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.