The Messenger, page 11
He also admitted that his wife had initially opposed the sacrificial slaughter, and that he had to beat her into submission. The reasons Karriem gave for murdering his boarder convinced the Detroit police that he was certifiably insane. Smith, Karriem said, was the first of four people he planned to kill in order to “gain his reward.”54 Each murder, Karriem said, would move him closer to Allah. Among Karriem’s other prospective victims was Gladys Smith (no relation to James Smith), a twenty-one-year-old Detroit social worker who had recently terminated welfare benefits to the Karriem family after determining that they had other means of financial support. He also planned to murder two Detroit lower-court judges, the Honorable Edward J. Jeffries and Arthur E. Gordon.
When police questioned Karriem further about these “gods” from whom he was trying to get rewards, they realized that the “gods” were in fact men, leaders of the cult to which Karriem belonged: Wallace D. Fard and Ugan Ali, Ugan being the “Arabic” name Fard gave to Eugene Ali.55 While Karriem and his wife were in custody, detectives searched their home. In a copy of Fard’s Secret Rituals, found near the bloody makeshift altar, police found the following words underlined in blue ink: “the believer must be stabbed through the heart.” Karriem’s knife was protruding from Smith’s heart when his body was found.56
The police immediately initiated a manhunt for Fard and Ugan Ali. The day after the murder, detectives Oscar Berry and Charles Snyder went to the ATI branch on Hastings Street, which was above an apparel store, accompanied by twenty uniformed policemen. In a room whose walls were adorned with Islamic and ancient Egyptian religious symbols and photos of famous black men, the detectives saw a frail, short black man wearing a maroon fez lecturing to some one hundred black men wearing similar fezzes sitting on black folding chairs. The room fell silent as Berry and Snyder approached the man at the lectern. Snyder asked him whether his name was Fard or Ali. “Why are you interrupting our service?” the man countered, without bothering to identify himself. Snyder apologized for doing so, and again asked the man what his name was. “My name is Ugan Ali,” he replied. Snyder asked Ugan Ali if they could speak with him privately for a moment, and the three of them left the meeting room and went into an adjoining area.
“Have you ever taught a colored man named Robert Harris or Robert Karriem?” Berry inquired. Ugan Ali flew into a rage. “I don’t teach colored people anything! We are not colored—nobody colored us! We are Asiatic!”57
Berry, trying to conceal his surprise over what he regarded as an exaggerated reaction to a simple question, rephrased it. “Is Robert Karriem a member of the Allah Temple of Islam?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ali said firmly, “Brother Karriem is one of my students.”
“Then you’re under arrest,” Berry replied. Ugan Ali said nothing as the detectives handcuffed him and led him through the crowd sitting in the meeting room. After handing him over to two policemen, Snyder and Berry joined the other officers in frisking the group in the room before ordering that the building be cleared.
The temple was searched from top to bottom, and accounting and attendance records were confiscated along with membership lists, copies of pamphlets authored by Fard, and antisemitic books and pamphlets bearing the Kansas City address of Gerald B. Winrod. As Berry approached the lectern where Ugan Ali had stood a few minutes earlier, he noticed a book open to a page with the passage: “Every son of Islam must gain a victory from a devil. Four victories and the son will attain his reward.”58 Turning to the cover, Berry saw that the book was titled Secret Rituals of the Lost-found Nation of Islam, by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, and showed the passage to Snyder. Now they understood why Karriem planned to murder three more people. Fearing that other lives were at risk, Berry and Snyder quickly left the temple and resumed their search for Fard with renewed intensity. Acting upon information they received from the on-the-spot interrogation of Ugan Ali and others in the temple, they went the next day to the Fraymore Hotel, where Fard was known to be staying. After checking with the desk clerk, the detectives, accompanied by several uniformed officers, rushed upstairs, where they found a dapper, distinguished-looking gentleman leaving Fard’s room.59
“Are you Wallace Fard?” Berry asked.
“I am Master Wallace Fard Muhammad,” the man replied. The detectives were flabbergasted. They were expecting to find a black man, perhaps even a light-complexioned man like Ali, but the individual they saw seemed to be a white man. “You’re Fard?” Fard replied in the affirmative. The detectives, still startled, asked Fard if Ugan Ali and Karriem were his followers. They were indeed his students, he said. They also asked him whether he was aware that Karriem had committed murder, and whether he had written the book advocating sacrificial killings, copies of which they had found at the temple and at Karriem’s house. He had written the book in question, Fard said, and was also aware that Karriem had been charged with murder. Asked by the detectives if he condoned the murder of his enemies, Fard said no. “They apparently misunderstood my teachings.” While it was true, Fard said, that the precepts of Islam as he taught it demanded the death penalty for anyone “who disturbed the peace in our temples, human sacrifice is not tolerated under Islam.” He also denied profiting from selling names and other items to his followers. “In fact,” Fard told them, “I have had to ask the brethren to contribute to a fund for the payment of an overdue electric light bill in the temple.”60
Unconvinced, Berry took Fard into custody. He and Snyder had their picture taken with Fard by local press photographers. During his interrogation, Fard was questioned repeatedly about some of the passages in the Secret Rituals. His explanations were deemed wholly unsatisfactory. In fact, the detectives wondered whether Fard was as unstable as Karriem, so they called in Dr. David Clark, a psychiatrist at the Detroit Receiving Hospital, who administered a battery of psychological tests to Ugan Ali and Fard individually for more than an hour. He recommended that both men be placed on the hospital’s psychopathic ward along with Karriem, where they could undergo further observation. A judge signed an order to that effect. Like Karriem, Ugan Ali and Fard were enfolded in white straitjackets and confined to padded cells.61 More than 500 members of Detroit-area temples milled about the halls of the Recorder’s Court during Karriem’s arraignment on November 25. Karriem pleaded guilty to the charge of first-degree murder. He killed Smith, he said, because it was “crucifixion time.”62
“I killed this man with the crucifixion,” the glassy-eyed suspect said. “I said ‘Ali-kerslump’ and he fell dead.” When he finished relating his version of the murder, Karriem looked at Judge John A. Boyne and said seriously, “Well, I’ve got to go now.” As he tried to leave the courtroom, several police officers restrained him. “Let me go!” Karriem demanded. “I’m the king here and everywhere!”63
Karriem’s plea was of no value, however, as his incriminating but inconsistent testimony as well as his bizarre behavior left Judge Boyne in no doubt that he was psychotic. At the start of the hearing Karriem entered the court wearing his maroon fez. When asked by the bailiffs to remove it, he refused, replying that he was king in the courtroom. The scene was reminiscent of a “Three Stooges” routine as the bailiffs kept taking Karriem’s fez off, and he kept putting it back on. Eventually the exasperated bailiffs let him keep the fez on.64 At the conclusion of the hearing Karriem was returned to a holding cell, while Fard and Ugan Ali remained in the hospital, and police continued their investigation of the cult. It was during this investigation that the Detroit police realized that the ATI, about which the department had received only a handful of complaints before the Karriem incident, had grown from a small cult to a large sect with about 10,000 members across the country. An estimated 7,000 followers lived in the Great Lakes area alone.
Detective Berry met with Detroit’s police commissioner, James K. Watkins, to request that a special squad be assigned the task of destroying the cult.65 The request, which Watkins approved immediately, was readily granted because the cult had been on the enemies’ list of virtually every African-American organization in Detroit. At the first conference sponsored by the special squad and held at the YMCA building, representatives from the Detroit office of the NAACP and the NUL, as well as local ministers and social workers, all portrayed the ATI as a cancer in the black community and a threat to the white population. Several Caucasian speakers at the meeting, including Detroit Free Press reporter Sherman Miller, concurred in the views expressed by the black representatives, and speaker after speaker warned the packed auditorium that Muslim children were being taught that white people were devils who deserved death. Social workers complained that welfare payments made to members of the ATI were handed over to the leaders of the sect instead of being spent on the children and the needs of the family. A prominent black psychologist testified that he had among his patients several members of the cult who had suffered nervous breakdowns shortly after joining.66
In the meantime, Fard’s followers were growing impatient with the anti-Muslim hysteria that gripped the city. They felt that black organizations and the legally segregated white-controlled city government were overreacting to a single bizarre incident. When Fard and Ugan Ali were still in custody on Friday—five days after Smith’s murder—Elijah, leading over 200 members of the cult, marched to the Recorder’s Court Building and staged a protest on the main floor. It took police an entire day to get the last demonstrators to leave.
Miller continued to write sensationalist front-page stories for the Detroit Free Press about the ongoing investigation of the ATI. The headline that provoked the Friday morning picket was dire: “New Human Sacrifice with a Boy as Victim Is Averted by Inquiry; Frenzied Father Sought by Police.”67 The shocking nature of the headline not only guaranteed that Ugan Ali and Fard would remain in their padded cells on the psychopathic ward, but also meant that the police might charge the cult’s leaders as accessories to murder, if for no other reason than to reassure the public that matters were under control. In those days, when journalistic and privacy issues were still legally gray areas, Miller managed to see the confidential psychiatric reports on Fard and Ali, and he quoted the most damaging portions in his front-page exclusive.
“The mental processes” of Ugan Ali, Miller’s story quoted, “are radically deviated. His sanity is extremely doubtful.… His case must be handled with the utmost caution, as the slightest word or phrase, used inadvertently, seems to enrage him for no apparent reason.”68 What Miller’s account failed to mention was that Ugan Ali vehemently protested being called “colored,” and reacted angrily when police and psychiatrists used the term. This protest was noted as a sign of his irrationality. The verdict on Fard was equally ominous. Fard, Dr. Clark wrote in his report, which Miller excerpted, “is suffering from delusions that he is a divinity. He has a pattern of religious precepts and patterns which, taken literally, are dangerous to those influenced by them.” Dr. Clark recommended that both men be confined in the psychopathic ward until further notice. The court approved his recommendation without debate.69
During a hearing before a special sanity commission on December 6, 1932, three white psychiatrists testified that Robert Karriem was legally insane. Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge John P. Scallen committed him to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminal Insane, where he remained until he died on June 19, 1935.70 Ugan Ali, threatened with possible criminal charges stemming from the sacrificial slaying, told the commission and Judge Scallen that he now realized “the danger of my teachings” and promised to use his “influence to disband the Allah Temple of Islam.” Fard, also facing possible aiding and abetting charges in the Smith case, made a similar confession. In exchange for dropping the charges, Fard agreed to leave Detroit forever as a condition for his release from the psychopathic ward and immunity from possible criminal charges. On December 7, detectives Berry and Snyder put Fard on a train bound for Chicago.71 As far as they were concerned, the special squad had achieved its goal, which was to destroy the ATI. On the same day, in an attempt to capture some of Fard’s disillusioned disciples, Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, head of the Chicago branch of the UNIA, broke with the Garvey movement to start the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME). Like Garvey and Fard, Gordon said her main goal was the repatriation of African Americans to Africa.72
Gordon, however, had seriously underestimated Fard’s determination to spread Islam among African Americans. To be sure, Ugan Ali kept his promise. But the trouble with promises is that they may mean one thing to the maker and something quite different to the taker. For Master Wallace Fard Muhammad and Ugan Ali, the very idea of disassembling an organization with nearly 10,000 dues-paying members nationwide was about as savory as a slaveship’s stench. Neither man had the slightest regard for the American judicial system and, as they were discovering, the Detroit courts held an equally low opinion of them and their cult.
Acting upon the earlier order of Commissioner Watkins to disassemble the cult, in the days following Fard’s banishment police arrested at least 100 members of the ATI. Nearly all of the arrests were pretextual, the objective being to make it difficult for temple members to congregate. They were arrested on the streets, on their jobs, and anywhere else that might cause them public embarrassment. To bolster the law-enforcement campaign, social workers whose caseloads included ATI families unilaterally ended welfare payments for many, which affected nearly one-third of Fard’s followers in the Michigan area. Many of the Muslims with young children were devastated, as welfare was their sole sustenance.73 Families formed food pools to survive. On some days males over thirteen had as little as three slices of bread to eat. To alleviate the harshness of the food crisis, Fard established the “Poor Fund,” through which money donated to the temple was doled out according to a family’s needs.
Though spared the harassment that their fathers faced from police and their mothers from welfare workers, the Muslim youngsters also had a harsh life. At school, they were ostracized by their black teachers and taunted mercilessly by schoolmates for the peculiar way they dressed and for practicing what the public regarded as “that voodoo religion.”
Ugan Ali and his wife, Lillian, disappeared after his release, and Elijah became Fard’s chief aide. Elijah’s children got into street fights so often that he finally took them out of the public schools, and, with Fard’s permission, reorganized the fledgling school. Located in the Hastings Street temple, the University of Islam accepted its first forty students in January 1933.74 Although the ATI was disbanded, signs reading “Nation of Islam” started cropping up in Paradise Valley, and Fard gave Elijah Karriem another name: Elijah Muhammad.75
CHAPTER FIVE
BITTER FRUIT
These children had, by the age of ten, learned to reject the Negro category totally. No favorable quality was ascribed to Negroes more often than to whites. In effect, whites had all the virtues; Negroes none.
—Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice1
Nepalese women are favored by Indian men because of their [European] facial features and light skin.…
—Washington Post (1995)2
Lead the Negro to believe this [that he is inferior] and thus control his thinking. If you can thereby determine what he will think, you will not need to worry about what he will do. You will not have to tell him to go to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door he will have one cut for his special benefit.
—Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro3
When Wallace Fard sneaked back into Detroit to assess the crisis in January 1933, he announced a new survival strategy for his cult. The ingenuity of his plan was a clear sign of his native intelligence and cleverness, which in some measure explain why people were so attracted to him. At a clandestine meeting at the Hastings Street temple, he told his devotees that they were in the first phase of the War of Armageddon. Likening Caucasians to Lestrigons, Fard said that government agencies were using their police powers and social service institutions to devour the self-confidence of members of the ATI. If the tactics against Muslims were successful, he warned, the second phase of Armageddon would engulf all black people in America. It would be of no use to quit the cult, he cautioned them, since there would be nowhere to run to once the second phase started. Unless the so-called Negro was careful, Fard prophesied, welfare checks would come to symbolize the African-American’s demise in the same way that the buffalo represented the decimation of Native Americans. He also reminded the gathering that the Holy Bible was a book of prophecy, that the trial and crucifixion of Jesus was symbolic of what would happen to Black Muslims in the final days, and that those who survived persecution would witness the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth after the Apocalypse.4
As he summarized what was described as his final sermon, Fard revealed a strategy modeled after the myth of Phaedra. First, he changed the name of the Allah Temple of Islam to the Nation of Islam (NOI); that way, leaders could not be arrested for violating the court order to disband the ATI. Semantically speaking, he was following the letter of the law. In short order, cult members returned to welfare benefits offices, where some swore to caseworkers that they were no longer members of the ATI. Again, semantically speaking, they had not breached their religion’s proscription on lying. As soon as their benefits were reinstated, they gave a tenth of it to the NOI treasurer to beef up the Poor Fund. All members were told to use their “slave names” when dealing with the public, but to use their Arabic names or interim names (like John X Jones or Mary 2X Magruder) while at the temples or when addressing fellow Muslims in private. Elijah used his new name, Elijah Muhammad, but to make it difficult for authorities to track him, he also used two aliases: Mohammed Rassoull and Ghulam Bogans.5
