Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975): Black Nationalist, Nation of Islam Spiritual Leader

Posted in the soc.culture.african newsgroup, 18 February 2003

Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, on October 10, 1897. His father, a Baptist preacher, had been a slave.

As a boy, Elijah worked at various jobs involving manual labor. At the age of 26, he moved with his wife and two children (he was to have eight children in all) to Detroit.

There in 1930, Poole met Fard Muhammad, also known as W.D. Fard, who had founded the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. Poole soon became Fard’s chief assistant and in 1932 went to Chicago where he established the Nation of Islam’s Temple, Number Two, which soon became the largest. In 1934, he returned to Detroit.

When Fard disappeared that year, political and theological rivals accused Poole of foul play. He returned to Chicago where he organized his own movement, in which Fard was deified as Allah and Elijah (Poole) Muhammad became known as Allah’s Messenger. This movement soon became known as the Black Muslims.

During World War II, Elijah Muhammad expressed support for Japan, on the basis of its being a nonwhite country, and was jailed for sedition.

The time Muhammad served in prison was probably significant in his later, successful attempts to convert large numbers of black prison inmates, including Malcolm X, to the Nation of Islam.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation grew under Muhammad’s leadership. Internal differences between Muhammad and Malcolm X, followed by the break between the two men and Malcolm’s assassination, for which three Black Muslim gunmen were convicted, provided a great deal of unfavorable media coverage, but this did not slow the growth of the movement.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Elijah Muhammad moderated the Nation’s criticism of whites without compromising its message of black integrity. When Muhammad died on February 25, 1975, the Nation was an important religious, political, and economic force among America’s blacks, especially in this country’s major cities.

Elijah Muhammad was not original in his rejection of Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. Noble Drew Ali and the Black Jews had arrived at this conclusion well before him. But Muhammad was the most successful salesman for this brand of African American religion.

Thus he was able to build the first strong, black religious group in the United States that appealed primarily to the unemployed and underemployed city dweller, and ultimately to some in the black middle class.

In addition, his message on the virtues of being black was explicit and uncompromising, and he sought with at least a little success to bolster the economic independence of African Americans by establishing schools and businesses under the auspices of the Nation of Islam.