Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam is a U.S. religious and cultural nationalist organization. Much of what survives today about the origins of the Nation of Islam (NOI or Nation) comes from its lore or from an article published in the American Journal of Sociology in the late 1930s. According to NOI accounts, in 1914 a man by the name of Master Wallace D. Fard Muhammad came to North America in search of his lost people, the original members of the Tribe of Shabazz from the Lost Nation of Asia. The people of the Lost Nation, the so-called American Negroes, had been captured, exploited, and dehumanized as slaves in America for more than 3 centuries. His mission was to resurrect so-called American Negroes with a thorough knowledge of God and of themselves. The fair-skinned Muhammad claimed that he was the son of an ebonyhued Nubian father and a blue-eyed, blond-haired translucent white European mother, which allowed him to disguise himself as a silk peddler and move about society unmolested as he sought to uplift his downtrodden people.

Muhammad's identity is in dispute, however. Some reports critical of the man suggest that he was either nothing more than a white scam artist from the U.S. eastern seaboard or a rather zealous, albeit justice-minded, white graduate student from southern California. What is relatively certain, though, is that Muhammad arrived in Detroit on July 4, 1930, and, along with peddling his wares in the black neighborhoods, began to talk with his customers about the Lost and Found Nation of so-called American Negroes and Islam, what he called the true religion of black men and women of Asia and Africa. Muhammad eventually began organizing meetings. Within about 3 years Muhammad had recruited nearly 8,000 followers.

In 1931, Muhammad met Elijah Poole, the 13th child of a Baptist minister and a recent immigrant from Sandersville, Georgia, who, like many other black families during the period, had made the journey north to Detroit, Michigan, in search of a better life. Muhammad taught the unemployed autoworker the next 3 1/2 years, a period during which he also developed the organizational structure that served as the foundation and the beginning of the Nation of Islam. It was also during this period that Muhammad appointed Poole as a minister of Islam and replaced his “slave” name, Poole, with a “holy” or “original” name, Karriem. Muhammad would change his top pupil's name once more, to Muhammad, to reflect his higher status. In the summer of 1934, Fard Muhammad disappeared from the scene as mysteriously as he had arrived upon it. From the point of the elder Muhammad's departure, Elijah Muhammad assumed leadership of the fledgling group and the title Messenger of Allah.

The NOI remained under the national radar until it gained greater visibility when in 1948 an incarcerated Malcolm Little, introduced by his brothers Philbert and Reginald to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, converted to the Nation of Islam. Upon his release from prison in the spring of 1952 Malcolm, earning his “X,” was appointed minister of Temple No. 1 in Detroit before assuming duties as a minister of Temple No. 7 in New York, where he also became the national spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad. As the national spokesman for Muhammad, Malcolm X was the main exponent of the NOI until his highly public departure from the group in 1964.

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