The Messenger, page 57
A number of librarians took time to research matters that I could have done myself only at considerable expense. They include the staffs of various public libraries in Maryland and the District of Columbia, the Gary Public Library, the Cordele Public Library, the Sandersville Public Library, the Detroit Public Library, the Gwinnett County (Ga.) Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, and the incomparable staff at the Library of Congress. I am also grateful to Ms. Chawdri of the Embassy of Pakistan, Ahmed Nabal of the MIT/Harvard University Aga Khan Visual Archives, and Fareed H. Nu’man of the American Muslim Council.
Last but most importantly, my deep gratitude goes to my literary agent, Nina Graybill of Graybill and English LLC, to Altie Karper and the staff at Pantheon, and especially to my editor, Erroll McDonald.
NOTES
PREFACE
1. The statement is from the preface to a review of David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law. See Book Notes, Harvard Law Review 109, no. 5 (March 1996): 1144–49.
2. See, in general, Andres Tapia, “Soul Searching: How Is the Black Church Responding to the Urban Crisis?” Christianity Today, March 4, 1996, 26–30.
3. Mary H. Cooper, “Muslims in America,” The Congressional Quarterly Researcher, April 30, 1993, 363–83.
4. J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to destroy Marcus Garvey, a West Indian who came to America in 1916, and who created one of the largest black nationalist organizations in the world within five years (the Universal Negro Improvement Association), is well-documented. At the end of Hoover’s successful counterintelligence campaign, Garvey was convicted of mail-fraud charges and was deported “to avoid a possible exposé of what even Attorney General John Sargent considered prosecutorial misconduct.” See O’Reilly, Black Americans; also see “Black Moses, Red Scare: The Clash of Marcus Garvey and J. Edgar Hoover,” Washington Post, February 12, 1997, H01.
5. The celebration is formally called the Annual Saviour’s Day Convention. Members of the Nation of Islam believe that God, or Allah, came to America “in human form” in 1930. The “living God” used several names, but is primarily called Master Wallace Fard Muhammad or Master Wallace Fard. See Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America; also see Lincoln, Black Muslims in America; Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism.
6. The Nation of Islam’s estimate of one million marchers conflicted with an estimate by the United States Park Police, which used aerial photographs to conclude that less than half a million people visited the Mall during the day-long event. Several weeks after the march, Farouk El-Baz, head of Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing, used a teehnique similar to that employed by the U.S. Park Police, but determined that between 670,00 and 1,004,000 people attended. See “Boston U. Sets March at 837,000; Estimates Hinge on Crowd Density,” Washington Post, October 28, 1995, C03.
7. “Minister Louis Farrakhan Calls for One Million Man March.” The article, which appeared before the Nation of Islam, had its own site on the World Wide Web, and so was picked up by another provider (http://www/afrinet … Fspeaks/marchcall.html).
8. The leading survey on the growth of Islam was conducted by the American Muslim Council in 1992. See The Muslim Population in the United States (pamphlet), American Muslim Council, 1992.
9. See “A Tribute to Malcolm X,” Black Beat Superstar Special No. 8, Lexington Library, 1992. The hit recording by Public Enemy was titled “Party for Your Right to Fight,” Def American Records, 1988.
10. His family, for the most part, were not convinced. See Barboza, American Jihad, 271; see also Muhammad, Theology of Time, book 1, 31.
11. Documentation establishing Islam as the religion of many Africans sold into slavery is voluminous. One of the most recent and fascinating accounts of slave rebellions, in fact, concerns how African Muslims taken to Brazil used pages in the Holy Quran to record details of an insurrection. See João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Also see Malcolm Cowley, Adventures of an African Slaver (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1928). Owing to the horrors of slavery, some slaves had trouble reconciling the slavemasters’ behavior with the latter’s professed religion. Thus, they rejected Christianity and talked about “that ol’–time religion.” See, for example, the lyrics to the spiritual titled “Gimme Dat Ol’-Time Religion.” Johnson and Johnson, Books of American Negro Spirituals. Wallace Muhammad currently spells his last name differently: Mohammed. For the sake of clarity, it is spelled herein consistently as Muhammad.
12. Muhammad, How to Eat to Live; book 1; Muhammad, How to Eat to Live, book 2.
13. See Forster and Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism, 175–220; Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America, 182–203. The Nation of Islam offered a drug-abuse treatment program which was so effective that government officials sought the sect’s help in the early 1960s in its fight to treat black drug addicts.
14. Correspondences between the student and FBI Director Kelley are included in the FBI’s declassified main file on Wallace D. Fard.
15. The “headquarters” file on Wallace D. Fard has 372 pages; the Detroit field office file, 99 pages; and the Chicago field office file, 345 pages. Pages are duplicated for a charge of $0.10 a page, and the first 100 pages are duplicated free of charge. Thus, the total cost of the file (of 816 pages) is $71.60.
PROLOGUE: UNDERCOVER
1. Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 319 U.S. 624 (1940).
2. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Milone, in Tryon Edwards et al, eds. The New Dictionary of Thoughts (New York: Standard Book Co. 1965). The Roman orator’s statement “Silent enim leges inter arma” has also been translated as “The law is silent during war” or “Laws are dumb amidst the clash of arms.” See Seldes, The Great Quotations, 158.
3. This account is based upon a very detailed FBI report of the arrest, interviews with members of Elijah Muhammad’s family, a four-page confession Muhammad made at the time of his arrest, reports by other writers and scholars, and lectures by ministers of the Nation of Islam. This was the only portion of the book submitted to Elijah Muhammad’s family for corroborative purposes. No one in the family disputed it. While members of the NOI have long argued that Elijah Muhammad was not hiding under the bed, no persuasive proof has been submitted to contradict the official record. Indeed, when Muhammad was interviewed in 1960, he did not dispute that he “was found in his mother’s home rolled in a carpet under the bed.” Wallace H. Terry, “Cult of Hate: Black Muslim Elijah’s Lowly Start” (Part 2 of 6), Washington Post, December 12, 1960, A03; also see Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1942, A09.
4. The manhunt for Muhammad and his followers was so elaborate and time-consuming that the FBI compiled more than 80,000 pages of documents detailing it. Many of the documents indicate that Hoover was very angry about the Bureau’s failure to apprehend Muhammad quickly.
5. A complete list of aliases used by Elijah Muhammad appears in Appendix A of this book. The Nation of Islam was originally called the “Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America.” See Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America; also see Lincoln, Black Muslims in America.
6. See “Moslem Leader Arrested,” Washington Star, May 9, 1942, A07.
7. The Nation of Islam was first on a list of thirty-five organizations U.S. Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge targeted for prosecution in the fall of 1942. The Justice Department was especially concerned about reports that Japanese radicals had been supplying arms to black nationalists. See, for example, Memorandum for the Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation. The document appears in the FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, section 3, 1–3. Also see, in general, Hill, The FBI’s RACON.
8. FBI Headquarters HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, memo dated September 22, 1942, 1–7.
9. Ibid. Also see Parole Progress Report on Gulam Bogans, aka Elijah Muhammad, Federal Correctional Institution at Milan, Michigan, dated April 23, 1945; Admission Summary, dated August 20, 1943; and Physical Examination and Correlated History, dated July 26, 1943. The reports are part of the FBI’s HQ file on Elijah Muhammad; Associated Press interview and feature story titled “People in the News: Elijah Muhammad,” Chicago, February 25, 1965.
1. BROTHER’S KEEPER
1. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1914), 32.
2. H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1963), 142.
3. Mellon, Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember, 441.
4. Interviews with Cordele Library staff members; interviews with the Honorable Rachel T. Lord, Washington County Probate Court; also see Clegg, An Original Man, 3–4.
5. “Middleton Pool,” Division of Estates, book A: 1829–1871, Washington County Probate Court, 196–97; “Middleton Pool,” Wills, book B: 1852–1903, Washington County Probate Court, 160. These documents are hereinafter jointly referred to as “Last Will and Testament of Middleton Pool.”
6. John Pitman served as one of three witnesses to Pool’s signing of his last will and testament. “Last Will and Testament of Middleton Pool,” 3. Members of Elijah Muhammad’s family of Pitman lineage still reside in Cordele, Sandersville, and Oconee, Georgia, according to Erskine Weaver, a friend of the family who is principal of Southwestern Elementary School in Cordele.
7. Ibid. Middleton Pool Jr. and his first wife lived in the village of Bold Springs for a few years before moving to Dekalb County. While some scholars have reported that Bold Springs was once part of Washington County and that Elijah was born there, they are in error. According to the sourcebook Georgia Place Names, Bold Springs has been in Walton County since it was established near the turn of the century. The name was changed to Williamsville in 1908, but reverted to Bold Springs a year later. The village of Bold Springs is approximately eighty miles northwest of Sandersville, and roughly at the thirty-five-mile mark between Atlanta and Athens. If Elija Pool had been born in Bold Springs, as several scholars have contended, it seems likely that he would have indicated his birthplace as being near Atlanta, not Sandersville. In fact, he told Malcolm X that he was born “in Sandersville.” Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 204.
8. “Last Will and Testament of Middleton Pool.”
9. Ibid., 2.
10. Of name-changing, one scholar wrote: “A new name was both a symbol of personal liberation and an act of political defiance; it reversed the enslavement process and confirmed the free Negro’s newly won liberty just as the loss of an African name had earlier symbolized enslavement.” Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 51–52.
11. “Last Will and Testament of Middleton Pool,” 196–97.
12. The Black Codes were laws whose sole purpose was to negate the Emancipation Proclamation and other subsequent legislation aimed at ending slavery. It forced blacks under the age of eighteen to remain on their former master’s plantation as wards if they were orphans or if their parents couldn’t care for them properly. See Ploski and Kaiser, “The Black Codes of Mississippi,” The Negro Almanac, 137–40; also see Bergman and Bergman, Chronological History of the Negro, 245–46.
13. Ferris, The Presidents, 156–63; also see Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, vol. 3, 1861–1865 (Washington: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), 25.
14. Woodrow Wilson, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1901, 2–11, reprinted in Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., Problems in American Civilization: Reconstruction in the South (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1952), 1–11.
15. Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 19–25. For a general history of the Ku Klux Klan, also see Chalmers, Hooded Americanism; Wade, The Fiery Cross.
16. Turner, The Negro Question, xi.
17. See In Re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895); Colston E. Warne, The Pullman Boycott of 1894: The Problem of Federal Intervention (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1955); “Robert Todd Lincoln,” Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia (1983), vol. 16, 139.
18. Plessy v. Ferguson, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 1143, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
19. Washington, Up from Slavery, 219–20.
20. Author’s interviews with members of Elijah Muhammad’s family; interviews of Pitman family via Erskine Bowles and others.
21. Henry McNeal Turner Papers: “The Writings of Henry McNeal Turner”; also see, in general, Douglas, Black Christ.
22. Meltzer, The Black Americans, 98–102.
23. “Negro Colonization Plan,” New York Times, September 28, 1903, A01.
24. Meltzer, The Black Americans, 98–102.
25. Henry McNeal Turner Papers: “Autobiography.”
26. Ibid.; also see “Religion’s Changing Face: More Churches Depicting Christ as Black,” Washington Post, March 28, 1994, A01.
27. Wallace Terry, “Cult of Hate: Black Muslim Elijah’s Lowly Start” (part 2 of 6), Washington Post, December 12, 1960, A03; Muhammad, History of the Nation of Islam, 3–4, 46; also see, in general, Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree.
28. Theodore P. Greene, ed., American Imperialism in 1898 (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1955); “Headline,” New York Times, October 27, 1897, A05.
29. “Negro Labor for Hawaii; A Report That Asiatics Will Gradually Make Way for the Overplus of the South,” New York Times, August 5, 1897, A05.
30. See “Mourning Glory: The Ashanti King’s Cloak of Symbols,” Washington Post, February 9, 1997, G01.
31. Beller, Herzl, 26, 62–66; Herzl, The Jewish State, 25–41.
32. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America.” Arena, January 1900, 15–24; Scott, Living Documents in American History, vol. 2, 498–507.
33. Beller, Herzl, 81.
34. Elijah Muhammad knew he was born in October, but was never sure of the exact date. As he regarded 7 as a lucky number, he selected October 7 as his birthday. “Muhammad Meets the Press!” Muhammad Speaks, January 14, February 4, and February 11, 1972; booklet reprint, Elijah Muhammad Meets the Press, 19. Also see “Elijah Muhammad,” Current Biography 1971, 293–95; Hakim, True History of Elijah Muhammad, 273.
35. Quoted in Eyes on the Prize (documentary); also see, in general, Bennett, Before the Mayflower.
36. See chart, “Lynchings by Race and Year: 1882–1962,” in Ploski and Williams, The Negro Almanac, 368.
37. “Crime Grows in Georgia; Gov. Atkinson Calls the Attention of the Legislature to Its Increase,” New York Times, October 28, 1906, A01.
38. “Lynch Law in the South; Georgia Legislators to Try and Find a Way for Its Suppression,” New York Times, November 14, 1897, A09.
39. FBI HQ File on Elijah Muhammad, section 1.
40. Ibid.
41. FBI HQ File on Elijah Muhammad, Parole Progress Report on Ghulam Bogans, aka Elijah Muhammad (1943).
42. Author’s interviews with Erskine Bowles.
43. Terry, “Cult of Hate” (part 2).
44. Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 205–6.
45. “Say Negro Race Is Dying; Medical Expert Tells President Deaths Here Exceed the Births,” New York Times, April 10, 1906, A01.
46. Muhammad, Theology of Time, part 1, 69–70; Hakim, True History of Elijah Muhammad, 37–38. One antilynching poster read “A Reign of Midnight Terror” across the top and “Ku Klux Devils Incarnate” at the bottom. See Harris, The Black Book, 59.
47. Hakim, True History of Elijah Muhammad, 37–38. For lyrics to “Steal Away to Jesus,” see Johnson and Johnson, Books of American Negro Spirituals, 114–17.
48. Muhammad, Theology of Time, 227.
49. “Unknown Negro Is Lynched,” Atlanta Constitution, October 17, 1903, A02.
50. FBI HQ file on Elijah Muhammad, Parole Progress Report on Ghulam Bogans; Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 205–6; Current Biography 1971, 293–95.
51. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873); Peonage Cases, 123 F. 671 (D.C.M.D. Ala. 1903). 42 United States Code 1581. The congressional statute was upheld in Clyatt v. U.S., 197 U.S. 207 (1905).
52. “World’s Fair Department of Anthropology: Portions of Ancient Cities Are to Be Represented and Unwritten History Revealed,” St. Louis Republic, March 6, 1904, A01. Other articles about the treatment of Ota Benga are in the appendix of a recent account of his life and death: see Bradford and Blume, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. “Blacks and the Constitution: Justice Thurgood Marshall,” Washington Post, July 5, 1987, D07.
56. Berea College v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908).
57. “Negroes in the North; They Have Fewer Chances Here Than South, Washington Says,” New York Times, September 20, 1906, A05.
58. Bergman and Bergman, Chronological History of the Negro in America, 347–48; “Paper Blamed for Riots; Grand Jury Accuses Atlanta News of Stirring Up Race Feeling,” New York Times, September 28, 1906, A01.
59. “Atlanta Mobs Kill Ten Negroes; Maybe 23 or 30—Assaults on Women the Cause,” New York Times, September 23, 1906, A01; “Rioting Goes On, Despite Troops; Exodus of Black Servants Troubles City,” New York Times, September 24, 1906, A01.
60. “Whites and Negroes Killed in Atlanta; Mobs of Blacks Retaliate for Riots—Two Whites Killed,” New York Times, September 25, 1906, A01.
61. “Will Be Riots Here—Dixon; Says New York Will Kill Negroes. B. T. Washington’s Concern,” New York Times, September 24, 1906, A01–2; also see Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 21. Dixon’s book The Clansman later attracted the attention of D. W. Griffith, director of the controversial film The Birth of a Nation.
62.“Was It a ‘Crime’?” New York Times, January 28, 1906, A06.
63. “Race War Is Coming, Says Senator Tillman; Predicts Killings in the South Far Worse Than Atlanta’s,” New York Times, October 8, A01.
64. “Plans a Negro Haven in West Africa; Bishop Smith Finds a Chance for Thousands in Liberia,” New York Times, November 24, 1906, A11.
65. Cherry was founder of the Church of God, otherwise known as the “Black Jews.” See Furtaw, Black Americans Information Directory, “Church of God” and “Church of God and Saints of Christ,” 137–38; also see “Negro Prophet Elijah Awes Throng of Saints,” New York Times, April 14, 1906, A11; “Blacks [Are] Israelites, Church Teaches,” Washington Evening Star, August 28, 1971, A08; “Cicanci Referral Leads to Interesting Religious Excursion,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, December 19, 1995, B01.
