an opportunity to put Malcolm X in his place. That opportunity came in November of 1963 when Malcolm told a Black Muslim rally at Manhattan Center that the assassination of President Kennedy was an instance of “the chickens coming home to roost.” While Malcolm’s statement was not against the Nation of Islam dogma, it was not the kind of utterance Muhammad wanted him to make in public. As punishment Malcolm was silenced for 90 days.
Malcolm accepted the punishment, but on March 8, 1964, he broke with Muhammad, telling the press that he was leaving the Muslims to organize his own party. According to the New York Times, Muhammad’s reaction to Malcolm’s schism was both angry and regretful. “Malcolm’s plans have had no effect at all on the movement. My work is divine work and people believe in what I am teaching of the resurrection from the death—the mental death of my people. Anyone who deviates from Islam is a hypocrite.”
After Malcolm X was assassinated in February of 1965, Muhammad kept close to his Chicago mansion, giving few interviews and rarely appearing in public. When he did appear it was in the company of hundreds of Fruit of Islam security guards. Mostly he worked in the Nation of Islam offices, planning recruitment strategies and tending to the movement’s growing network of businesses, farmlands, and restaurants.
In the early 1970s, an increasing radicalism made itself felt in the movement. A January 1972 shootout between police and a Louisiana Nation of Islam splinter group brought to light a split in the movement. According to Newsweek, younger activists such as the Young Muslims in Chicago, Saudi Arabia in New York, and El Colistrand in Oakland, California, were disenchanted with the $1.5 million the Nation of Islam was spending on mansions for Muhammad, his family, and his aids in Chicago. Muhammad responded to the rebellions like the elder statesman he by then was. “I think there is some little splinter group that sometimes wants to go out for themselves and be big boys,” he told Newsweek, “and so they take chances sometimes, and sometimes they stub their toes and they have to go back home and bandage them up. By that time, we’re back where we was.”
Muhammad’s Legacy
On January 30, 1975, Elijah entered Mercy Hospital in Chicago suffering from heart trouble, bronchitis, asthma, and diabetes. He died on February 25th. In a 1989 article for The Final Call titled “Allah’s Promise,” Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan eulogized Muhammad and called on black men and women to see the value of his words: “This modern era of Black consciousness was inaugurated by Muslims.... We became Muslims because Master Fard Muhammad came and raised up the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and gave him a methodology that enabled him to reach a spiritually and mentally dead people and raise us to spiritual and mental life.”
Farrakhan continued: “Elijah Muhammad was indeed a friend of the Black man and woman. He worked, suffered, studied, and constantly prayed for our rise. He sacrificed his own personal life to devote 44 years to the rise of our people. He singlehandedly, with tenaciousness of will and singleness of purpose, turned the language of America from use of the word ’Negro,’ which means something dead, lifeless and hard, into seeing ourselves as Black people, members of the aboriginal nation of the Earth.... He more than any religious leader is responsible for causing us to refer to one another as brothers and sisters.”
Sources
Books
Lincoln, C. Eric, The Black Muslims in America, Greenwood Press, 1982.
The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the African American, edited by Harry A. Ploski and James Williams, 5th edition, Gale, 1989.
Young, Henry J., Major Black Religious Leaders, Abingdon, 1979.
Periodicals
The Final Call, January 15, 1989.
Newsweek, January 31, 1972; March 10, 1975.
New York Times, February 26, 1975.
New York Times Magazine, March 22, 1964.
Reporter, August 4, 1960.
Time, March 10, 1975.
U.S. News & World Report, November 9, 1959.
—Jordan Wankoff
