Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Black Muslim movement, concluded the tutorial of his designated successor, Elijah Muhammad, in 1934. That was the year Fard, who under the Nation of Islam’s theology was an “Allah,” one of a series of divine messengers whose time on Earth was limited, disappeared.
The two men’s paths had first crossed in Detroit, where Fard Muhammad was a street peddler of silk goods who also preached a self-help faith. Elijah Poole, later to take the name Muhammad, had moved with his family to Detroit from Georgia in 1917 and worked in industrial plants. The Great Depression left him unemployed and despondent.
His wife, Clara, and their children barely survived on the pittance of aid provided to those who signed up for public assistance, while Elijah fruitlessly begged at factory doors for any kind of job. Day after day, he’d come home without being able to buy anything to put on the kitchen table.
“At other times, he would drink to unconsciousness in alleyways where Clara would find him and bring him in off the streets on her shoulders,” Claude Andrew Clegg III reported in “An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad.”
Elijah, whose father was a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, quoted the Old Testament and the Gospels and proclaimed that God hears the faithful’s suffering, just as his father had.
But neither resonated with Elijah’s experience as a Black man in America. In Detroit, the Christian references were to be replaced by quotations from the Quran, Islam’s holy book, after Elijah was first exposed to Fard Muhammad’s teaching in the fall of 1931.
“I recognized him to be the person the Bible predicted would come 2,000 years after Jesus’ death,” Elijah Muhammad later said, according to his 1975 Chicago Tribune obituary.
Elijah joined the Black Muslims and witnessed Fard’s creation of a counterfaith to Christianity.
It was based on the proposition that white people weren’t content to just import Black people from Africa to be their slaves in America. God-fearing Christians didn’t hesitate to profit from the product of their very flesh.
“This took place when the slave master wanted to produce lots of slaves. He put himself to try to make some slaves, then took all the children and sold them off,” Fard taught.
From a corollary that the evil white people inflicted on Black people continued when slavery ended, Fard posited a metaphysics and a battle plan that began with the theory that the first humans were Black, their innocence earning them the gift of life.
But Yakub, a devilish prodigy, back-bred a strain of brown in the original humans. By lying to the mother of a baby who carried that seed, Yakub produced a white person: “Born to make trouble, break peace, kill and destroy his own people with a made enemy to the black nation,” according to the Book of Yakub, a collection of Fard Muhammad’s articles in Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam.
One of Yakub’s tricks was the Civil Rights Movement and its promise to enable Blacks to live peacefully side by side with whites. The Nation of Islam theology rejected that premise.
In his book “The True History of Master Fard Muhammad,” Elijah Muhammad wrote: “If you say the races should be merged, and live together, and not be separated, I’m asking you, where do you find it, where can you point to me in the past history where such ever happened and it was a success?”
The Black community’s problems required not integration but separation, under Nation of Islam teachings.
Amid succession questions following Fard Muhammad’s disappearance, Elijah Muhammad decamped permanently to Chicago, which remained the Nation of Islam’s headquarters. He set up what is known as Temple No. 2 — Temple No. 1 being in Detroit — which is now in a former Greek Orthodox Church at 7351 S. Stony Island Ave.
Blacks who joined the Great Migration only to find that discrimination and violence in the North wasn’t much better than in the South were ripe for recruiting by the Black Muslims’ message.
They were given a home-study course in the movement’s interpretation of Islam. If they passed a finely detailed examination, they were stripped of Christian names forced upon them by the slave owners and their enslaved ancestors. Many who entered a Black Muslim congregation were given the last name X.
The movement flourished in Chicago under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership, building a portfolio of businesses and amassing millions of dollars in assets and attracting adherents including boxer Muhammad Ali.
To the FBI, however, the Black Muslims’ insistence on autonomy in a slice of America made them a security threat. The agency’s secret file on the organization said Nation of Islam members “because of their fanatical anti-white and anti-United States government teachings and beliefs would be potentially dangerous and likely to seize upon the opportunity presented by a national emergency to endanger the public’s safety and welfare.”
“Therefore, the FBI must determine the identities, whereabouts, and activities of these individuals constituting a threat to the internal security,” the file read.
FBI agents spied on Nation of Islam officers. They were arrested wherever they preached.
Fard Muhammad disappeared without leaving even a hint of why, or instructions to his followers on how to carry his mission. Their dejection might have effectively written the Nation of Islam’s obituary, except for Elijah Muhammad.
He consoled the abandoned flock with a vivid word picture of his final sight of Fard. The Messenger was sitting in a souped-up automobile, surrounded by the faithful in Chicago. He was urging them not to lose their faith. His words would become a Black Muslim legend that, passed from one generation to the next, sustained the separatist movement.
“Don’t worry. I am with you. I will be back to you in the near future to lead you out of this hell,” he said before roaring off to the Chicago Municipal Airport.
Elijah Muhammad was with him as he departed, according to Clegg’s book:
“For Elijah, the final moments were as pregnant with mystery and symbolism as the first, as the man he knew as Fard Muhammad, the second Jesus, the Mahdi, the Son of Man, and Allah in Person, soared into the Chicago sky.”
