MUHAMMAD, Elijah

(b. 7 October 1897 in Bold Springs, Georgia; d. 25 February 1975 in Chicago, Illinois), black nationalist and founder of the Nation of Islam, known as "Messenger of Allah to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America."

Born Elijah Poole, Muhammad was one of thirteen children of Wali, a Baptist minister and sharecropper, and Mariah (Hall) Poole, a domestic servant. When he was fifteen years old, Muhammad witnessed the lynching of his friend Albert Hamilton, falsely accused of the rape of a white woman. After having completed only a formal fourth-grade education, Muhammad married Clara Evans on 17 March 1919. When he was twenty-four, he left Georgia with his extended family for Detroit, Michigan.

In Detroit Muhammad joined the Moorish Science Temple of America, becoming affiliated in 1931 with Wallace D. Fard (David Ford), a Detroit clothing merchant and the founder of the Allah Temple of Islam. Fard, who gave Muhammad the name of Elijah Karriem, changed the name of his organization from the Allah Temple of Islam to the Nation of Islam. Muhammad claimed leadership of the organization, but his position was contested by other members, and both men fled from Detroit after a murder was connected to the Allah Temple. Elijah Karriem (by that time given the name of Muhammad) ended up in Washington, D.C., where he read extensively at the Library of Congress. Muhammad rejoiced in the American defeat at Pearl Harbor. In 1942, refusing the draft, he was charged with sedition and draft evasion and spent three years in jail. Muhammad began calling himself the "Messenger of Allah to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America." He was under police and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance from 1930 until his death, and the FBI alone holds over a million pages of records on him.

Much controversy surrounded the origins of Fard, who either died or disappeared in 1934. Many years later, a 28 July 1963 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligence claimed that Fard was alive and well in New Zealand. Muhammad, by then the leader of the Nation of Islam, offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could prove it. The FBI determined that Fard, a white ex-convict from San Quentin, was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1891, and not in Mecca of a black and white couple. His former common-law wife claimed Fard was really Fred Dodd, born in New Zealand in 1891 of Polynesian and English parents. Another claimed he was really Arnold Josiah Ford, a black rabbi from New York.

After 1934, Muhammad claimed that Allah himself had appeared in the person of Fard, and that he, Muhammad, was a prophet of Allah. His message that whites were devils from whom the blacks must remain separate and over whom the blacks would gain ultimate victory in the battle of Armageddon (in reference to the biblical story of the final struggle between good and evil) offered many poor blacks a sense of hope in a time when such hope was not available elsewhere.

While some claimed that between 100,000 and 250,000 African Americans were affiliated with the Nation of Islam during the 1960s, Muhammad's son, Warith (Wallace) D. Muhammad in the 1990s claimed the number was more like ten thousand. Some claim that the Nation of Islam had eighty thousand members in 1960, but others report that the group's seventy temples had 100, 000 members at the time of Muhammad's death.

Muhammad played an important role in African-American literature of the 1960s. James Baldwin based his book The Fire Next Time (1963) upon his interviews with Muhammad.

The most famous member of the Nation of Islam remains Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X, who converted to Islam while held in federal prison in 1947 at Concord, Massachusetts. Released in 1952, he went to work for Elijah Muhammad and continued with the Nation of Islam until 1964. Named national spokesman for the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Muhammad started the weekly newspaper Muhammad Speaks. In his Autobiography (1964) Malcolm X calculated that he had "either directly established, or I had helped to establish, most of the one hundred or more mosques in the fifty states."

By January of 1960 Muhammad had fathered the first of thirteen illegitimate children. His legendary affairs may have included at least one that was incestuous. Flying in executive jets and wearing a $150,000 diamond-studded fez, Muhammad lavished material goods upon himself. When George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, called Muhammad the black Adolf Hitler, Muhammad took the remark as a compliment.

All this put strains on the Nation of Islam, and at the same time threatened the relationship between Muhammad and Malcolm X. Because of various paternity charges against Muhammad, Malcolm X—already censured by Muhammad for making controversial public statements after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—dissociated himself from the Nation of Islam.

In 1965 Louis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott), minister of Harlem Temple, denounced Malcolm X in Muhammad Speaks. Nation of Islam members who opposed Muhammad were often killed or injured, and some believe that Muhammad ordered the assassination of Malcolm X that year.

In 1967 Farrakhan became the Nation of Islam's national representative. Muhammad was no longer in a leadership position because he was under critical scrutiny for his extramarital activities. That same year W. Deen Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad's son, renamed the Nation of Islam as the World Community of Al-Islam in the West.

After Muhammad's death from congestive heart failure, he was buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Chicago. Leadership in the organization was divided between Farrakhan, who married his daughters to Muhammad's nephew and grandson, and the considerably more moderate W. Deen Muhammad. In February of 2000, the two men agreed to work together for the betterment of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad left an estate of $5.7 million, which he divided between his twenty-one heirs, including eight legitimate and thirteen illegitimate children.

For biographical information on Muhammad, see Claude Andrew Clegg, The Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (1997), and Karl Evannz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (1999). Also see Zafar Ishaq Ansari, "W. D. Muhammad: The Making of a 'Black Muslim' Leader (1933–1961)," American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 2 (1985): 245–262. Information on the Black Muslim movement can be found in Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930–1980 (1984), and Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992).

Larry D. Griffin