Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,865

This is the grave of Elijah Muhammad.

Born in Sandersville, Georgia in 1897, Elijah Poole grew up in the poor South of the Jim Crow era. His schooling ended in the fourth grade and he had to go to work. In that part of Georgia, working in the timber industry was a common job for Black men and he started to work in them. Sometimes he was a bricklayer too. Sometimes he helped his sharecropper parents. It wasn’t much of a life. He married and in 1923, followed the Great Migration north. Whatever limitations Michigan might have had, it was better than Sandersville. I mean, he had been around three lynchings and he was only 26 years old.

But things indeed were not great in Michigan. Living in Hamtramck, Poole struggled to make ends meet for his growing family. Racism was just as big a problem in the North as the South and remains so to the present. So he was in the worst jobs, with few opportunities for advancement. But he started getting involved in Black nationalist movements. This was the age of Marcus Garvey and he was hardly alone in preaching these ideas. It was an intellectually fertile period in the Black community, yes, with the Harlem Renaissance, but in Black communities across the North. So in 1931, his wife Clara urged him to attend a lecture by Wallace Fard Muhammad, progenitor of a new way of thinking about Islam. Poole was deeply impressed and approached Fard after the talk. Fard told him the basic theology of what was becoming the Nation of Islam–Black people had their history and culture stolen from them by the whites and they could gain that freedom back through self-determination and rejecting European culture. That included through religion, where they should reject Christianity and embrace a particular strain of Islam that, let’s face it, was being made up on the fly. In fact, the Nation of Islam was a complete perversion of Islam, but in the time and place the circumstances that led to the NOI, it’s hardly surprising. Poole converted, became Elijah Muhammad, and quickly became Fard’s leading disciple.

Now, Fard disappeared in 1934. Might have been killed, more likely he died of diabetes, but there were a lot of complex circumstances and the point is that we don’t know what happened. But for Muhammad, this was an opportunity. Not only did he rise to take over the organization, but the disappearance of Fard gave him the mysterious Christ-like foundational figure he could deify and build around. And whatever you want to say about religion generally, this kind of disappearing foundational figure works pretty well, from Jesus Christ to Che Guevara.

In 1934, the NOI was still quite small, but over the next three decades it grew quite significantly. Its message of Black empowerment and the complete avoidance of white people if at all possible not surprisingly had a lot of appeal for quite a few African Americans. Moreover, this message particularly spread through the prisons. There, the discipline and sacrifice required made a lot more sense than it did for a lot of people with other options. Just resisting pork, a cheap meat, inside prison and claiming rights around it directly challenged the prison authorities in ways hard to ignore since they could claim constitutional rights around the idea.

Now, the other thing about the NOI is that was a lot of money floating around and after Fard’s death, there were a lot of contenders to the throne. The NOI had already committed to violence as a way to discipline members, not to mention resist the cops, so he had to get out of Chicago for awhile there to avoid death threats from rivals. But he managed to hold onto the organization. By 1942, he was in Washington, D.C., where he was arrested for avoiding the draft. His lawyer actually feared Muhammad would be lynched, so the leader fled the city on bail and returned to Chicago. But he was soon arrested and sentenced to prison, only being released in 1946.

Yet Muhammad remained the head of the organization while serving time. He developed his theology more in these years too. Blacks were the original people and whites were devils that would be the oppressive race for 6,000 years. Economic development was critical to resistance and this was appealing–the combination of self-sacrifice and financial success appealed very much to disaffected young Black men. Muhammad started to live it up to show followers what he and the NOI could do for them. So he bought large amounts of property, big cars, all that stuff. By the 70s, they owned banks and had their own set of NOI schools for their kids. He also developed some real lunatic dietary stuff. Not eating pork, OK sure, that’s actually borrowed from Islam. But his food advice put him squarely in the pantheon of American food faddist weirdos. Collard greens were bad. So were all beans except navy beans. Food with too much color was bad for you. In fact, food was to be avoided except for sustenance. He urged people to only eat one meal a day and preferably one meal every three days, which would allow them to live for 1,000 years. OK then.

Of course, Muhammad’s great disciple was Malcolm X. Malcolm converted in prison and was a great and passionate speaker who could articulate armed self-defense and the evils of whites to a broader public. That was amazing and got the NOI a lot of attention. That it was negative in the white community was great for them in the Black community. But then Malcolm got bigger and bigger. Malcolm also began to question the corruption inside the organization, including both financial and sexual. That Muhammad, a man preaching aestheticism, was having sex with his secretary and many other women, disgusted the true believer prophet. Then Malcolm started exploring Islam on his own and went to Mecca and began to turn on some of the NOI dogma. So Muhammad simply had Malcolm assassinated in 1965. Muhammad did the whole “We didn’t kill Malcolm but the traitor completely got what he deserved” bit in public. Ah, sure, OK then.

By this time, Muhammad was also taking money from the far-right Texas oil capitalist H.L. Hunt, a white supremacist, based on the beliefs of both men that the races should have nothing to do with each other. George Lincoln Rockwell, one of the worst Americans to ever exist, said of Muhammad that he was “the Hitler of the black man,” which of course he meant as a positive comparison. Heck, Muhammad invited Rockwell to address the NOI’s 1962 convention, which didn’t go very well as the rank and file booed him, but still, that’s where Muhammad was here. All their money also bought Muhammad the houses and the cars and the gifts for his women.

Well, Muhammad died in 1975, at the age of 77. He had at least 21 children, 9 by his wife and the rest by his various mistresses. Truly a holy aesthetic there.

Elijah Muhammad is buried in Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens South, Glenwood, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other American religious figures, you can donate to cover the required expenses. Billy Graham is in Charlotte, North Carolina and Joseph Smith is in Nauvoo, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.