WHEN THE WORD IS GIVEN ...

By Louis E. Lomax

THE RELUCTANT AFRICAN

THE NEGRO REVOLT

WHEN THE WORD IS GIVEN ...

LOUIS E. LOMAX

When the Word is Given ...

A REPORT ON
ELIJAH MUHAMMAD,
MALCOLM X,
AND THE
BLACK MUSLIM
WORLD

THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK

Published by The World Publishing Company
2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-21624
FIRST EDITION
WP963
Copyright © 1963 by Louis E. Lomax.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for
brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper
or magazine. Printed in the United States of America.
Design by Larry Kamp

To James Leonidas Lomax, consecrated preacher, dedicated teacher, and devoted parent. What little love there is among men today is due to men like Uncle James.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

This book comes at a time when the American race issue seems at a climax. Disturbing though it may be, it is encouraging that such a book as this can be written, that a group like the Black Muslims not only lives among us but that it can be investigated and studied. This means that at long last we are about to become honest about the race question. Negroes are saying what they think; white people are pausing to listen. These are the prerequisites of dialogue in a free society, and I predict that on the whole the Black Muslims will have a healthy influence on our social structure.

I know white people are frightened by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad; maybe now they will understand how I have felt all my life, for there has never been a day when I was unafraid; we Negroes live our lives on the edge of fear, not knowing when or how the serpent of discrimination will strike and deprive us of something dear—a job here, a house there, an evening out over there, or a life itself. But things are better now than they once were; I am convinced they will soon be better than they are now. I am optimistic because I feel Negroes are now determined to better their lot; I believe we will win because there is every evidence that white people are beginning to yield some of their power, and that—power—is what the argument is really about.

I have drawn on a spate of newspaper articles for this manuscript. I must give particular thanks to my friends Alex Haley and C. Eric Lincoln, Professor of Social Relations, Clark College, Atlanta. Haley’s article on the Muslims and his unpublished notes were of immense help; Lincoln’s book, The Black Muslims in America, is the definitive work on the followers of Elijah Muhammad and it was my bible as I tried first to understand and then to portray the Black Muslims. Dr. Lincoln and I shared research when he was preparing his fine work, and he has most graciously given me his consent to draw freely from his material, particularly that related to the origins and early history of the movement.

Thanks to Ann Westbay and Frances Hannah for their work as typists. Both of them also served as valuable critics as the manuscript took shape; for this additional service I owe them much appreciation.

Most of all I am indebted to the Black Muslims themselves. For more than four years, now, they have tolerated my questions and presence, knowing that I differ with them on many issues. Without their permission, over the years, this kind of book would have been impossible.

The summer of 1963 saw the Negro Revolt move into full view; it also saw the Black Muslims reach an almost incredible peak of public concern and notice. The intent of this work is to provide information and insight as companions to that concern. For correct information is the ultimate weapon of freedom. Even so, there are unpleasant and chilling things in this book. The Black Muslims—for some—are an unpleasant and chilling people, but freedom includes the right to be chilling, and the Black Muslims have no monopoly on unpleasantness.

In reality, Western man is on trial in this book. Without the failings of Western society, the Black Muslims could not have come into being; without the continued failings of our society, the Black Muslims cannot endure. Here, then, Western white man, is a bitter pill. Do with it as you see fit.

Louis E. Lomax

St. Albans, New York
July, 1963

PART ONE
The Coming of the Prophet

1. MAKE IT PLAIN,
MR. MINISTER!

The ultimate comment upon racialism in this republic is that the all-black Nation of Islam—a Chicago-based theocracy whose citizens are known as the Black Muslims—is one of the few religions ever produced by the American experience. Incensed liberals, Negro and white, will deny my assertion that the Black Muslims are a religious body, but the issue, both legally and theologically, has been settled: Courts in several states have ruled that the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad are, indeed, adherents to a religious faith—as such, Black Muslim prison inmates have the right to hold services of worship as do other convicts. And no one who understands theologian Paul Tillich’s argument that religion is nothing more than one’s ultimate concern can doubt that the teachings of number-two Black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, constitute a religion.

Malcolm X is the St. Paul of the Black Muslim movement. Not only was he knocked to the ground by the bright light of truth while on an evil journey, but he also rose from the dust stunned, with a new name and a burning zeal to travel in the opposite direction and carry America’s twenty million Negroes with him.

“This is the day of warning,” Malcolm shouts to the Negro, “the hour during which prophecy is being fulfilled before your very eyes. The white man is doomed! Don’t integrate with him, separate from him! Come ye out from among the white devils and be ye separate.”

Nobody knows just how many Negroes have said “yes” to Malcolm X’s call. Estimates of the Black Muslim membership vary from a quarter of a million down to fifty thousand. Available evidence indicates that about one hundred thousand Negroes have joined the movement at one time or another, but few objective observers believe that the Black Muslims can muster more than twenty or twenty-five thousand active temple people.

The Black Muslims are feverish proselytizers, however, and they get amazing results from Negro prison inmates and the abandoned black masses who live in a world of despair and futility. Early commentators on the movement pointed to their work among prison inmates as further evidence that the Black Muslims were a dissolute lot. The opposite has proved to be true—the Muslims have been able to change the lives of these men once they emerge from prison. While the percentage of repeaters among ordinary Negro criminals runs very high, the Black Muslim converts seldom, if ever, return to a life of crime.

“Many of my followers—and ministers—were once criminals,” Elijah Muhammad boasted in Washington, D.C., “but I changed all that by giving them knowledge of self. Once they discovered who the devil was and who God was, their lives were changed.”

“All praise due to Allah,” the crowd of some five thousand shouted as they leaped to their feet and applauded with rejoicing.

Non-Muslim Negroes used to scoff when Elijah wrote and talked about “knowledge of self.” They are less apt to scoff now that a new wave of race pride has engulfed the Negro and a coterie of clean-cut, well-dressed, polite, and chillingly moral Black Muslim ex-convicts parade through the Negro community each day.

The same general approach, teaching race pride as knowledge of “self,” accounts for the success the Black Muslims have among low-income Negroes. For these people are in something of a prison, too; they see themselves as failures and need some accounting for why they are what they are, why they are not what they are not. These needs are met when the wayward and the downtrodden sit at the feet of Malcolm X and hear him proclaim the divinity of the black man, hear him blame the white man for sin and lawlessness and then go on to herald the impending destruction of the “blue-eyed white devil.”

Bean Pie and Beatitudes

The life of the Black Muslim centers around his temple—sometimes called a mosque—and the temple restaurant. They are usually located close together, in the heart of the Negro ghetto, and are the nerve centers of work and worship. Temple services are held two or three times a week and are generally preceded by family and group meals at the restaurant. Families—most of them former Methodists and Baptists—come in groups, the men dressed in black, the women in flowing white, and the children wearing pins or buttons to let the world know of their commitment to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

The restaurants—like the Black Muslim homes—strictly adhere to Moslem dietary laws. Muslim sisters glory in their ability to prepare dishes that satisfy the traditional eating habits of the American Negro without violating these laws. The best example of imaginative Black Muslim cooking is their famous bean pie, something of a gourmet’s delight in the Negro community. Negroes in New York have been known to come to Harlem from miles around just to buy a bean pie for the family table. The restaurants also serve as business headquarters for the movement; they are the distribution centers for Black Muslim newspapers and other periodicals, the place where one is invited to have a talk with a Black Muslim leader. Temple Number Seven Restaurant at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem is where Minister Malcolm X holds forth: he can be seen there almost any time conducting the financial affairs of the movement and holding press conferences. Then, on a sign from one of his assistants, Malcolm bounds out of the restaurant to conduct temple service at Temple Number Seven, half a block away.

Throughout the nation the Muslims generally meet in rented halls—a Masonic Temple in one town, over a pool room in another. Men and women enter the temple together, but once in the vestibule the families are separated. Everybody is searched thoroughly and all sharp objects, to say nothing of weapons, are taken away. The search is carried out by well-trained sisters and brothers who work with the efficiency of jail guards. They assign a small paper bag to each worshiper, and such objects as nail files, pocket-knives, scissors—any sharp objects that might conceivably be used as weapons—are put into the bag for safe keeping until the parishioner leaves the temple. Even the ordeal of being searched is made palatable by a pleasant brother or sister who explains that the visitor must be relieved of all weapons because once the truth about the white man is explained, the visitor might run out and start his private Armageddon before the “word” comes.

The men and women are ushered into the temple through separate doors and are ordered to sit on opposite sides. The auditorium is generally a drab room, one used by many groups in the course of a week. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, the Black Muslims use the Masonic Hall auditorium. The Sunday I visited the services there one could see posters, fans, and other materials left by groups who had used the same hall earlier in the week. The chairs of the auditorium are arranged in rows, a wide gulf between the “brothers” side and that of the “sisters.” Dark-suited young men, members of The Fruit of Islam, patrol the floor incessantly. They dart about, nudging children to silence, awakening a slumbering brother or sister, and performing whatever duties might come to hand, all the while keeping up a rapid-fire “That’s right,” “You tell it like it is,” in response to what the minister is saying.

The visitor finds himself inside a strange new world at a Black Muslim service. Many religions separate men and women during their services, but few Negroes are members of such faiths and so they are intrigued from the outset. Their sense of being in on something exotic, thus meaningful, is increased when one of the lesser ministers takes the platform and says a few words in Arabic. The Negro is told that this was his language before the white man kidnaped his father and truncated his culture.

“As-Salaam-Alaikum!” the minister says—Peace be unto you.

“Wa-Alaikum-Salaam,” the visitor is taught to reply—“Peace also be unto you.”

The Black Muslims have little or no liturgy. They do not sing in the temple, for they have not yet developed hymns that enunciate their faith. The nearest thing I have heard to a Black Muslim hymn is a plaintive and moving song written by Minister Louis X of Boston, “The White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell.” It is often sung in the temples, but only as a solo by some gifted member of the congregation.

Many of the Black Muslims are excellent musicians; indeed, they are sidemen for some of the best-known jazz groups in the nation. I have been in temple meetings where a group of brothers set the stage for the service by playing a protracted jazz riff. The music was as complex and as far out as anything you would hear at New York’s Five Spot Café or any other den of progressive jazz. As these accomplished jazz men play out their frustrations, the audience sits in cold silence. Sometimes the musicians come on a beat or a shading that strikes some common chord, and the Muslims smile slightly and nod at one another. When the music is done—it goes on and on until it runs down, just as it does in the jazz clubs—the congregation applauds, and somewhere a male voice can be heard to say, “All praise due to Allah!”

Then the stage is set for the “teaching.” In lieu of the cross, the focus of the Black Muslims’ religious service is a huge blackboard divided into two sections. On one side is a drawing of the American flag with the Christian cross superimposed on it. Under this flag is written, “Slavery, Suffering and Death.” On the other side of the blackboard is the half-crescent symbol of Islam, and under it is written, “Freedom, Justice and Equality.” Under both flags, running the full length of the blackboard, is the somber warning: “Which one will survive the War of Armageddon?”

And it is against this backdrop that the minister gets up to “teach.” Each temple has its own minister, who is extremely well trained in what he is to say and do. And he does it well.

The Black Muslims have but one message: The white man is by nature evil, a snake who is incapable of doing right, a devil who is soon to be destroyed. Therefore, the black man, who is by nature divine and good, must separate from the white man as soon as possible, lest he share the white man’s hour of total destruction.

This sermon, or “teaching,” is the high point of the service, what everybody has come to hear. An air of expectancy runs through the crowd as the moment to begin the teaching approaches. This is stock drama for the Black Muslims whether the meeting be a national affair where Elijah himself is to speak or a local meeting where the temple minister is to teach.

This air of expectancy is set stirring by the second-in-command, who keeps up a running promise that something good is about to happen. As warm-up man for Elijah’s Washington, D.C., speech, Malcolm X electrified a crowd of some five thousand in Uline Arena with this:

“You are here to get some good news.”

“Make it plain.”

“But you must remember that what is good news for some is bound to be bad news for others.”

“All praise due to Allah,” the people shouted back.

“What is good news for the sheep,” Malcolm continued, “is bad news for the wolf!”

“Make it plain, Mr. Minister. Make it plain.”

The good news, as everybody knew, was that Elijah would be there soon with a message of freedom for the “sheep” (the black man) and a message of destruction for the “wolf” (the white man).

The setting for local meetings is much the same. In New York Minister Henry X gets the crowd ready for Malcolm by saying, “We are here to receive a blessing. The truth is going to be told here this afternoon.”

“All praises due to Allah.”

“The Messenger’s Minister will be here shortly with word from the man who saw God.”

“Make it plain.”

“The Minister is going to tell you who and what you are!”

“Say the word.”

“Then he is going to tell you who and what the devil is!”

“Make it plain.”

“Then he is going to show you why you had better hurry up and get out from among the devil before you get destroyed with him.”

This brings the crowd to their feet, cheering. The side door to the upstairs temple swings open and Malcolm X, a tall, rawboned, Ichabod-Crane-looking man, strolls in flanked by an Honor Guard. As he walks to the platform his light-skinned, granite face is stern. He looks and acts like a military officer who may give a fatal order any minute. His clothes, always a size or so too large, literally drape from his body, making him look more gaunt than he actually is.

“Big Red,” as Malcolm was called when he was peddling prostitutes and dope on the streets of Harlem, is a dashing and handsome man. Women of all races and creeds are drawn to him. He speaks with an authority that is all but hypnotic.

“When I say the white man is a devil,” Minister Malcolm shouts, “I speak with the authority of history.”

“That’s right,” the people shout back.

“The record of history shows that the white men, as a people, have never done good.”

“Say on, brother, say on.”

“He stole our fathers and mothers from their culture of silk and satins and brought them to this land in the belly of a ship—am I right or wrong?”

“You are right; God knows you are right.”

“He brought us here in chains—right?”

“Right.”

“He has kept us in chains ever since we have been here.”

“Preach on, Brother Minister, preach on.”

“Now this blue-eyed devil’s time has about run out!”

The people leap to their feet, rejoicing.

“Now the fiery hell he has heaped upon others is about to come down on the white man!”

“All praise due to Allah,” the people shout.

“God—we call him Allah—is going to get this white, filthy, hog-loving beast off our backs,” Malcolm promises.

“Say on—yes, yes, yes....”

“God is going to hitch him to the plow and make him do his own dirty work.”

“Yes, yes. Say on!”

“God is going to take over the garment district and make those white dogs push their own trucks.”

Men in the audience jump up and down and shout their approval: “All praises due to Allah. Praise His holy name!”

“Now, now,” Malcolm says, “calm down, because I want you to hear me. Now I want to tell you who God is. I want you to understand who Allah is so you will know who is going to get this white, dope-peddling beast off your back.”

Malcolm smiles. A ripple of laughter runs through the audience—you see, they know who Allah is; they know who God is; they know just who is going to get the white man off their backs. But they have come to hear Malcolm “make it plain” again.

“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God—Allah—is not a spook; we don’t worship any ghost for a God. We don’t believe in any dead God.”

“That’s right.”

“Our God is a live God.”

“Yes.”

“He is walking around here with you, among you, in you.”

“Yes,” the people shout back.

“God is black, like you; God is oppressed, like you; He looks like you; He acts like you; He walks like you; He talks like you....”

By this time, the people are back on their feet cheering. But Malcolm has gone as far toward describing God as he will go for a while.

“Now,” he says, “you have to listen with understanding to know what I am talking about.”

“We with you.”

“We don’t let white devils in our meetings.”

“No, no, no!”

“But we have to worry about some of you because the white man has messed up your mind so bad that some of you will run back and tell everything. That’s why we can’t tell you everything; that’s why you have to listen carefully and with understanding if you are going to find out just who God is. But if He walks like you, and looks like you, and talks like you, and suffers like you; and if He is with you, in you, and all around you ... then ... well, you figure it out!”

The people, particularly the men, lift their voices in a long shout, for they have again been told that the black man, taken collectively, is God—Allah—that Allah will soon, now, destroy the devil, the white man.

Malcolm X, as he does three or four times each week, has “made it plain.” He has told black men that they—as God—must deliver themselves from the evils and hurts of the white man. And that, of course, is what they came to temple to hear.

On another Sunday afternoon the message will take a different form. Malcolm this time elects to make his famous “deaf, dumb, and blind” speech. I, for one, believe Malcolm is at his best when he deals with this issue.

The speech begins as Malcolm X literally heaps abuse on his audience.

“You are deaf, dumb, and blind,” he tells them. “You are lost in the wilderness of North America, and the black man’s new day has been delayed because of you. Now I am here to get you ready.”

“Make it plain,” the people shout back.

“Now the first thing you must do is clean yourself up.”

“Yes, that’s right, that’s right!”

“You must clean yourself up both physically and morally.”

“That’s right! That’s right!”

“You must learn that certain foods are unclean. The hog is a filthy beast, and it is against God’s will for you to eat it.”

“That’s right.”

“You can never clean yourself up as long as you have hog in your body.”

“Make it plain; make it plain.”

“Then you must clean yourself up morally.”

“That’s right, Brother Minister, that’s right.”

“This white devil is responsible for all the dope and prostitution you see here among us.”

“That’s right.”

“He has filled us with his immorality.”

“All praise due to Allah.”

“He has so confused us that our community is filled with addicts, thieves, and prostitutes.”

“That’s right.”

“And you will notice,” Malcolm continues, “that these are Christians who are dealing in dope and prostitution.

“And you and I know this is true because when we were Christians we used dope.”

“Yes.”

“We lied.”

“Yes.”

“We stole.”

“Yes.”

“We were unfaithful to our wives.”

“Yes.”

“We did everything antisocial and immoral.”

“That’s right.”

“But now that we know who God is, now that we have found Allah—our original true God—now that we have learned love and respect for self, now that all this has happened, we have cleaned ourselves up.”

“All praises due to Allah.”

“We love our own black women.”

“Yes.”

“We protect our women and children from the devil and his works.”

“Yes.”

“And we have stopped turning the other cheek!”

“Yes.”

“We respect authority, but we are ready to fight and die in defense of our lives.”

“All praises due to Allah!”

Broadsides at Christianity delivered by Malcolm X and other ministers seem to make the strongest impression on the audience. The minister explains that the Negro was introduced to Christianity while a slave, a bondsman to the man who taught him about Jesus. Employing any history text, he reads at length, using “the white man’s own writings to show that Christianity is a white man’s religion.” This strikes home, because the average Negro has read enough to know that there is a good deal of historical soundness in what the minister says. Then the minister goes on to point out that the Christian church (and they quote Adam Clayton Powell on this) “is the most segregated institution in America.” And the Negro does not need a history book to know that this statement has total validity.

Then the minister goes on to attack Christianity on the grounds that its practitioners are immoral. He calls the roll of criminals and public failures, making much of the fact that they are “all Christians.” The minister uses clippings from the newspapers showing white clergymen and church-goers either sanctioning segregation or being neutral about it. During the Birmingham crisis I attended the Black Muslim service and saw Minister James X deliver a devastating indictment of Christianity simply by showing pictures of Birmingham Negroes being turned away from white churches. One picture showed the rebuffed Negroes praying on the church steps while white bullies, their fists balled up, stood near-by.

Black Christians are also indicted for immorality; the minister points out that “All of us were once in the church and we did everything evil.” I have watched this argument at work and come away amazed at the way the Black Muslims take the Christian ethic as a measuring stick; they then arouse the guilt complex of the wayward Christians in the audience and then go on to blame Christianity for the individual’s moral failure. This, to be sure, is a contorted argument. But it works. Christians sit in the temple audience and confess their Christian failing, then they repent themselves right out of the Christian church.

After the sermon the visitors are asked to raise any questions that may trouble them. The ministers deal with each question in detail, but the Black Muslim ushers (The Fruit of Islam) make certain the questioner is not an “agitator,” someone who has come into the temple just to start a philosophical or theological argument.

“You are in here to be taught, Brother,” I heard one Black Muslim say to a visitor, “not to argue.” And when the visitor frankly says he does not understand what the Black Muslims are up to, or that, after honestly trying, he is unable to agree, the minister explains that this is not to be held against the visitor. “You are among the deaf, dumb, and blind,” the minister explains kindly. Then he assures the visitor that further study and estrangement from “the teaching of the devil” will open his eyes and ears.

The climax of each temple service comes when visitors are invited to join the movement. There is great rejoicing when converts come forth. Eric Lincoln, who has attended more of these services than I have, says that the larger temples average a dozen or so converts at each meeting.

Once the visitor decides to join the temple, he is given a letter he must copy by hand:

Address
City and State
Date

Mr. W. F. Muhammad
4807 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago 15, Illinois

Dear Savior Allah, Our Deliverer:

I have been attending the teachings of Islam by one of your Ministers, two or three times. I believe in it, and I bear witness that there is no God but Thee, and that Muhammad is Thy Servant and Apostle. I desire to reclaim my Own. Please give me my Original name. My slave name is as follows:

Name
Address
City and State

This letter of application is dispatched to Chicago, and if the copy contains no errors, the visitor is sent a detailed questionnaire that inquires into his family and employment status. This completed, the applicant is given a thorough investigation by local members of The Fruit. If the applicant stands muster, he is admitted to membership in the Black Muslim movement.

Then, and only then, is the convert allowed to drop his “slave” name. If his name is, say, John King, he becomes John X; if there are other Johns in the local temple, his “X” will denote that he is the third, fourth, or whatever number John to join that particular temple. Thus it is very common to find John 2X or John 7X. Lincoln discovered a midwestern Muslim whose name was John 17X. The “X” is the Black Muslim’s way of saying that his own origins—before the white man—and name are a mystery; it is also the Muslim’s shout that he is an “ex,” and “no longer what I was when the white man had me deaf, blind, and dumb.”

I have sat with Black Muslims during temple meetings and have seen the people, particularly the young children, come alive with a new sense of identity; they seem to have a new reason to go out and do battle with the rats and roaches in the slums that are their homes. A feeling of unity and love for one another grips the entire room as they silently stand to be dismissed.

They stretch forth their hands, palms upward, and in the name of Allah, the most powerful and all-merciful God, they vow to go in peace. But every Black Muslim temple meeting is saturated with expectation. It reaches its peak when the minister makes the promise that the War of Armageddon is drawing closer and closer. No one ever really says it, but there is an intense feeling that one day soon, at just such a meeting, the “word”—probably from Elijah Muhammad but through Malcolm X—will be given. Just what the word is nobody says; just what will happen when the word is given nobody seems to know. Yet everybody—man, woman, and child—is determined to be on hand when the “word” comes.

Such meetings as these have been going on all over the nation for several years. Most of us heard talk about the “temple people,” as the Black Muslims were called, but there was very little real information about them. Nobody seemed to know just how many temple people there were, how they were organized, what they were really about. The consensus was that they were just another offbeat sect, one of the scores of “Islamic” movements that have sought to convert American Negroes during the past century. We had no idea of the power of the Black Muslims as a religious and political organization capable of rallying mass support. But early in 1959 we got the message.

The Alert Is Given

Shortly after dark on the night of April 14, 1958, police at Harlem’s 28th Precinct received what had all the appearances of a routine call—a fight between two Negroes at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. The dispatch officer barked into his microphone, and his orders squawked out in a dozen radio cars patrolling the area. The cars, their revolving red lights glaring, sped to the scene of the incident. Police poured out of the cars, their clubs at the ready, and began to batter their way through the mob that had gathered.

One Johnson Hinton, a man nobody knew and who had nothing to do with the fight, was one of the spectators who had stopped to watch the melee. The police shoved and knocked aside several Negroes and finally came upon Hinton. What happened then is still a matter of argument, but one fact is agreed upon by all concerned: Hinton and the police entered into a verbal exchange and a policeman knocked Hinton to the ground, his head split open. A police ambulance was called and police took the position that another Negro agitator had been subdued. But they were in for a major surprise, and the city was on the brink of a race riot. Hinton, it turned out, was a Black Muslim, Johnson X, a member of Malcolm’s Temple Number Seven in Harlem.

Within minutes after Hinton hit the ground the word spread that a Black Muslim had been assaulted by the police. An hour later some five hundred sullen, angry Black Muslim men put a cordon around the 28th Precinct Station house where Hinton was being held. This meant trouble, and plenty of it. Precinct Captain McGowan realized he had the makings of a riot on his hands and sent out an urgent call for responsible Negroes to rush to the scene and intervene. One of the first to arrive was James Hicks, editor of The Amsterdam News, a Harlem newspaper. Hicks accurately sized up the situation and told Captain McGowan that only one man, Minister Malcolm X, could manage the crowd and get them to disperse.

The police captain asked, in essence, “Who he?”

Shortly afterward Captain McGowan found out just who Malcolm X was. Flanked by several strapping, angry Muslim brothers, Malcolm walked into the station house. As he entered the door, he gave a sign, and the hundreds of Muslim brothers surrounding the area knew their stand was affirmed. The call went out for still more Muslim brothers to converge upon the area.

Once inside the station, Malcolm X sat down for hard bargaining. First, there was the matter of Brother Johnson Hinton lying on the floor of a jail cell with his head split open. Malcolm demanded that Hinton be given immediate hospital treatment. This was agreed to. Then Malcolm went on to place on record the facts of the affair. Johnson was standing on the street, he was not involved in the fight, he at no time disobeyed a police order, and the police struck him out of sheer flailing frustration.

As Johnson Hinton was carried out of the station to an ambulance, Malcolm walked out the door and paused at the top of the steps. The dimly lit night was filled with Black Muslims and onlookers. Malcolm made a slight gesture, and, according to both police and editor Hicks, in exactly three minutes the streets were empty. The hundreds of Muslims simply vanished—at least the police thought they had vanished. In actuality they shifted their cordon to the hospital where Hinton was being treated. And it was only after Malcolm emerged from the hospital and gave another sign that the Black Muslims finally dispersed to their various homes.

“No man,” Police Captain McGowan said to James Hicks, “should have that much power over that many people. We cannot control this town if one man can wield that kind of power.”

Johnson Hinton now walks around with a silver plate in his head. An all-white jury awarded him seventy-five thousand dollars in damages against the City of New York. Those knowledgeable about the case and the Black Muslims feel that seventy-five thousand dollars is a small fee to pay for the service Malcolm X rendered the city that night. As the jury found, the police were absolutely wrong, and as Negroes know, Hinton’s was only one of the Negro heads that are cracked open without reason by the New York police each year.

But there was a difference between Johnson Hinton and all the other Negroes who get their heads split open in Harlem: Hinton had black brothers and sisters who cared about him; he was a member of a tightly knit congregation of believers whose basic tenet is “fight in defense of your life” and whose main social ethic is “be ready to exact justice when one of your brothers is abused.” The Muslims will deny it, but they have a “crisis system” that moves into action whenever a Muslim is abused. It involves a telephone pyramid—one man calls ten people and each of them calls ten—that in one hour can produce upward of a thousand Muslims at any given point in New York.

And the night Johnson Hinton’s head was split open was the night New York police officials went into a huddle and named the Black Muslims, particularly Malcolm X, as people to watch.

2. FROM MOSES TO
MALCOLM X

The black muslims have been in the national spotlight for only four years now, although the movement itself was born more than a quarter of a century ago. It attracted some attention in Chicago and Detroit but did not emerge as a national concern until Minister Malcolm X, then serving as leader of the New York Muslims and as a sort of roving bishop for the entire movement, burst upon the scene.

As is all too often the case with white people, the Establishment took one look at the Black Muslims and lurched from apathy to frenzy. No one paused long enough to study just what the Muslims believe, what makes them a religion, how they function as a religion. One of the reasons why this has not been done is that the Establishment, both Negro and white, was afraid that open acceptance of the Black Muslims as a religion would legitimize them. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, courts in several states have issued findings that the Muslims are, indeed, a religion, and as such enjoy the same freedom as, say, Roman Catholics.

But this is to get ahead of the story. In truth, the scheme of events, both economic and moral, that led to the formation of the Black Muslims first began to unravel on the west coast of Africa some five hundred years ago. And we must begin there and then if we are to understand clearly the here and now. Prior, and basic, to a full comprehension of the meaning of the Negro’s African experience, we must pause and understand the role of religion in the life of a people.

The Negro as African and Tribesman

American Negro slaves were captured from the west coast of Africa. They were by no means products of a monolithic culture. They represented many tribes and sub-tribes. They spoke a myriad of languages. Indeed, one of the incredible ironies of the “Middle Passage” was that the African slaves chained together in the hold of a boat as it crossed the Atlantic were unable to talk to one another because they did not have a common language. Yet these were not uncivilized people. West Africans had developed a complex society, as Lerone Bennett, Jr., suggests, long before European penetration. Their political institutions, rooted in family groupings, spiraled outward into village states and empires. They had their armies and courts and, if this is of any comfort to modern Americans, their own internal-revenue departments. Speaking of Africa before the European penetration, anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits wrote, “Of the areas inhabited by non-literate peoples Africa exhibits the greatest incidence of complex governmental structure.” Not even the kingdoms of Peru and Mexico could mobilize resources and concentrate power more effectively than could some of these African monarchies, which are more to be compared with European states of the Middle Ages than referred to in the common conception, “primitive state.”

Agriculture, herding, and artistry were important to the West African, but the concept of private property was not widely accepted. The land belonged to the community. The core of West African society was the family. Interestingly enough, most of the African tribes constructed their families along matrilineal lines—the family tree was traced through the mother. On the whole, the West Africans were a mixture of various stocks by the time of the slave invasions. Centuries of interbreeding had produced Africans of varying shapes, colors, and features. Although they spoke many languages, they approached a semblance of linguistic unity in that only four of the African languages had been reduced to writing before the coming of the white man.

Whatever their tongue or color the West Africans were a deeply religious people. No greater injustice has been done to a people than that committed by spurious American historical and anthropological writings which suggest that African religion should be written off as infantile animism. On the contrary, the West Africans had developed complex answers to such major tribal inquiries as “What is man?” “Who is God?” “What is life?” and “How final is death’s sting?” At rock bottom, the religion of West Africa embraced a concept of “Life Forces.” The “Life Force” of the Creator was present in all things animate and inanimate and was viewed as a particularized but microcosmic fragment of the Supreme Being, God, Who created the earth. As Lerone Bennett, Jr., suggests, this African concept of God as a vital force in everything bears a striking resemblance to Henri Bergson’s “élan vital.” Religion formed the center of West African life. Every event took on religious meaning. And there is no telling what towering civilization might have blossomed and survived there had the white man not made his intrusion.

Africans as Moslems

The character of this work demands that we examine the impact of Islam on the black Africans, particularly on those of the West Coast, if we are to understand and evaluate the current preachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.

Dr. John Hope Franklin feels that influences of the religion of Mohammed on the African way of life have been exaggerated. It seems certain that Mohammedanism had little influence upon black Africans prior to the fourteenth century. As early as the seventh century the Moslems swept from Arabia over into Egypt. Subsequently, they moved into North Africa with great success. But when they attempted to penetrate the land of the black African below the Sahara, they encountered complex resistance from the kingdoms of Ghana, Melle, and Songhay, where thriving cultures were already in operation. Some Negro monarchs accepted Mohammedanism for economic or political reasons, but their subjects clung to their tribal religions. The Moslems were never able to win over the peoples of Melle, Hausa, Yoruba, and Susu despite the fact that Negroes were accepted as their equals. And when invited to enjoy both the economic and cultural advantages the religion offered, the masses of West African Negroes rejected Islam in favor of their own tribal way of life.

It is of singular significance that Christianity was already entrenched in North Africa when Mohammedanism made its appearance there in the seventh century. The two faiths became locked in a life-and-death struggle for the control of North Africa. But in West Africa, the region from which the bulk of the Negro slaves were taken, Christianity was all but unknown until the Portuguese and Spanish set up their missions in the sixteenth century. Almost from the onset Christianity was beset by moral ambivalence; on the one hand the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries espoused a doctrine of equality and brotherhood while on the other hand Spanish and Portuguese slave traders were seizing thousands of Africans and shipping them off to the New World to become slaves. It was thus aboard “The Good Ship Jesus” that the first slaves arrived in America. As John Hope Franklin comments, “If the natives of West Africa were slow to accept Christianity, it was not only because they were attached to their own particular form of tribal worship, but because it was beyond the capacity of the unsophisticated West African mind to reconcile the teaching of brotherhood and the practice of slavery by the white interlopers.” The European Christians, however, found no conflict between Christ and slavery and by 1860 the twenty Negroes who landed at Jamestown in 1619 had become four million.

The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land

The literature of the American Negro rumbles with the controversy over the transplantation, or lack of it, of African culture. Some Africanisms have survived in the New World, particularly in the West Indies and in Haiti. But the impact of the New World culture upon the Africans—who were already culturally diffused—was decisive.

What happened to the African is exemplified by the pious captain who held prayer service twice a day on his slave ship. After the prayer services were over, he retired to his cabin and wrote the now-famous hymn which begins “How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear, it quells the sorrow, drowns his fears, and drives away his tears.” Further evidence of the complete Americanization of the African lies in the fact that descendants of the first Negro slaves—Negro Christians born in Spain and Portugal—settled in the New World long before the Mayflower came. These Negroes were explorers, not slaves. Some of them accompanied the French into the Mississippi Valley, and others went with the Portuguese into South America. Thirty Negroes were with Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean, and several were with Menéndez as he marched into Florida.

The bulk of the Negroes in America are descendants, at least partially, of Africans who arrived in this country first as indentured servants and who were then lowered into slavery. It was under the aegis of slavery that the black American accepted Jehovah as his God. It is this ignominious first meeting between Jesus and the black American that Malcolm X probes so accurately and exploits so effectively.

Christ and His Cotton Curtain

When the Black Muslims call upon American Negroes to forsake Christianity and return to Islam, they not only flirt with historical inaccuracy, but they declare open war against the Negro church, which has been properly described by E. Franklin Frazier as the most important institution the American Negro has built. That the Black Muslims have had remarkable success in leading thousands of Negroes out of the Christian church and into the temples of Islam is clear evidence that somewhere in the history of American Christendom faith failed the Negro. And when it is realized that the Black Muslims are able to attract three times as many fellow travelers as they do members, the failure of Christianity becomes even more pronounced. How and why that failure came about lies deep in the swamps and plantations of the South, and we must return there and examine the record of that failure if we are to grasp fully the meaning of Malcolm X when he says, “Christianity is a white man’s religion.”

Every people has a sense of the past, the handed-down record of what has gone before, the Ark of the Covenant, as the collective experience of a people. For the American Negro this sense of the past begins in America, not Africa, for it was in America that the American Negro was forged into a people. Under the tutelage of white plantation masters the first slaves discovered a common language that made it possible for them to communicate with each other and thus make a collective expression of their resentment of the peculiar institution known as slavery. The white slave owner was Christian, and despite some efforts to prohibit Negro exposure to the Bible, most slave masters or, more particularly, their wives—saw to it that the slaves heard the gospel. One of the moving scenes of American history is that of slave and slave master gathered together in church on the plantation to hear the gospel of a Christ of brotherhood. Most plantation masters saw to it that the minister kept his sermon confined to such texts as “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters” (Ephesians 6:5). There was a deeper meaning for the slave in the religious life of the plantation. Strangely enough, it was the Old Testament with its rich history of the Jews and their bouts with famines, pestilence, idolatry, and slavery that attracted the imagination of the religious slave. Working in the field by day, having his wife sold away from him down the river to another plantation, seeing his son stripped naked to the waist and given a hundred lashes for being “uppity,” the Negro slave found a cruel parallel between his life and that of those who begged favor to let them return to their homeland and who finally were delivered by God, who visited a series of disasters upon the slave master. Here in the Negro plantation church—called by scholars “The Invisible Institution”—the Negro began to translate the history of the Jews into words of deliverance and hope. It was thus that slaves began to translate the social history of the Jews into Negro spirituals:

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell Old Pharaoh let my people go....

We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, every round goes higher and higher.... Soldiers of the Cross

Jordan’s river is chilly and cold, none can cross but the true and bold....

Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home....

Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world, going home to live with God....

At first it appeared that the American church would embrace integration of the Negro and lead the attack against the institution of slavery. In 1784, for example, the Methodist Church declared slavery “contrary to the golden laws of God” and went on to order its members to set all slaves free within twelve months. But Southern states led by Virginia forced a suspension of the resolution. Five years later the Baptist Church passed pretty much the same resolution. But it, too, recanted under pressure from the Deep South. Even so, many churches accepted Negroes as parishioners, though many whites feared that they could be flirting with disaster if they adopted a truly liberal policy with respect to Negro membership. By the same token, they were leery of all Negro churches on the plantation. They feared that Negro ministers and church officials would exercise considerable authority over their slave communicants and thus the church could become a center of rebellion. The American church was having other problems at the time, and its concern with the Negro question was not prime. The Anglican clergy, flouting their Toryism, were causing many American parishioners to seek complete disassociation from the Church of England. In fact, every religious denomination, with the exception of the Roman Catholic, was busy establishing an American wing of its church in the hope that it would be completely separate from its European sponsor. The Catholic Church itself finally acquiesced and became separate under the control of a special Prefect Apostolic. This intercontinental war between the churches of the New World and the Old eclipsed the problem of the Negro as far as white churchmen were concerned and set the scene for the establishment of separate churches for Negroes.

Negro Baptist churches began to sprout while the war for independence was still being waged. George Liele, a Negro leader, founded a Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia, in 1779 that became the nucleus of the Negro Baptists in that state. Virginia Negroes organized a Baptist church in Petersburg in 1776, in Richmond in 1780, and in Williamsburg in 1785. According to Dr. John Hope Franklin, many of the white clergy in Virginia assisted Negroes in setting up and organizing their separate churches.

It was in the North that the Negro church really burgeoned. Foremost among the Northern Negro churchmen was Richard Allen, an ex-slave who had purchased his freedom from his Delaware master in 1777, the year he also accepted Christ as his saviour. In 1786 Allen moved to Philadelphia and began to hold prayer meetings for Negroes. His efforts to establish a Negro church were opposed by whites and some Negroes. But when the officials of St. George’s Church, where Allen frequently preached, began to segregate a large number of Negroes who came to hear him, it became clear to Allen’s Negro detractors that the time was right for a Negro church. The final break came when white church officials pulled Allen, Absalom Jones, and William White from their knees while they were praying in what had been set aside as the white section of the church. An innately dramatic man, Allen led the Negroes out of St. George’s Church and organized Mother Bethel, now the central church of Negro Methodism. Allen and his followers organized what became the African Methodist Episcopal Church and by 1820 they had four thousand followers in Philadelphia alone. The organization spread as far west as Pittsburgh and as far south as Charleston.

In New York City, because of discrimination and segregation Negroes withdrew from the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church and established what is now the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, one of whose leading bishops is Dr. Stephen Gill Spottswood, the current chairman of the board of the NAACP. The same trend was developing among Negro Baptists of the North. In 1809 thirteen Negro members of a white Baptist church in Philadelphia were dismissed to form a church of their own. The Negro Baptists of Boston set up their own church in the same year under the leadership of Reverend Thomas Paul. At the same time he was shepherding the Boston congregation, Rev. Paul also organized a Negro Baptist church in New York City. The church was later named Abyssinian and is now pastored by the controversial minister-politician, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Both white and Negro clergymen agree that the development of separate churches was inconsistent with the teachings of religion, but the Negro clergymen were adamant, feeling that a separate church would give them an opportunity to develop leadership. More, there were theological points that Negro churchmen found difficult to accept. One was the notion, widely held among white Christians particularly in the South, that the Negro was the descendant of Ham, the son of Noah, who laughed at his father’s nakedness and thus doomed himself and his descendants to be hewers of wood and drawers of water—that is to say, servants—to the descendants of Noah’s other sons. This theological justification for the concept of Negro inferiority reached its peak during the early part of the nineteenth century, when a spurious body of anthropological and biological scholarship offered “scientific proof” of the Negro’s innate inferiority both as a spiritual being and as a person. It was the “Linnaean Web” that did it: scientists at that time completely embraced the notions of Linnaeus that the classification of peoples in terms of skull sizes and shapes as well as in terms of color was the first step toward knowledge. The American scene of the early 1800s was peopled with a variety of racial stocks, and the majority of the white Protestant group fell victims of the all-too-easy temptation to judge the worth of an individual merely by looking at the color of his skin or the shape of his nose. Thus, the image of the hook-nosed Jewish peddler; the drunken, shiftless Irishman; the stupid, soggy German; the hot-tempered Italian; and the ragged, lazy Negro.

Only in the Negro church, then, did the Negro find a sense of dignity and meaning. Only there was he made to feel a true and equal child of God. The Negro church developed a peculiar theology that spoke to the frustration of the American Negro, and it was there that the Negro translated Christianity into the hope of Negro deliverance.

But two factors, hardly noticed at the time, were to keep the Negro church from becoming a completely closed institution: first, the Negro church was a part of the Negro community, which was an affront to every sensitive Negro citizen; the Negro community was an enclave of terror and police brutality, and the growing ambition of every Negro was somehow to escape this troubled land and live out his days in a less menacing atmosphere. The other factor that operated against the Negro church was its consuming concern with the salvation of souls, the readying of men for full and total adjustment in the world beyond the grave. Like its white counterpart, the Negro church neglected the social ethic, was unconcerned about where men would live, what they would eat, and how they would clothe themselves on this side of the Jordan.

Meanwhile, the nation lunged from slavery through Reconstruction into the race riots of the early 1900s. White attitudes hardened, segregation signs sprouted over every bathroom and drinking fountain, in every railroad train and bus, and the white segregationist invoked the name of God to justify his lynchings, police brutality, injustice before the law, as well as the denial of every right the Constitution had given to the Negro.

Negro churchmen realized the situation was getting grave. A young theologian, Benjamin E. Mays, now President of Morehouse College, and one of the three American official mourners at the funeral of Pope John XXIII, wrote his doctoral thesis on the Negroes’ God. That was almost forty years ago, and even then Dr. Mays suspected that the Negroes’ religion had better take on more militancy and that this militancy should be rooted in some kind of God concept.

At the end of World War II American Negro soldiers—so movingly described in John Oliver Killens’ novel And Then We Heard the Thunder—came home determined to do something about their own society. The children of these soldiers are now marching the streets of Birmingham, Jackson, and New York City. They were spawned by the same era that produced Malcolm X and comedian Dick Gregory, both of whom are part and parcel of the same movement. It is not coincidental that the freedom riders and Malcolm X came upon the scene at the same time. They both emerged from a growing Negro consensus that old paths have led nowhere, that they lead the wandering Negro around and around the foot of the mountain but never lead him on toward his goal.

The Peddler of Silks and Scripture

Nineteen-thirty was the year after the big crash on Wall Street. For the Negro in Detroit the crash had a double meaning. It not only meant that he would be unemployed, that there would be no money, but that the subtle discrimination of the North—the very thing that had caused him to leave the South—would become bold and overt. Into the Negro ghetto of Detroit, late in the summer of 1930, there came a peddler, a man of unknown origin and lineage, who sold silks and satins from door to door. He was a strange-looking man. Because of his pale yellow coloring, some thought he was an Arab, others thought he was a Palestinian, and others felt that he had come from India. He called himself W. D. Fard on most occasions. Other times he was variously known as Mr. Farrad Mohammad, Mr. F. M. Ali, Professor Ford, and Mr. Wali Farrad. One of his Detroit followers quotes him as having said, “My name is W. D. Fard, and I come from the Holy City of Mecca. More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time is not yet come. I am your brother. You have not yet seen me in my royal robes.”

There are no documented facts as to just who Fard was or where he came from. However, he found easy entry into the homes of lower-class Detroit Negroes, who were eager to purchase the silks he claimed were like those worn by black men in Africa.

Dr. Eric Lincoln has gathered information showing that Fard also used his presence in Negro homes to spread a curious doctrine which, in Lincoln’s words, found anxious ears “among culture-hungry Negroes.” The evidence suggests that Fard mixed the peddling of silks with lectures on the black man’s past. He became known as “The Prophet” and concentrated his teachings on his experience in the Near and Far East.

Fard often warned his listeners against certain foods and drinks. “... he would eat whatever we had on the table,” one of his followers said, “but after the meal he began to talk. ‘Now don’t eat this food, it is poison for you. The people in your own country do not eat it. Since they eat the right kind of food they have the best health always. If you would just live like the people in your home country, you would not be sick any more.’ So we all wanted him to tell us about ourselves and about our home country and about how we could be free from rheumatism, aches, and pains.”

Fard was also well versed in the Bible and he used it as a textbook while, at the same time, advising Negroes to renounce Christianity. Realizing that the Bible was the only religious literature known to the Negro, Fard skillfully used it to support his version of the black man’s history and the white man’s destiny. In the beginning Fard peddled his wares by day and held house meetings at night. But as the Depression deepened and his attack upon the white man grew more bitter, the crowds overflowed the small living rooms and dining rooms of the Detroit slum area. The followers of Fard hired a hall, which they named The Temple of Islam. And that was the birth of the phenomenon known today as the Black Muslims. Fard seems to have been a very friendly, relaxed man with an intuitive mastery of mass psychology. His attacks on members of the white race and on the Bible shocked his listeners into ecstasy and many became converts to his amazing brand of Islam.

“Up to that day I always went to the Baptist Church,” one convert said. “After I heard the sermon from the prophet, I was turned around completely. When I went home and heard that dinner was ready, I said, ‘I don’t want to eat, I just want to go back to the meeting.’”

It was inevitable that legends would pop up about a man like W. D. Fard. Eric Lincoln has gathered and reported them as follows:

One such legend is that Fard was a Jamaican Negro whose father was a Syrian Moslem. Another describes him as a Palestinian Arab who had participated in various racial agitations in India, South Africa and London before moving on to Detroit. Some of his followers believed him to be the son of wealthy parents of the tribe of Koreish—the tribe of Mohammed, founder of classical Islam. Others say that he was educated at London University in preparation for a diplomatic career in the service of the Kingdom of Hejaz, but that he sacrificed his personal future “to bring ‘freedom, justice, and equality’ to the ‘black men in the wilderness of North America, surrounded and robbed completely by the Cave Man.’” Fard announced himself to the Detroit police as “the Supreme Ruler of the Universe,” and at least some of his followers seem to have considered him divine. At the other extreme, a Chicago newspaper investigating the Black Muslim Movement refers to Fard as “a Turkish-born Nazi agent [who] worked for Hitler in World War II.”

As for Fard himself, he said that he had been sent to alert the black people of America to the unlimited possibilities of the universal black man in a world now usurped, but temporarily so, by white “blue-eyed devils.” This teaching was a sweet shock to illiterate Negroes whose lives had been spent in fear of the white man. They were irresistibly attracted to a black man who would stand tall, call the white man a snake, a devil—a blue-eyed devil, at that—and predict that his reign over the world would soon come to an ignominious end. And when Fard taught that the white man was full of tricks, always to be suspected, never to be trusted, the Southern Negroes who had come to Detroit in search of freedom only to find futility could not resist the temptation to shout “Amen.” As Eric Lincoln says, “The North was no promised land: It was the South all over again with the worst features of racial prejudice thinly camouflaged by sweet talk about equality.”

The black Detroiters who heard Fard were starving, living in overcrowded slums. They were the victims of police brutality, the continuing symbol of the power of the white establishment. They were bitter toward the white workers who took over “Negro jobs” as work became more scarce. Even the white welfare workers in Detroit, according to Eric Lincoln, deliberately abused Negroes by making them wait long hours in line before passing out pitiful supplies of flour and lard. All this fear resulted in deep resentment and despair. The words of Fard began to make more sense than ever.

Once Fard had secured a temple, the frequency of his meetings was stepped up and the movement became more formalized. Prospective members were put through rigid examinations and were called upon to make commitments and pledges. The sermons at Fard’s meetings were always based on the same subject: the untrustworthiness of the white man and the need for the Negro to understand and return to his glorious history in Africa and Asia.

Eric Lincoln says that Fard, with no literature or material to espouse his cause, used the writings of Joseph F. “Judge” Rutherford, then leader of Jehovah’s Witnesses; Van Loon’s Story of Mankind; Breasted’s The Conquest of Civilization; the Quran; the Bible; and certain literature of Freemasonry, to bring his people to “knowledge of self.” The followers of Fard were encouraged to buy radios so that they could hear the expressions of Rutherford and Frank Norris, the Baptist fundamentalist preacher.

Once temple meetings began, however, Fard told his members that the words of any white man could not be trusted, for the white man was incapable of telling the truth. He insisted that the white man’s writings were filled with a symbolism that must be interpreted. Fard went on to establish himself as the interpreter and brought the throng to its feet cheering when he said that the stupid white man was actually a tool in the hands of Allah, that the white man was a dumb idiot who unknowingly told the “truth” and thus predicted his own doom. Fard himself gave the movement its two basic theological pieces: The Sacred Ritual of the Nation of Islam, still the key document for the Black Muslims, and Teachings for the Lost Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way, a religious cryptogram distributed among Muslims but which only Fard could interpret.

Within four years after he had set up the first temple, Fard, who turned out to be an extremely able executive, not only had a burgeoning membership of followers, but had founded a University of Islam, a combination of elementary and high-school education devoted to higher mathematics, astronomy, and the “ending of the spook civilization.” To augment all this, Fard established “The Muslim Girls Training Class” to drill Muslim women in the art of being good housewives and mothers. And to put down any trouble with unbelievers and police, he organized “The Fruit of Islam,” a quasi-military organization in which men were divided into squads headed by captains and taught the tactics of judo and the use of firearms. Completing the temple structure, a minister was appointed by Fard to run the entire organization.

The Man from Sandersville

One of Fard’s Detroit converts was Elijah Poole, a Negro from Sandersville, Georgia, and the son of a Baptist minister. Poole was born on October 7, 1897, one of the thirteen children of Wali and Marie Poole, both of whom had been slaves. After completing the fourth grade—he was then sixteen years old—Poole left home. In 1923 he and his wife, Clara Evans, along with their two children moved to Detroit. Of all the disenchanted Detroit Negroes, Elijah Poole was probably the bitterest. The lure of Detroit had proved a nightmare; he worked in factories at several different jobs until the Depression hit in 1929. In 1930 Poole attended one of the house meetings and heard Fard; in Poole’s words, Fard took him “out of the gutters in the streets of Detroit and taught me knowledge of Islam.”

Almost from the onset Fard and Poole seemed to become fast friends. Early members of the sect have stated that Elijah Poole became something of an errand boy for Fard and also helped him publish a newspaper. The key fact in the relationship between Elijah Poole and Fard was time. Poole came into the movement at the moment police in Detroit were breathing down Fard’s neck. Indeed it was fear of trouble from the police—and nonbelievers—that caused Fard to organize The Fruit of Islam. The same concern caused Fard to organize his temple in such a manner that he would seldom risk public exposure. Once Fard had fashioned his tightly knit organization he appointed a Chief Minister of Islam to preside over the entire movement.

Elijah Poole was tapped by Fard as the first Chief Minister of Islam and given the coveted “original name” Muhammad. Earlier in 1932, three years after he joined the movement, Elijah Muhammad went to Chicago and established what has since become known as Temple Number Two, which is now the headquarters of the Black Muslim movement. Trouble in Detroit, however, seems to have cut short Muhammad’s sojourn in Chicago. The history of this period is clouded by controversy, but the following is the best sequence of events observers have been able to piece together:

Shortly after (perhaps before) Elijah Muhammad left Detroit for Chicago one of the Muslim brothers got into trouble with the Detroit police because of his alleged part in the sacrificial killing of a fellow Muslim. It is a matter of record that the Muslims did teach sacrificial killing at that time and that Fard was arrested in connection with the charge. Muhammad has written of the incident in these words:

He 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 may see and learn the price of truth for us (the so-called Negroes).

Muhammad gave Fard refuge in Chicago. Shortly thereafter Elijah was named Fard’s first Minister of Islam and returned to Detroit, where he took over the movement despite opposition from several of Fard’s followers. Shaken by his encounter with police, Fard withdrew from public view, leaving Elijah Muhammad to stand as the public presence for the movement. During 1933 Fard was seen less and less; then, in 1934, he simply vanished. To this writing, state and federal authorities have been unable to solve the riddle of Fard’s disappearance. As Eric Lincoln says, “All reports about the whereabouts of Fard wind up at a dead end.” The report that he was seen aboard a ship bound for Europe was never substantiated. The report that he met foul play at the hands of Detroit police or some of his dissident friends was never confirmed. And the dark hint that Elijah Muhammad himself was in some way connected with Fard’s disappearance has not been supported by any evidence.

Although rumors persist to this day that Muhammad induced Fard to offer himself up as a human sacrifice, there is no evidence to support them. Yet as Eric Lincoln comments, “It is interesting to note that Fard is honored by [Black] Muslims everywhere as the ‘Saviour’ and is celebrated as such every year on his birthday, February 26.”

Once Fard fell from view, Muhammad became leader of the movement. He was able to bring many dissidents back into the temple, but soon broke with the Detroit faction and returned to Chicago to set up his headquarters. Muhammad had learned church administration from his clergyman father and was able to organize several new temples of Islam. Fard was apotheosized and referred to as the Prophet of Allah; Muhammad proclaimed himself the Messenger of the Prophet of Allah. To this day, the wellspring of Muhammad’s power flows from the fact that he was with Fard in life and possibly in death. On one occasion he said, “I have it from the mouth of God that the enemy had better try to protect my life and see that I continue to live. Because if anything happens to me, I will be the last one that they murder. And if any of my followers are harmed, ten of the enemy’s best ones will be killed.”

Fard and Muhammad shared an affinity for getting into trouble with the law. In 1934 Muhammad refused to transfer his children from the University of Islam to another, accredited school, and he was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and placed on six months’ probation. Eight years later the Messenger was arrested by federal authorities, convicted of refusing to register for the draft, and sentenced to four years in the federal prison at Milan, Michigan. The indictment, however, alleged that Muhammad taught Negroes that their interests were in a Japanese victory in World War II, since Negroes were ethnic brothers of the Japanese. Muhammad’s pro-Japanese sentiments were probably influenced by Japanese efforts, principally through a skilled operative named Major Takahashi who was in Chicago around 1938, to proselytize among the Muslims and other Negro groups. Rank-and-file Muslims, however, showed little interest in Takahashi’s propaganda, just as they had shown little interest in Communist overtures in 1932.

Like other men with a messianic complex, Muhammad seemed to grow both in stature and spirit behind bars. First of all, he was clearly able to direct the movement even while he was in prison, and once he was released, he began uttering statements that made Fard and, indeed, the early Elijah Muhammad sound conservative. In bold staccato phrases, punctuated by clearing of the throat so endemic to Southern Negro preachers, Muhammad shouted to the throng that the white man is a snake, a devil by nature, evil, incapable of doing right. Despite the fact that he was still garbed in his “release suit,” Muhammad told the Chicago crowd that it made no sense for Negroes in this country to have fought against the Japanese, who were victimized by the same blue-eyed devil who had victimized the American Negro. But Muhammad did not stop there; he said that the American Negro had had no stake in World War II. “Rather,” Muhammad said, “the American Negro should be saving his energy and ammunition for ‘The Battle of Armageddon,’ which will be waged in the wilderness of North America. This battle—and this is one of the central teachings of the Nation of Islam—will be for freedom, justice, and equality. It will be waged to success or under death.” Muhammad always titillates his followers by telling them that he cannot at this moment let them know just when the battle will take place and who the protagonists will be. But one has only to sit in the audience and hear his followers applaud and laugh to know that they fully believe that the time of the bloodletting is nigh and that the struggle will be between black and white.

Despite his boldness, the movement stagnated under Muhammad’s leadership. In the mid-forties “The Big X” came on the scene. And with the arrival of Malcolm Little—christened into Islam Malcolm X and elevated by Elijah Muhammad to be Malcolm Shabazz, but known to the pimps, prostitutes, and dope addicts as “Big Red”—the Black Muslim movement really began to move.

Big Red

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, and like Elijah Muhammad he was the son of a Baptist minister. The family soon moved from Omaha to Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm’s father was a follower of the Black Nationalist, Marcus Garvey, who felt that all Negroes should return to Africa and escape the oppression of the white man. The Ku Klux Klan burned down the family home when Malcolm was only six years old. “The firemen came,” Malcolm says, “and just sat there without making any effort to put one drop of water on the fire. The same fire that burned my father’s home still burns in my soul.”

Following Garvey’s teaching that the Negroes should go into business, Mr. Little then set out to build his own store. Soon after this, according to Malcolm, “my father was found with his head bashed and his body mangled under a streetcar.” Malcolm Shabazz to this day remains convinced that his father was lynched by white people who resented even the prospect of a Negro gaining some economic independence. With his father’s death, Malcolm’s family was forced to separate. In moving terms, clenching his fists, and at times breaking into tears, Malcolm has described to me how his mother boiled dandelion greens from day to day trying to keep her eleven children from starving to death. “We stayed dizzy and sick because we stayed hungry.” At night Malcolm and his brothers would go out and steal what food they could to fill their stomachs. The Littles were a clannish bunch. They struggled to stay together, but the pangs of hunger were too great, and they were ripped apart. Malcolm was sent to an institution for boys.

This turned out to be the second molding factor in the life of Malcolm X. He was one of the few Negroes—if not the only one—in the institution and he developed a warm love for the white matron who defended him when other kids were “kicking him around.” In the only complimentary statement I have heard him make about a white person, Malcolm says of the matron, “She was good to me. I followed her around like a little puppy. I was a kind of mascot.” She arranged for him to attend a near-by school where, although he was the only Negro pupil, his keen mind put him at the head of the class, which only gained him the resentment of both the teacher and the pupils.

“When I was in the eighth grade,” Malcolm says, “they asked me what I wanted to become. I told them I wanted to study law. But they told me that law was not a suitable profession for a Negro. They suggested that I think of a trade such as carpentry.”

That ripped it! Malcolm soon left school and came east to New York, and in a matter of weeks penetrated the underworld where he became a trusted lieutenant. Malcolm’s early days in the underworld are described in unpublished notes by writer Alex Haley in the following words:

Admitted to the underworld’s fringes, sixteen-year-old Malcolm absorbed all he heard and saw. He swiftly built up a reputation for honesty by turning over every dollar due his boss (“I have always been intensely loyal”). By the age of 18, Malcolm was versatile “Big Red.” He hired from four to six men variously plying dope, numbers, bootleg whiskey and diverse forms of hustling. Malcolm personally squired well-heeled white thrill-seekers to Harlem sin dens, and Negroes to white sin downtown. “My best customers were preachers and social leaders, police and all kinds of big shots in the business of controlling other people’s lives.”

His income often reached as high as two thousand dollars a month. And I have heard Malcolm talk of paying off the cops from a thousand-dollar bankroll which he pulled from the pocket of his two-hundred-dollar suit. But not even “Big Red” had enough money to pay all of the policemen and eventually Malcolm X went to prison for burglary.

It was in 1947, in the maximum security prison at Concord, Massachusetts, that Malcolm was converted to the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad by one of his fellow prisoners who was a member of the Detroit temple. From that moment Malcolm has neither smoked, cursed, drunk, nor run after women. He is the most puritanical man I have ever met. I have interviewed him scores of times but he will not meet me for an interview at any place where liquor is sold. He does not object to my smoking, but in polite terms he makes it understood that he would rather I didn’t smoke around him. I have entertained him in my home along with other guests, and he has sat relaxed on the floor as we drink. He has never taken anything but coffee, although he knows full well that none of us would ever betray him.

Indeed, it is around the widely known and deeply admired morality of Malcolm X that one of the few pieces of humor about the Muslim movement came into being.

The story is that Malcolm was attempting to convert a Negro Baptist to the teaching of Islam.

“What are the rules of your organization?” the Negro asked.

“Well,” Malcolm said, “my brother, you have to stop drinking, stop swearing, stop gambling, stop using dope, and stop cheating on your wife!”

“Hell,” the convert replied, “I think I had better remain a Christian.”

3. THE NATION
OF ISLAM

Any objective evaluation of the Black Muslims as a religious body must begin with a fresh look at religion itself, its origin and meaning. The current, widespread antipathy toward the Black Muslims makes such a basic review of the roots of religion all the more necessary. Above all we must shut out the voices of those who insist that the Black Muslims are not a religion because they—the critics—don’t like what the Muslims preach and do. After all, the Mormon Church holds, among other things, that the Negro is inferior because he is the descendant of Ham, the accursed son of Noah. As a result Negroes are allowed to join the Mormon Church, but are barred from high church office. But none of us will take the position that the Mormons are not a religion.

To understand the Black Muslims—and the Mormons, for that matter—we must retrace that contorted and tribal path man and God have walked together en route to the here and now.

Religion as a Group Experience

The world has always been a mystery to man. It excites his imagination, challenges his courage, and piques his intellect. But the individual never meets the world alone. He is of his group; the group is part of the world he inherited on the day he discovered himself and the other members of his group—like the thunder and the lightning and the sun and the trees and the rivers and the canyons and the hurricanes and the manna trees that are part of that which confounds him. Collectively confounded, then, the group members react as one. They create a god almost always in their own image and attribute to him all of the omnipotence and omnipresence required to account for a plot of matter spinning dizzily through space into nowhere. And if he is in their image, then he is their father and they are his children. He watches over them and protects them from the pestilences that come by day and the evils that crawl by night. They are his chosen people and he walks with the warriors of the tribe as they go forth to battle temporal evil, which is to say, anything and anybody that differs from their tribe.

In return, the tribesmen insist that god make demands upon them. And god grants their request: He commands them to bow down and worship him, and to put no other god before him. He commands them to love one another even as they love him and he loves them. His commandments on social ethics always parallel the social history of the tribe involved. If one day some members of the tribe feel sick from having eaten the meat from a given animal, then god decrees that such meat is unclean and that it is sinful to eat of it. If the social history of the people discloses that the affinity between the man and his woman is so intense that the intrusion of any other man or woman upon that relationship brings on community disorder, then god decrees that a man shall have one wife and a woman one husband, and then commands that the neighbors covet not the man’s wife or the woman’s husband. And when the tribe matures to the point of having old men, elders, steeped in the history of the tradition of the people, god orders that the aged be respected and all be venerated as his leaders on earth.

Thus it is that the god of a tribe becomes “their” god. History is replete with battle scars left when the gods of an opposing people fought it out on the plains and in the valleys. When tribe meets tribe in war, at least one of the tribes is bound to lose. But even in defeat the god of the tribe becomes more powerful than ever before as the tribe is convinced that, though it has lost a battle, it will eventually win the war. Thus, in the words of one of the great tribal leaders, “Our god is able to deliver. But if not, we will not bow down and serve your god.”

Although tribal life revolves around the god concept, few tribal states have actually become theocracies. Religious leaders have taken their place beside temporal leaders, and they function in concord, under the umbrella of their god to make the state a practical institution.

With the dawn of modern history, gods began to fuse and merge as people began to widen the circle of their experience and accept the reality of tribal pluralism, and civilizations that have survived to matter in the context of the current world are those that fly the banner of the world’s four or five major religions.

Modern man knows little of all this because he inherited already thought-out religions. Thus he has no idea how primitive and crude his gods once were. And it is precisely because of modern man’s religious sophistication that the Black Muslims rasp: At stage center, and before an audience that is weary of racism and religious bigotry, the all-black Nation of Islam gleefully re-enacts the shoddy scenes of our cultural beginnings.

“We are in the image of God,” Malcolm says.

“Make it plain, Brother Minister. Make it plain.”

“That means that God—we call him Allah—must be black like me!”

“All praise due to Allah.”

“God was here in the beginning.”

“Yes sir, that’s right.”

“So we were here from the beginning”—and Malcolm X smiles.

The people come roaring to their feet with shouts of thanks and deliverance.

“And that which was here from the beginning must be the daddy of everything else. Am I right or wrong?”

“You right. That’s right.”

“This blue-eyed devil talking about he is superior. It’s about time he found out that we are his pappy!”

“Make it plain, Brother. Make it plain.”

“Now listen to this,” Malcolm told a rally of three thousand on a Harlem street corner, “and you will know why black is superior.”

“Come on. Come, let’s hear it!”

“Black is the prime color. It is the strong color.”

“Yes!”

“You can get any other color you want by mixing colors, but you cannot find colors that you can mix and produce black. Only black can produce black.”

“Make it plain.”

“And if black is prime, that means it is God, that means it is good.”

“That’s right!”

“Therefore the less black you are the less good you are.”

“All praise due to Allah.” And now the people sense the great truth that is about to come, and they begin to break with laughter.

“Therefore when you are white, you are as nonblack as you can be.”

“Make it plain, Malcolm. Make it plain.”

“Therefore when you are white you are absolutely nongood; am I right or wrong?”