“Every white man knows his time is up,”
snapped the frail-looking Negro in the embroidered pillbox to 5,500
Negroes packed into Manhattan's St. Nicholas Arena one hot afternoon
last week. “I am here to teach you how to be free. Yes, free from the
white man's yoke. We want unity of all darker peoples on the earth.
Then we will be masters of the United States, and we are going to treat
the white man the way he should be treated.” Roared the crowd: “That's
right! More! More!” For more than two hours, as shouts and applause
rose in regular cadences, the scowling, incendiary speaker obliged by
pouring out his scorn upon all “white devils,” “satisfied black men,”
the “poison” Bible, Christianity's “slave-master doctrine,” and
America's “white for white” justice. The purveyor of this cold black hatred is known to some 70,000 Negro
followers in 29 U.S. cities as Elijah Muhammad, the
Messenger of Allah, head of a stern, demanding, disciplined
black-supremacist religious sect called “the Moslems.”* Calmly feeding
the rankling frustration of urban Negroes, the Moslems reach deep among
the least-educated, lowest-paid Negroes jammed into big-city slums from
Harlem to Los Angeles. Muhammad's virulent anti-Americanism and
antiSemitism, plus his elite corps of dark-suited, shaven-polled young
“honor guards,” has lifted him well beyond the run-of-the-street
crackpot Negro nationalist groups. The Moslems are of rising concern to
respectable Negro civic leaders, to the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, to police departments in half a dozen
cities, and to the FBI. Men Named “X.” Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole, son of a Baptist
minister, in Sandersville, Ga. on Oct. 7, 1897, later moved with his
family to Detroit. One momentous day, he tells the faithful, he met one
Fard Muhammad, who revealed himself to be “Allah on earth”—on earth,
that is, just long enough to pick the “messenger” for his
black-supremacy doctrine. Messenger Elijah dropped his “slave-master
name” of Poole, took up the spiritual surname Muhammad . He founded Temple No.
i in 1931, but soon ran into difficulties. Detroit police arrested him in April 1934 on charges of contributing to
the delinquency of a minor , and in November
some of his would-be followers got disgusted with his teaching, drove
him out of town. He set up permanent headquarters in Chicago, preached
against the white man's draft registration in World War II. When FBI
agents tracked him to his mother's Chicago home in September 1942, they
found him rolled up in a carpet under her bed. He was in federal prison
at Milan, Mich, for draft dodging until 1946, later made a play for
recruits among ex-convicts. His New York leader, Malcolm X, once
Malcolm Little, is an ex-convict who has been arrested for larceny in
two states.
