Chapter III: Part ONE: The Coming of the Prophet (2)

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?”

“You right!”

“In other words,” Malcolm shouts, “the white man is therefore absolutely evil, a snake and a devil, and his time of destruction draws nigh!”

With this the crowd breaks with joy. The applause lasts for several minutes; white policemen standing guard at the meeting nudge white onlookers, telling them to “move on.”

This argument, that God is black and the white man a devil, presents the Black Muslims with the identical philosophical dilemma that has plagued most religions: How could a good (black) God create a bad (white) thing?

The doctrine concerning Yakub is the Black Muslims’ attempt to answer that riddle. In biological terms of reference, accepting the Muslim notion that the black man is the original man, they must explain how the black race produced white people. Elijah Muhammad states the argument in these terms: The Caucasian race was created out of the weak of the black race; they are the handiwork of Yakub, a black scientist who rebelled against Allah. Dr. Eric Lincoln is correct when he says that the doctrine of Yakub is the central myth of the Black Muslim movement. But it is also the tenet the Black Muslims seem to know least about.

Writing in the _Pittsburgh Courier_, Elijah Muhammad detailed in these words the mechanics by which the black scientist Yakub made the white man:

Who are the white race? I have repeatedly answered that question
in this [column] for nearly the past three years. “Why are they
white-skinned?” Answer: Allah (God) said this is due to being grafted
from the Original Black Nation, as the Black Man has two germs (two
people) in him. One is black and the other brown. The brown germ is
weaker than the black germ. The brown germ can be grafted into its
last stage, and the last stage is white. A scientist by the name
of Yakub discovered this knowledge ... 6,645 years ago, and was
successful in doing this job of grafting after 600 years of following
a strict and rigid birth control law.

According to Elijah Muhammad the experiment was a success, but it also resulted in the “blue-eyed devils” who now people the world and have low physical and moral stamina. Muhammad then goes on to show the physical superiority of the black man by underlining the victories of Negro ballplayers and prize fighters. He then points up what he calls the low morality of the white man by citing the gas chambers of Germany, the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, and all the abuses white Southerners (and Northerners) have heaped upon the Negro.

Summing up the results of Yakub’s experiment, Elijah Muhammad issues this finding:

The human beast--the serpent, the dragon, the devil, and Satan--all
mean one and the same: the people or race known as the white or
Caucasian race, sometimes called the European race.

Since by nature they were created liars and murderers, they are the
enemies of truth and righteousness, and the enemies of those who seek
the truth....

But their certification of the white man as a devil, one incapable of doing good, rests on more than metaphysical grounds. It involves history. To make their historical point the Black Muslims part company with the established world historians. They begin their argument by establishing--with some accuracy--that the black man in Africa had a developed civilization at the time that, in Malcolm’s words, “the white savages of Europe were living in caves and crawling around on their all-fours.” It was the intrusion of the white man into Africa that spoiled things and brought slavery to the New World.

The decline of the black man in Africa is only temporary. The white devil was given about six thousand years to flaunt his evil and then he was to be destroyed as the black man returned to power. The white man’s time ran out just as World War I was raging; the Black Muslims overcame the fact that this was an excellent time for the prophecy to come true--after all, white people were out to destroy each other--with the argument that sets the American stage for the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

The only reason the destruction of the white man didn’t come off on schedule, according to the Muslims, is that so many black men are all mixed up with the white, that it is impossible to destroy the evil men without destroying some “originals,” that is to say, Negroes. This, then, is what Muhammad and Malcolm are talking about when they speak to “the lost-found black man in the wilderness of North America.” They are really saying that the restoration of black men to world power is being delayed because of the American Negro; the white man has been given a new dispensation, actually, not because he deserves it but to give the Negro time to separate from those scheduled for destruction.

Herein lies the reasoning behind Muhammad’s talk about a separate state; this is why the Black Muslims with their tremendous power over people are unable to participate in any of the current civil-rights actions; they can’t help fight for better jobs, better schools, or better housing. They are committed to getting out from among the white man as soon as possible, lest they share his doom of the fire, which is sure not only to come next time, but to come soon.

To plug up the logical and emotional leaks in such an argument as this, the Black Muslims must propagate a continuously expanding “line.” They must maintain the “Islamic” tinge but at the same time keep their teaching within American terms of reference that Negroes can understand; they must take Negroes who have a struggle with English and teach them Arabic; they must convince the most Western of men that they are Arabs.

This cultural island-hopping can backfire, sometimes with amusing results. I attended a Black Muslim bazaar with writer Alex Haley. Elijah Muhammad was scheduled to appear but sent his son, Akbar, instead. Akbar, a slender, dark-brown twenty-five-year-old, came before the crowd of some two thousand garbed in a flowing white sheet. In Middle Eastern Arabic circles Akbar would have been considered in his Sunday best, but to Harlem Negroes Akbar’s dress smacked of the Ku Klux Klan, hardly an image one wishes to raise in a man he hopes to convert. Yet this is the cross-cultural problem the Black Muslims must continually deal with.

I have seen Malcolm X do this with tremendous effectiveness. I once debated with him on TV in Los Angeles. He took the stand of a Muslim, saying that the Moslem faith was the black man’s original culture. Malcolm must make this basic thrust or all else he says rests on historical sand. As we were leaving the studio, we were greeted by several white students, Moslems from Persia, who complained to Malcolm that they had attempted to visit Muhammad’s temples and were refused entry because they were white blue-eyed devils. Malcolm glossed the matter over, and they all parted wishing Allah’s blessing each upon the other. In reality, Malcolm is not interested in any white people, Moslem or not. These Persians could no more get in a Black Muslim temple than Governor Faubus could. “Let’s look at it this way,” Malcolm told the Persians. “If a lion is in a cage, his roar will be different from the roar of the lion who is in the forest. That,” he concluded, “is why you couldn’t get in our temple. But both the lion in the forest and the lion in the cage are lions. That is what matters. Lions love lions; they hate leopards.”

Translated, Malcolm was saying that the American Negro, as a Moslem, must make different noises from the free Moslems of, say, Persia, because the American Negro is in a cage. The cage, of course, is white civilization; that is why the roar of the American Negro Moslem is so provincial; that is why Persians would do well to worship Allah in their own way in their own temples, while the Black Muslims and Allah have their rendezvous in a dinky auditorium over a pool hall in Los Angeles’ Negro ghetto.

It is in such meetings that Malcolm adds the historical ingredient to his theology. It takes two forms:

First, the Black Muslims excite Negroes to shouts by proving that the Negro is somebody, a man with a past and a history. I know from personal experience that Malcolm X is one of the best-versed people in America on African history. I have sat with him in private and general gatherings where he has recited startling facts about the nature of early African civilizations. When challenged, Malcolm is always able to produce a text--and a legitimate one at that--to support what he says. Malcolm’s teachings come as a surprise not because they are new, previously unknown facts about Africa, but because the entire system of education in the Western World, particularly in America, has carefully distorted the true history of Africa to support the notion of white, male supremacy. And so it is from Malcolm X, not from his sixth-grade history teacher--who is probably white--that the Negro child in the North learns the truth about Africa and what once really happened there.

The second historical aspect of the Muslim doctrine involves an intensive study of the role of the American Negro in American history. Here again Malcolm and his followers walk into a void left by the American education system. The black child in Harlem learns about the Revolutionary War but he does not learn that the man who set it off by leading the Americans in the Boston Massacre was a Negro, Crispus Attucks. The black child sees the clock work but he does not know that Benjamin Bannaker, a Negro, invented the pendulum. The black child visits the blood bank but he does not know that a Negro, Dr. Charles Drew, discovered how to preserve blood and thus made the bank possible. Nobody tells the Negro child these things in school. On the contrary, the child is taught that American civilization flowed, for the most part, from white brains. And when Malcolm, to use his words, “pulls the cover off the white devil and tells black men the truth about the work of their ancestors,” the Negro child shrieks with pride and joy--probably for the first time in his life.

Malcolm X brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves as a race or as individuals. Their encounters with white people are always unpleasant situations in which Negroes find themselves embarrassed or emasculated. Think it out for yourself: What contact does the Negro in Harlem have with the white man?

The white man is the _man_ they must meet every morning when they go to work in the garment district; the _man_ they must meet when the rent is due; the _man_ they face when they go to the pawnshop; the _man_ who comes and sells things on credit; the _man_ who buys the installment paper and comes to collect the payments; the _man_ who gets work when they cannot; the _man_ whom they see on TV loosing dogs on Negro children; the _man_ they face as a schoolteacher who does not understand them and who is often contemptuous of them--the man, the man, the man, the white man, the goddam white man! And when Malcolm X says the white man is a devil, they roar “amen” because every experience they have with a white man is a devilish one.

Chilling though it may be, the Black Muslims have erected their teaching on a group experience common to all American Negroes. Few of us concur in their conviction and sentencing of the white race. But none of us can question the accuracy of the indictment on which that conviction rests.

_Elijah Goes to Mecca_

The _hajj_, the long, dusty pilgrimage to Mecca that every Moslem looks forward to, is the final criterion of whether one is or is not a Moslem. Only certified followers of Islam are allowed to enter Mecca during the holy period of the pilgrimage.

“Elijah Muhammad is not a Moslem,” said Imam Talib Ahmad Dawud in 1960. “He is just plain Elijah Poole of Sandersville, Georgia.” Dawud, an American Negro and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood USA, was then locked in a bitter struggle with the Black Muslims over the question of their religious authenticity. But the Imam’s remarks couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Even as Dawud was denouncing the Black Muslims, Elijah was packing his bags for a trip “back home where I can visit and pray with my own people.” Several days after he departed from New York, Elijah placed his credentials before the eagle-eyed _hajj_ committee, the final judge of who may march to Mecca and pray. Elijah Muhammad was admitted without delay, and Black Muslims--the word was cabled back and came over the wire services--held meetings of praise and thanks all over the nation.

That was that. Muhammad was admitted to the _hajj_, he made the holy walk to Mecca. Who, then, is to dispute his religious credentials?

Muhammad’s journey to Mecca brought an end to all the arguments about his true affiliation with traditional Islam. When Mike Wallace and I were preparing a TV documentary on the Black Muslims, the orthodox Moslems denounced the movement. “They teach race hate,” one Islamic spokesman told us, “and that means they couldn’t be Moslems.” The Federation of Islamic Associations of Chicago is the official Moslem organization in the United States and Canada. They have denounced Elijah; they have praised him for conducting the largest Arabic school in America and for accepting the Koran as law, but federation officials are “suspicious” of him. These Moslems, however, are largely of European descent, although their ranks are peppered with a few Negro converts. Their rejection of Elijah rests on his argument concerning racism, and they flinch when Muhammad calls himself “The Messenger of Allah.”

Rejection from such a group is grist for the Black Muslims’ mill. Malcolm X holds them up to high ridicule and scorn, saying they have been corrupted by Christianity and that they look very much like “the blue-eyed devil who enslaved us and took away our culture.” In his “University Speech” (see Part Two of this book) Malcolm rains fire upon these “European Moslems” who have “passed us by in an attempt to make our slave masters Moslems.”

There are several clear differences between Black Muslims and orthodox Moslems. Whether these differences read Elijah and his followers out of the Islamic brotherhood is a matter to be determined by Islamic officials. These are some of the differences between the two groups:

--The Black Muslims will not allow white persons in their temples; orthodox Moslems accept worshipers of all races.

--The Black Muslims maintain a separate movement; there seems to be little or no organizational link with the orthodox Moslems. The Black Muslims do not visit the orthodox Moslem temples, and the orthodox Moslems do not come to hear Malcolm X.

--Nowhere in the Koran or in any orthodox Moslem literature is there support for the Black Muslim’s teaching about the evil scientist Yakub. Nor is there any support in the teachings of orthodox Moslems to support Elijah’s account--see his “Atlanta Speech” in Part Two--that this world was once the moon and was blown up by an evil scientist who wanted to destroy true followers of Allah.

--Orthodox Moslems universally condemn the Black Muslim teaching that the white man is a devil by nature.

--Orthodox Moslems universally object to the Black Muslim preachment concerning a separate state.

But once Muhammad walked into Mecca these differences ceased to matter. To be sure, orthodox Moslems want no part of Elijah and, if pushed, will denounce him. But the _hajj_ committee has rendered what must be accepted as the final verdict.

Behind this trip to Mecca lies a typical Black Muslim story. Malcolm X had visited the Near and the Far East the year before. His mission was to make certain key contacts for Muhammad. I followed Malcolm by some several months into Cairo, Egypt, and talked with Moslem officials who had received him with open arms. Malcolm was in Cairo during the holy season, at the very time when thousands of chanting Arabs were wending their way toward Mecca. Malcolm himself was cleared to make the _hajj_; he could have gone to Mecca in 1959 and that would have settled the controversy once and for all. Malcolm elected not to go, not to upstage his teacher and leader. Instead he returned home with the word that all was well in Mecca, that Elijah and his family would be received there with open arms.

The following year, while Malcolm remained at home, Elijah went to Mecca.

Malcolm’s ambassadorial work in Cairo--and that is precisely what it was--stunned many of his American detractors. Others of us who had been close observers of the movement were not surprised. We knew that Malcolm has always maintained excellent relations with top Arabs at the United Nations. Few, if any, of these meetings were ever public. But they did occur and there is every indication that they are still going on. The road to Mecca was cleared long before Malcolm and Elijah left these shores; powerful pro-Nasser Arabs are quietly in Malcolm’s corner, and many Black Muslim bazaars open with the reading of cabled greetings from “Our Beloved Brother Gamal Abdel Nasser.”

The emphasis of orthodox Islam is universal love and brotherhood among men of all races. The central teaching of the Black Muslims is that all white men are devils and will soon be destroyed. It seems superfluous to point out the wide disparity between these two views. But both Muslim and Moslem worship Allah. And that--at least so the _hajj_ committee said--is all that matters.

The answer to this ambiguity, I suspect, lies in the gangling structure of the Moslem hierarchy. Unlike, say, the Catholic Church, the Moslem faith is not a tightly knit, fully administered organization. I have talked with Moslems about all this, and while they would rather that Elijah did not say much of what he says, they are still smarting over the Christian Crusades and readying for the moment of truth with the Jews. The Black Muslims carefully describe themselves as “anti-Zionist” rather than as against the Jews. But herein, I suspect, is the resolution of the entire matter of Elijah’s relationship to orthodox Islam.

A high Islamic official in Cairo explained it to me in these words: “Of course your Black Muslims are improperly informed. But they are turning men to Allah, away from Christianity, toward Mecca. This is what we want; this is what we must have. We need new blood in western Islam. If Muhammad can give that new blood we welcome him. As for his teachings,” the official continued, “we will see to it that the correct view is given to the black man in America. Now the thing is to get them facing toward Mecca.”

_Is This a True Religion?_

Although Elijah has made his holy pilgrimage to Mecca, the debate over the religious validity of the Black Muslims still rages, with the movement’s critics holding to their charge that Elijah Muhammad teaches hate whereas true religion teaches love. A case can be made that these critics are doubly in error, first in their assumption that their own faith teaches universal love, and secondly in their conclusion--aided by news accounts--that the Black Muslims actually preach hatred of others.

Every religion is a closed network of believers; it has its dogma, its ritual, its gods. The followers of that faith are taught to love one another and are urged to proselytize sinners (outsiders) wherever they can be found. Most religions draw creedal, not racial, lines. Persons of any race may embrace the tenets of the faith and become members. However, this is not always the case and racial overtones have crept into major world faiths.

The late, and loved, Pope John flirted with immortality by coming to grips with the issue of racism in religion. Not only did he infuse the Church with the fresh air of universalism, but he halted a service because a priest violated--forgot, actually--His Holiness’ order that a reference to the Jews as a “perfidious people” be stricken from the Catholic prayer service. The pending second session of the ecumenical council may see the introduction of a proposal that would call on the Church to speak out against anti-Semitism. The proposal was not brought up in the first session because the Church fathers feared what the Arabs might say!

The Jews and the Protestants face essentially the same problems as the Roman Catholics. St. Paul rose to glory because he translated being a Jew from a biological to a spiritual proposition. Many Jews have not accepted that translation and they snicker when Sammy Davis, Jr., walks into their temple. Racism is such a fact of American Protestant church life that most major denominations are divided along racial lines. Then there is the question of religion and geography. The world’s major faiths were spawned in certain areas and took root among people of a common ethnic stock. Thus the followers of Buddha are apt to be Orientals; but for slavery and colonization all of the followers of Christ would be European. But for the same kind of cultural intermingling, Allah’s followers would be the peoples of Asia Minor and North Africa, and the black peoples below the Sahara would still be practicing the varied tribal and family faiths mentioned earlier in this essay.

But time and trouble make saints of everybody ... and universalism occurs only when feuding faiths clash on the plains of practical reality. Thus American Protestants now have a commission that is given over entirely to eliminating all anti-Semitism from the gospel of Christ. The Episcopal Bishop of California, James Pike, has gone so far as to suggest that we take down the cross as a symbol of our faith lest this encourage the teaching that the Jews killed Our Lord. This teaching--that the Jews killed Christ--is no longer fashionable as it was when I was baptized. Now one is told that the Romans killed Christ. And since the once-heathen Romans are now Christians--even though they are Catholics--I suppose this makes things better.

* * * * *

Now let’s turn to the other side of the coin.

During a recent lecture before the Jewish Graduate Club at Columbia University I talked about the need for all orthodox religions to relax their dogmas and accept other peoples as equals. One fiercely intent man leaped to his feet and shouted to me, “You want to rob us of our culture because you people don’t have one of your own!” This was sheer nonsense and the host rabbi rose to say so. But I pressed the issue: Could I join their temple? The younger Jews shouted “Yes--we would love to have you.” The older fellows were not quite so sure.

“Are you as Jews chosen of God, thus the only ones who are really blessed?” I asked one of the fundamentalists.

“Yes,” he shot back.

“Are you chosen in a way that I can never be?” I continued.

“Yes.” He faltered. “You are not a Jew; you cannot be among the elect.”

By this time the younger Jews were on their feet screaming denunciations of him. But the issue of ethnic exclusiveness that splits today’s Jewish community had been laid bare.