Summary

Elijah and Clara Muhammad’s work advancing the Nation of Islam (also “the NOI” and “the Nation”) was the most significant in a series of developments of Islam among African Americans. The earliest Muslims in the United States were enslaved Africans who brought Islam as an indigenized practice during the colonial era. Some left legacies written in Arabic. A later development was Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) that emerged around 1913 in New Jersey after Timothy Drew (aka Thomas Drew) encountered Islam through travel to North Africa and the Mediterranean region. By the time of the NOI’s origin, Islam was not only a heritage of African religious practices brought to the hemisphere of the Americas. It also was partially linked to the MSTA and, like the MSTA, reflected the black religious consciousness that objected to enslavement and its Jim Crow legacies of subjugation, exclusion, and violence. In 1930, during the Great Depression, silk merchant W. D Fard introduced Islam to Black Detroiters. Some of the most materially challenged African Americans in Detroit embraced the NOI as as a response to their desperate circumstances and as their conscious objections to what they were experiencing. Fard’s teaching met readiness for a message, deity, and religious tradition that responded directly to the social and cultural challenges black persons faced. Elijah Muhammad is routinely described as the leader of the NOI who took up and propagated the teachings of W. D. Fard to build the NOI into a national organization. However, Clara Muhammad, Elijah’s wife since 1919, was de facto cofounder and co-leader. Her contributions were essential during the two foundational decades of the Nation’s formation. Together Elijah and Clara built the NOI into a movement with a membership that numbered over one hundred thousand persons and assets in excess of US$50 million. Under their leadership, the NOI helped overcome the perceived total hegemony of Christianity as the only legitimate expression of religiosity, not only for African Americans but also for other peoples of the United States. Through the Nation, they offered African Americans an opportunity to take up a separatist disposition. Moreover, preceding the heyday of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the Muhammads emphasized affirmation of black identity that precipitated expressions of black pride during the civil rights and black power movements and that persist as generative ideas that deepen and become more complex in successive iterations of African American discourses about black identity.