Farrakhan, Louis

May 17, 1933

Louis Eugene Walcott was born in the Bronx, New York, but was raised in Boston by his West Indian mother. Deeply religious, Walcott faithfully attended the Episcopalian church in his neighborhood and became an altar boy. With the rigorous discipline provided by his mother and his church, he did fairly well academically and graduated with honors from the prestigious Boston English High School, where he also participated on the track team and played the violin in the school orchestra.

In 1953, after two years at the Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina, Walcott dropped out to pursue his favorite avocation of music and made it his first career. An accomplished violinist, pianist, and vocalist, he performed professionally on the Boston nightclub circuit as a singer of calypso and country songs. In 1955, at the age of twenty-two, Malcolm X recruited him for the Nation of Islam. Following its custom, he dropped his surname and took an X, which meant "undetermined." However, it was not until he had met Elijah Muhammad, the supreme leader of the Nation of Islam, on a visit to the Chicago headquarters that Louis X converted and dedicated his life to building the Nation. After Louis X proved himself for ten years, Elijah Muhammad gave him his Muslim name, "Abdul Haleem Farrakhan," in May 1965. As a rising star within the Nation, Farrakhan also wrote the only song, the popular "A White Man's Heaven is a Black Man's Hell," and the only dramatic play, Orgena ("A Negro" spelled backward), endorsed by Muhammad.

After a nine-month apprenticeship with Malcolm X at Temple No. 7 in Harlem, Minister Farrakhan was appointed as the head minister of the Boston Temple No. 11, which Malcolm founded. Later, after Malcolm X had split with the Nation, Farrakhan was awarded Malcolm's Temple No. 7, the most important pastorate in the Nation after the Chicago headquarters. He was also appointed national spokesman or national representative after Malcolm left the Nation in 1964 and began to introduce Elijah Muhammad at Savior Day rallies, a task that had once belonged to Malcolm. Like his predecessor, Farrakhan is a dynamic and charismatic leader and a powerful speaker with an ability to appeal to masses of black people.

In February 1975, when Elijah Muhammad died, the Nation of Islam experienced its largest schism. Wallace Dean Muhammad, the fifth of Elijah's six sons, was surprisingly chosen as supreme minister by the leadership hierarchy. In April 1975 Wallace, who later took the Muslim title and name of Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, made radical changes in the Nation of Islam, gradually moving the group toward orthodox Sunni Islam. In 1975 Farrakhan left the New York Mosque. Until 1978 Farrakhan, who had expected to be chosen as Elijah's successor, kept silent in public and traveled extensively in Muslim countries, where he found a need to recover the focus upon race and black nationalism that the Nation had emphasized. Other disaffected leaders and followers had already formed splinter Nation of Islam groups—Silas Muhammad in Atlanta, John Muhammad in Detroit, and Caliph in Baltimore. In 1978 Farrakhan formed a new organization, also called the Nation of Islam, resurrecting the teachings, ideology, and organizational structure of Elijah Muhammad, and he began to rebuild his base of followers by making extensive speaking tours in black communities. Farrakhan claimed it was his organization, not that of Wallace Muhammad, that was the legitimate successor to the old Nation of Islam.

In 1979, Farrakhan began printing editions of The Final Call, a name he resurrected from early copies of a newspaper that Elijah Muhammad had put out in Chicago in 1934. The "final call" was a call to black people to return to Allah as incarnated in Master Fard Muhammad or Master Fard and witnessed by his apostle Elijah Muhammad. For Farrakhan, the final call has an eschatological dimension; it is the last call, the last chance for black people to achieve their liberation.

Farrakhan became known to the American public through a series of controversies that were stirred when he first supported the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign. His Fruit of Islam guards provided security for Jackson. After Jackson's offhand, seemingly anti-Semitic remarks about New York City as "Hymietown" became a campaign issue, Farrakhan threatened to ostracize Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman, who had released the story in the black community. Farrakhan has also become embroiled in a continuing controversy with the American Jewish community by making anti-Semitic statements. Farrakhan has argued that his statements were misconstrued. Furthermore, he contends that a distorted media focus on this issue has not adequately covered the achievements of his movement.

Farrakhan's Nation of Islam has been successful in getting rid of drug dealers in a number of public housing projects and private apartment buildings; a national private security agency for hire, manned by the Fruit of Islam, has been established. The Nation has been at the forefront of organizing a peace pact between gang members in Los Angeles and several other cities. They have established a clinic for the treatment of AIDS patients in Washington, D.C. A cosmetics company, Clean and Fresh, has marketed its products in the black community. Moreover, they have continued to reach out to reform black people with the Nation's traditional dual emphases: self-identity, to know yourself; and economic independence, to do for yourself. Under Farrakhan's leadership, the Nation has allowed its members to participate in electoral politics and to run for office, actions that were forbidden under Elijah Muhammad. He has also allowed women to become ministers and public leaders in the Nation, which places his group ahead of all the orthodox Muslim groups in giving women equality. Although the core of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam continues to be about twenty thousand members, his influence is much greater, attracting crowds of forty thousand or more in speeches across the country. His group is the fastest growing of the various Muslim movements, largely through the influence of such rap groups as Public Enemy and Prince Akeem. International branches have been formed in Ghana, London, and the Caribbean.

In the United States throughout the 1990s, however, Farrakhan remained an immensely controversial figure. In January 1995 newspapers revealed that Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, had plotted with a gunman to assassinate Farrakhan. He responded by expressing sympathy for Shabazz, and he helped persuade federal officials to allow Shabazz to plea-bargain. Later that year, Farrakhan's plans for a Million Man March on Washington drew national attention. In October 1995 he delivered the keynote speech at the march, and he called for black men to repent for their treatment of their wives and to organize in their communities. In March 1996 he drew widespread condemnation following a trip to the Middle East that included stops in Iran, Libya, Syria, and Nigeria, and for his announcement that Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi had contributed one million dollars to the Nation of Islam.

In the late 1990s Farrakhan was treated for prostate cancer, a disease that caused the death of his good friend and fellow activist Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) in 1998. Complications with his own treatment with implanted radioactive seeds caused extensive bleeding and resulted in a near death experience for Farrakhan. He was transformed by this experience and began to moderate his views and to move closer to Sunni Islam. Members of the

Nation of Islam were taught how to do the formal Arabic prayers, prostrating themselves as other Muslims, and to hold the Friday Jum'ah prayer service. They also follow the Islamic lunar calendar for the month of the Ramadan celebration instead of fasting only during the month of December, as Elijah Muhammad taught them in order to counteract the influences of Christmas. Beginning in 2001 Imam Warith Deen Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan have held joint prayer services during the last weekend of February, the traditional time for the Nation's Savior's Day celebration. Although they have developed friendly relationships, they have decided not to merge their respective movements.

See also Fard, Wallace D.; Islam; Malcolm X; Muhammad, Elijah; Nation of Islam

Bibliography

Essien-Udom, E. Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Farrakhan, Louis. Seven Speeches by Minister Louis Farrakhan. Newport News, Va.: Ramza Associates & United Brothers Communications Systems, 1974.

Farrakhan, Louis. A Torchlight for America. Chicago: FCN Publishing, 1993.

Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Lomax, Louis F. When the Word Is Given. New York: Signet, 1963.

Mamiya, Lawrence H. "From Black Muslim to Bilalian: The Evolution of a Movement." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21, no. 2 (1982): 138–151.

Marsh, Clifton E. From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930–1980. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

Muhammad, Warith Deen. As the Light Shineth from the East. Chicago: WDM Publishing, 1980.

lawrence h. mamiya (1996)
Updated by author 2005