The Messenger, page 14
All the talk by Elijah about the last days of the devils and of Japan’s impending attack on America was overwhelming for most of his followers. By the end of December 1934, Black Muslims were in an apocalyptic frenzy. Many were ready to go into the streets to expedite the removal of white people from the planet when Muhammad dropped a bomb of his own on December 30. With a single day left in the year, he managed to shake off the spell that Fard had cast on him long enough to see how improbable it was that all Caucasians would vanish within the next twenty-four hours.2
In his final lecture of the year, Muhammad injected a new theme into his sermon, a theme that caught Chicago temple members by surprise. “This is the last of the devil,” Muhammad told them. “He will have no more power.” But in the next breath, he said that “the devil will live awhile physically. Several [of you] have heard that this is the end of the devil and by 1935 there will be no devils on the planet.”3 Alas, he said, it wasn’t so.
That was the last thing the congregation wanted to hear. What, in the name of Fard, had the devils done to deserve a reprieve, they wanted to know. Muhammad explained that Fard had given whites a “one-year extension” on life. The extension wasn’t granted because Fard believed Caucasians were suddenly salvageable, but merely to give those African Americans still lost in the wilderness of North America a little more time to accept Islam. Despite the regrettable reprieve, Muhammad said, 1935 would be a year that white people would suffer such economic and environmental adversities that they would wish they were dead. Fard “is now withholding the rain from America and Great Britain. He is smiting these two countries with plagues as often as he wills.”4
As the new year opened, Muhammad remained confident that Fard’s prophecy would be fulfilled. “This is the day of Armageddon,” he declared at a meeting on January 16, 1935, in Chicago. “There will be no more prosperity here, brothers and sisters. This year will seem like night to day. In the next few days, the bottom will fall out.… 1935 is here, so keep your tongue in your mouth if you want to see the hereafter.”5 The assembled knew exactly what Muhammad was referring to: many of their homes had been visited by police in recent weeks because some overanxious members had told their white employers that the white race was as good as dead.
Interpreting such loose talk as a threat, white foremen fired quite a few Black Muslims and occasionally called in police to arrest NOI members to discourage any on-the-job violence. Other NOI members simply quit their jobs, despite being urged by Muhammad to continue working: What was the point in working for a race that would be eliminated any day now?
The days and the weeks marched on toward spring and then summer, but there were no earthshaking changes in Paradise Valley or in the country as a whole. When the floods and plagues and earthquakes that Muhammad predicted failed to materialize, Black Muslims began to lose faith in their leader. Some naturally concluded that it was unlikely that white people would be destroyed in 1935 or 1936 or any other year in the foreseeable future. The anger that this realization provoked against whites became apparent to Muhammad in February 1935. On February 24, as Black Muslims were preparing to mark Fard’s birthday, Chicago temple member Rosetta Hassan was riding on a streetcar with her husband, Zack, and their nine-year-old son, Zack Jr., when she became embroiled in an argument with a white female rider. The white woman, a Greek immigrant named Athenasia Christopolous, made an undiplomatic remark about Mrs. Hassan’s manner of dress, whereupon the latter adjusted the Greek woman’s eyeglasses by punching her in the face. Ms. Christopolous got off the streetcar at the next stop and walked to the nearest police station, where she filed assault charges. A hearing was set for March 6.6 That day, the normally quiet halls of the Chicago courthouse were abuzz with chatter as Mrs. Hassan entered, for walking closely behind her was a posse of some sixty Black Muslims. They had come to court with her, an NOI spokesman said later to reporters, to guarantee that “justice and freedom and truth” prevailed. The show of support paid off handsomely. The hearing lasted less than half an hour, with the arbitrator ruling that no charges would be filed against Mrs. Hassan.7
The Muslims clapped as a bailiff tried to restore order in the courtroom. He instructed the cultists to leave by a door at the rear. But as the group marched proudly toward that exit, another bailiff who was escorting ten black women into the courtroom for another hearing yelled at the Muslims as though they were his disobedient children. “You people turn around and use the other exit!” he shouted, unaware that in the midst of the sixty Muslims was the bailiff who had told them to use the rear rather than the front exit. That’s when all hell broke loose.8
Women in the non-Muslim party tried to escape by intermingling with the Muslims, which resulted in a scuffle among the two black groups and the two bailiffs. Police standing guard in the courtroom ran to the aid of the bailiffs. In self-defense the Muslims started swinging chairs at the officers. One policeman, a seventy-three-year-old captain, tried to subdue King Shah, the official leader of the Muslim group. Shah pushed him and as he fell to the floor, other Muslims began hitting and kicking him. As the captain lost consciousness, bailiffs and police officers stationed elsewhere in the courthouse finally got to the courtroom and joined the fray. One of them shot King Shah in the right shoulder. Another Muslim, Allah Shah, was shot in the left foot. A bailiff, Phillip Branton, was shot in the chest. Once order was restored, police noticed that the elderly captain was still unconscious, and after checking for a heartbeat and a pulse, they realized that he was dead.9
Immediately, 150 policemen and bailiffs took forty-three Muslims into custody. The seventeen Muslim children that were with the group were released. King Shah and Allah Shah were charged with shooting the court bailiff and with the captain’s murder. At the pretrial hearing the next morning, however, doctors testified that the captain had died not as a result of the pummeling he had received but rather from the “strain of too much excitement” during the fracas. It was also determined that none of the Muslims had been carrying knives or guns, and that all of the gunshot wounds were caused by police fire. Fearing another riot if any of the Muslims were retained in custody, Municipal Court Judge Edward Scheffler dismissed all charges against them.10
The euphoria among Muslims over their courthouse victory was so all-consuming that Fard’s apocalyptic prophecy was forgotten, at least for the moment. As word of the Muslim “miracle” (in the sense that no one paid a price for the officer’s death) traveled through black communities in Chicago and other cities where temples were located, blacks sought to join the NOI. Most were eager to get their “original” names and have them entered in Lamb’s “Book of Life,” the official Muslim registry. Muhammad, who still harbored the hope that Fard would return, advised them that he could not give them their original names; only Fard could do that. Instead, he told them that they would receive an “X” as a surname. The “X” represented their unknown true nature, just as it represented the unknown in algebra. The new recruits were advised to write a “letter of submission” to Islam addressed to W. F. Muhammad, reading as follows:
As Salaam Alaikum: (Freedom–Justice–Equality)
Dear Savior and Deliverer:
I have been attending the Temple of Islam for the past two or three meetings, and I believe in the teachings. Please give me my Original name. My slave name is————.11
By August, however, the upward spiral in membership had peaked. Riots in Harlem and Chicago had whetted the Muslims’ thirst for the penultimate showdown with Caucasians. Sensing this growing disenchantment, Muhammad announced at a temple meeting on August 16 that he had just received another sign from Fard that the War of Armageddon had entered a new, critical phase.
This sign, he said, was the passage of the Social Security Act, which decreed that all adults would be issued a six-digit identification number from the federal government. This six-digit number, Muhammad contended, was the “mark of the beast” mentioned in the Holy Bible’s Book of Revelation. “Roosevelt gave you a Social Security number just to hold you, and now he’s getting ready to call in these numbers and give you a stamp,” Muhammad warned his congregation in lectures and in The Final Call newspaper. “He’s going to put a stamp on you, the mark of the beast.”12
Muhammad was convinced that the numbers were a clear sign that the nightmares visited upon the biblical Daniel and retold in Revelations were coming to pass. He instructed his followers to dispose of all their worldly possessions. “The end of the world is here.”13 He forbade them to read any newspaper other than The Final Call or to listen to the radio. The purpose of the prohibition, he said, was to protect them from the devil’s tricknology in the final days of white civilization.
Any Muslim caught listening to the radio suffered draconian consequences, including excommunication and even permanent expulsion from the sect. Because of this harshly enforced prohibition, most Muslims didn’t know that the prophecy relating Social Security numbers to the Book of Revelation had not come from Fard to Muhammad through the powers of divinity; it had come rather from the radio addresses of Joseph Rutherford of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.14 Muhammad always listened carefully to Rutherford’s broadcast sermons. In fact, without Fard as his guide, Muhammad became increasingly dependent upon Rutherford’s broadcasts and writings for his own interpretations of scripture and for ways to lure underclass African Americans to his temples. Once the unconverted entered his temples, Muhammad found that he could keep them interested for a few months by relating to them the triumphs of ancient black civilizations, both real and mythical, and by promises of a glorious future once the NOI membership reached a certain figure, which he cited, based on the Holy Bible and Fard’s instruction, as 144,000.15
An example of this phenomenon occurred in the early months of 1935 when membership began to plunge. The decline was due, of course, to Fard’s failure to destroy all white people as he had promised. Without Fard to help him, Muhammad started using fear tactics as a recruitment and retention tool. He claimed that the story in the Holy Bible’s Book of Ezekiel was in reality a description of what was happening at that very moment. “Ezekiel’s wheel is already hovering over the United States,”16 he said in what became one of his standard sermons. However, the wheel was visible only to him, by virtue of the “special vision” he had received from Fard:
The Asiatic Nation has the Ezekiel wheel ready to destroy this devil in six hours time.… They are just waiting to hear the name of the Prophet W. D. Fard Muhammad.… This plane is a wheel-shaped plane known as the Mother of Planes. It is one-half mile by a half-mile and is the largest mechanical man-made object in the sky. It is a small human planet made for the purpose of destroying the present world of the enemies of Allah.
The plane was built in Japan, he said, on the island of Nippon. According to Muhammad, the flying saucers people had reported seeing were actually “escort planes” from the Mother of Planes. In all, 1,500 escort planes had accompanied the Mothership. “One bomb from this plane will destroy fifty square miles and if it doesn’t kill a person—that is, if it only breaks his leg—the poison gas does the rest,” he warned his audience.17
In late 1935, the Messenger pointed to several more catastrophes as evidence that Armageddon was approaching. Hitler’s denunciation of the Versailles Treaty and the construction of concentration camps in Dachau were seen by him as evidence of the end of the international “Jewish conspiracy” that Fard had preached about. The assassination of Senator Huey “Kingfish” Long of Louisiana on September 10 was hailed by him as another sign of the decline of the American empire, as the presidential aspirant (his book, My First Days in the White House, had just been published) was seen as a symbol of the moral decay in the national government. The third omen was a hurricane in Florida in September that killed 436 people. Most of the fatalities were passengers on a Florida East Coast Railroad train that was mangled by winds of over 125 miles an hour.
These tactics worked for a while, but were of questionable value in the long run; after a few weeks, new recruits became bored by Muhammad’s monologues and his constant cries about the big, bad wolf in white skin. Membership in the NOI continued to plummet. By Christmas, it was clear to all but the desperately devout that no plagues were on the horizon and that the year-long physical death of the white man that Muhammad described was a rather enjoyable life as far as anyone could tell. The American economy, despite Muhammad’s dire forecast, was improving steadily under President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Many African Americans, Muslims included, were able to find gainful employment on Detroit’s auto assembly lines and under programs created by the government under the National Recovery Act (NRA). Muslims were doing so well, in fact, that a sociologist who conducted the first formal study of the NOI reported that there wasn’t “a single case of unemployment” among Muhammad’s followers, and that most Muslims enjoyed a fairly fortunate lifestyle.18
One of the axioms of political science is that few people favor a change in a system of government when its economic policies are working to their advantage. The Muslims were no exception. Some members of the NOI who had joined as early as 1931 stopped attending Muhammad’s thrice weekly sermons; it was simply too depressing to listen to his “the sky is falling” sermon over and over again, especially so soon after the worst years of the Great Depression.
When the War of Armageddon failed to materialize and the Mothership failed to land, there was a growing feeling among the NOI membership that Muhammad was a fraud. How could a real prophet have made such a colossal miscalculation, they wondered. The faithful, who had had few worldly possessions to begin with, now, since obeying Muhammad’s injunction to dispose of them, had nothing, nothing at all—no chairs for sitting or tables for dining. Some were homeless, having given up their apartments. If the message was wrong, perhaps the Messenger was a false prophet. “The enemies, hypocrites, united to drive me out,” Muhammad recollected.19 Narrowly escaping several attempts on his life, he bid farewell to his wife and children, as he had done when coming to the Promised Land, and headed for Washington, D.C. He found a room for rent in a row house owned by Benjamin and Clara Mitchell.20
“Call me Evans … Mr. Evans,” Muhammad said when he introduced himself to the couple. (Evans, as may be recalled, was his wife’s maiden name.) The house was near Howard University, a repository of some of oldest and rarest books on Africans of the diaspora. Accepting him at his word, the Mitchell’s extended a hearty welcome to the newcomer at 1602 13th Street Northwest (the city’s streets all carry a directional quadrant), which was in a well-maintained black neighborhood within walking distance of the Library of Congress, where Muhammad planned to study the books on the list Fard gave him. He quickly befriended his landlords, who allowed him to use their home as a makeshift temple. After converting the Mitchells and about thirty other Washingtonians to Islam, Muhammad began holding meetings in a storefront building on U Street, the center of black economic power in the nation’s capital.21
Despite his moderate success in Washington, NOI national membership had fallen from 20,000 to fewer than 5,000. In a desperate measure to beef up the membership rolls and increase the revenues for his dwindling sect, Muhammad reinstated some of the ritualistic practices Fard had introduced in the cult when he was under Takahashi’s influence, including human sacrifice. In January 1937, Muhammad decreed that it was the moral obligation of every Muslim head of household to convert his entire family. The demand was not to be taken lightly, either. Any man who failed to convert his family within one year of joining the NOI was threatened with expulsion. For most Muslims, the isolation associated with expulsion was the equivalent of a death sentence.22
Verlen McQueen (renamed Verlen Ali by Fard in 1933), a member in Detroit, had been unable to convince his wife and daughter to join the cult. Although he had been a member since 1932, he had never been under any pressure to convert his family until Muhammad’s mandate was handed down. McQueen’s brother, Tata Pasha (his slave name was Todd McQueen), was an assistant minister at a satellite temple in Detroit. On January 16, 1937, Pasha, who had converted his own family, ordered McQueen to either convert his wife and daughter or sacrifice them in the name of Allah.23
McQueen pleaded with his wife, Rebecca, and their eleven-year-old daughter, Dorothy, to join the cult. But his wife refused, citing McQueen’s promise to her that if she came back to him—they had been separated for seven years—she would not be forced to join. McQueen knew that his wife’s recalcitrance would cost him his membership in the NOI. His salvation was suddenly slipping away, his entire lifestyle threatened. On January 18, he invited twelve witnesses to his home. Pending their arrival, he prepared a ten-gallon pot of boiling water to be used as “holy water” during a noon ceremony in which he planned to murder his wife and daughter.24
McQueen refused to tell his wife why he was boiling the water, but she had only days earlier overheard Pasha tell him that he would sacrifice his own family if that was what it took to ensure his standing in the NOI. Fearing for her life, Rebecca McQueen called the police while her husband was in the kitchen. When they arrived and questioned Verlen, he admitted that he had planned to kill his family. When asked why, he replied that his family had to die because “they were unholy.” He was arrested on charges of attempted murder. Rebecca and Dorothy McQueen were put in a “safe house” pending McQueen’s trial to protect them from being harmed by other members of the cult.25
Newspaper headlines about the McQueen case caused many Muslims to rethink their commitment to the NOI. The overriding fear was that Muhammad would order other non-Muslim family members put to death. Rather than risk facing such a dreadful dilemma, over five hundred families quit the Detroit and Chicago temples within weeks of the McQueen incident.
The return to the idea of sacrificial slayings rekindled memories of the macabre murder of James Smith in 1932. NOI faithful wondered why Muhammad had suddenly reinstated the archaic rituals, when the practice had resulted in widespread discrimination against Muslims and had led to an economic deprivation so severe that it had nearly destroyed the sect. The riddle was sufficiently solved when they discovered that Takahashi had returned to Detroit just weeks before Muhammad issued the membership mandate. He had sneaked back into Paradise Valley, where he had been seen with his common-law wife. His return to Detroit could not have come at a more propitious time, for all four of the black organizations that he had helped either establish or finance were disintegrating.26
