Farrakhan, Louis 1933-

Louis Farrakhan
1933-

Nation of islam leader

The Charmer

Born Louis Eugene Walcott in the Roxbury section of Boston in 1933, Gene was the younger of two sons of Mae Clark, an immigrant from Barbados. Walcott's father, a Jamaican immigrant, was largely absent in Gene's life, but his mother more than made up for the absence. Her children attended St. Cyprian's, an Episcopal church, and were close with the pastor, Nathan Wright. She also paid for her sons to take music lessons. Gene became an accomplished violinist, scholar, and athlete, winning an athletic scholarship to college in North Carolina. Frustrated with the racism he encountered in the South, he dropped out of school to take up a career as a calypso singer and became known as "the Charmer." He was losing patience with the religion of his youth and told Henry Louis Gates, "I couldn't understand why Jesus would preach so much love and why there was so much hate demonstrated by white Christians against black Christians." In 1955, after hearing Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X speak, he converted to the Nation of Islam, a branch of Islam established in the 1930s by Wallace D. Fard in the black community of Detroit. Walcott took the name Louis X in keeping with Fard's teaching. Fard had taught that black people were the original people of the earth. Whites, the "blue-eyed devils," were interlopers. Their oppression of black people was destined to end when blacks woke up and discovered their real humanity, rejected their "slave names," and began to adopt the diet and pure lifestyles of their African ancestors. Fard disappeared in June 1934. His successor, Elijah Muhammad, proclaimed Fard a Prophet and Savior, and 26 February came to be celebrated as Savior's Day. Louis X led a temple in Boston from 1956 until the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. He changed his name again, to Louis Farrakhan, and took over leadership of Temple No. 7 in New York City. When Muhammad died in 1975, leadership of the Nation of Islam passed to his son, Wallace Deen Muhammad, who steered the organization toward orthodox Sunni Islam. In 1977 Farrakhan broke with Wallace Deen Muhammad to reestablish the Nation of Islam according to the teachings of Fard.

Anti-Semitism

Under Farrakhan's leadership the new Nation of Islam enjoyed a period of financial and organizational growth; its membership—perhaps thirty thousand strong—and racially exclusive ideology left it at the fringe of American religious movements. In 1984, however, Jessie Louis Jackson's campaign for the U.S. presidency pushed Farrakhan into the national spotlight. Registering to vote for the first time, Farrakhan offered Jackson's campaign his clean-cut and bowtied security force, the "Fruit of Islam," to protect the candidate. Farrakhan's rhetoric, always fiery and racially charged, discredited Jackson's campaign among white liberals and black moderates. When a black reporter quoted Jackson's reference to New York City as "Hymietown," Farrakhan further inflamed the situation by threatening the reporter with reprisal. Later that year Farrakhan criticized the state of Israel and complained that Jews used "God's name to shield your dirty religion." It would have been hard in any case for Farrakhan to distance himself from charges of anti-Semitism, and though he claimed repeatedly not to be anti-Semitic, he regularly referred to the existence of a powerful and secretive Jewish cabal.

Voice for Black Unity

The best known and most outspoken leader of the Nation of Islam, Farrakhan seemed to revel in controversy, His anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American culture rhetoric left few people unmoved, Even his supporters cringed when, in an interview on Reuters Television, he argued that "Many of the Jews that owned homes, the apartments in the black community, we considered them blood-suckers because they … didn't offer anything back to our community." Farrakhan accused the U.S. government of introducing crack cocaine to the inner cities "as a method of exterminating blacks." Still, Farrakhan and his supporters insisted that his basic message was positive. He called for black unity in the face of white intolerance and oppression; he wanted blacks to face the threats to their culture and identity by building stronger character within stronger communities. Blacks, he argued, needed to exercise their power to rebuild "a more perfect union."

Million Man March

As the guiding voice behind the Million Man March, Farrakhan moved beyond his formal role as simply the outspoken leader of a fringe Islamic sect. Though he did not abandon his racial and religious extremism, his leadership of the march in Washington on 16 March 1995 marked the beginning of Farrakhan's move toward the mainstream of the civilrights movement. Working with Christian and secular leaders of the African American community, Farrakhan called for black men from around the country to come to the National Mall for a day of speeches and community building. The march was held on a weekday so that the men who attended would have to sacrifice a day of work or school to attend. He encouraged women to stay at home in order to embody the ideal of family values as the men were being called to take more responsibility for their children and communities. Though its implications were clearly political, Farrakhan believed the March had "essentially a religious theme—atonement—disconnected from public policy."

Beyond the March

In January and February of 1996, responding to what Farrakhan claimed was divine inspiration, he made a "World Friendship Tour," meeting with leaders of Third World countries, including Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi of Libya, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, some of the most distasteful dictators in the world. Molefi Kete Asante, an Afrocentric scholar, complained that "What Farrakhan did, in my judgment, was to take the legitimacy of the march and put it in his back pocket, and march around to these terrible governments, as if somehow he was the leader of a million black people." In 1999 Farrakhan, though being treated for prostate cancer, remained among the most controversial religious leaders. Respected as a legitimate and powerful voice by many black Americans, feared or dismissed by most whites, his political and racial identity was inseparable from his religious worldview.

Sources:

Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Charmer," New Yorker, 12 (29 April & 6 May 1996): 116-132.

Mortimer B. Zucker, "Louis Farrakhan's White Noise," US News and World Report, 119 (6 November 1995): 96.