The Messenger Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Karl Evanzz’s

  THE MESSENGER

  “Evanzz … has a nose for scoops.”

  —Time

  “Evanzz expertly charts Muhammad’s course.”

  —The Star-Ledger

  “Karl Evanzz is both a meticulous historian and an effective chronicler. For anyone seeking to understand the history of the Black Muslim movement and its place in America during the twentieth century, this book is essential.”

  —David Maraniss

  “There is nothing of the dull history tome about Evanzz’s narrative: occasional flashes of irony add to this fascinating story of the self-described prophet of Islam.”

  —The Republican

  “A fascinating, long overdue study of one of the most intriguing personalities of the twentieth century … One of the most complete accounts to date of the final, bitter confrontation between Muhammad and his chief disciple, Malcolm X.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Evanzz excels at evoking the historical context of his subject, offering a masterful account of the rise and fall of the Nation of Islam and its impact on African Americans.… An important, if disheartening, book.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A convincing exposé that also offers an interesting account of the souring relationship between Muhammad and his great disciple, Malcolm X.”

  —Library Journal

  Karl Evanzz

  THE MESSENGER

  Karl Evanzz is an on-line editor at The Washington Post. He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, MSNBC, and Tony Brown’s Black Journal as an authority on the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. He is the author of The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. He lives in suburban Washington, D.C.

  ALSO BY Karl Evanzz

  The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X

  FIRST VINTAGE EDITION, JANUARY 2001

  Copyright © 1999 by Karl Evanzz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the

  Pantheon Edition as follows:

  The messenger: the rise and fall of Elijah Muhammad / Karl Evanzz.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80520-1

  1. Elijah Muhammad, 1897–1975. 2. Black Muslims—Biography. 3. Afro-Americans—Biography. I. Title.

  BP223.Z8E434 1999

  297.8 7 092—DC21

  [b] 99-11826

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  In

  loving memory

  to my mother; and

  to Dad; to my immediate

  and extended family, expressly

  Donald Brown, one of America’s most

  gifted musicians and prolific composers; and

  to Malcolm Shabazz, with faith, love, and prayer.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue: Undercover

  1 Brother’s Keeper

  2 Roots

  3 Paradise Lost

  4 Lord of the Flies

  5 Bitter Fruit

  6 Elijah the Prophet

  7 Moles in the Mosque

  8 Kaaballah

  9 Arabesque

  10 Compromised

  11 Black Macbeth

  12 Sons and Lovers

  13 Devil’s Disciples

  14 The Pen and the Sword

  15 Apollo Fires

  16 And Mercury Falls

  17 In the Name of Allah

  18 Keys to the Kingdom

  19 A Con for a Con

  Epilogue: Virtual Religion

  Afterword

  Appendices

  A. Reported Aliases of the Messenger and of Wallace D. Fard

  B. The Scarlet Letter

  C. Concise Genealogy of Elijah Muhammad

  D. Locations and Infrastructure of the Nation of Islam, 1958–1959

  E. The Muslim Program

  F. Selected Declassified Government Documents on Elijah Muhammad and Key Figures in the Nation of Islam

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  PREFACE

  America’s long and divisive experiment with school integration may be quietly coming to an end. Although both black and white Americans strongly support the ideal of integration, the persistence of de facto residential segregation has made integration difficult to obtain by anything short of extraordinary measures.

  —Book Notes, Harvard Law Review (1996)1

  A generation ago, 80 percent of Blacks went to church. Today that figure is 40 percent.…

  —Christianity Today, March 4, 19962

  At a time when many denominations are seeing a decline in membership, Islam is said to be the fastest-growing religion in the United States.…

  —Congressional Quarterly Researcher, April 30, 19933

  If the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City had occurred on any day other than February 26, there would not have been speculation about it being the work of the black separatist sect known as the Nation of Islam. Nor would some African Americans have wondered whether the bombing was an elaborate government measure to equate Islam with terrorism, and in that way suppress its growing appeal to blacks, as it had done with Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism in the early part of this century.4 However, as it did happen on February 26—the date members of the Nation of Islam believe is literally God’s birthday—the attention of some scholars familiar with the sect focused on Chicago, where thousands of Muslim admirers of Minister Louis Farrakhan had gathered.5

  To most Americans, the Nation of Islam is synonymous with Louis Farrakhan, the controversial minister who, to nearly everyone’s amazement, inspired up to one million black men to gather in Washington on October 16, 1995, for a day of “atonement.”6 While the mass media credited Farrakhan with conceiving the idea of the Million Man March, he had said some months before the march that the initial idea came out of a thirty-two-year-old conversation between himself and a man he habitually refers to as “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

  “I was visiting with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as we watched the 1963 March on Washington,” Farrakhan wrote in an article published on the World Wide Web in the fall of 1995. “He said he saw too much frivolity, joking, and a picnic atmosphere.” He promised Farrakhan that one day the Nation of Islam, which he, Muhammad, headed at the time, would call for its own march on Washington. In calling for the Million Man March, Farrakhan maintained that he was fulfilling another of Muhammad’s “prophecies.”7

  Farrakhan referred to Elijah Muhammad often during his three-hour address that day (the first anniversary of his brother Alvan’s death), but most young Americans outside the African-American community had no idea whom he was talking about. Foreigners were even more in the dark and were equally nonplussed by Farrakhan’s allusions to Sufism and esoterica in this, his first nationally televised address. But among African Americans, the name Elijah Muhammad had a ring as familiar as Big Ben’s to the British and connotations as unique to them as those of the pyramids to the Egyptians. They have always regarded Elijah Muhammad as the primary embodiment of the sect and the single most significant mover in the skyrocketing conversion of African Americans to Islam.8
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  Indeed, most of the estimated four million African Americans who have converted to Islam did so after reading pamphlets and books written by Elijah Muhammad or after visiting one of the hundreds of storefront mosques he opened over a period spanning five decades. That hip-hop artists as dissimilar as Afrika Bambaataa, Brand Nubian, and Public Enemy have recorded rap songs in praise of him is a testament to his enduring influence in Black America. “Get back on the right track,” a popular hip-hop group urged listeners some years ago, by listening to “the word from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”9 Today, large colorful posters featuring his likeness dominate dormitory rooms on college campuses across the country, while small, framed black-and-white photographs of him are displayed on nightstands and mantels in the homes of many black senior citizens.

  Who, exactly, was Elijah Muhammad?

  Asking that is tantamount to quizzing college freshmen on the nature of “truth”: it will beget answers as varied as the faces in the classroom. To acolytes of Minister Farrakhan of Chicago and Minister Silis Muhammad of Atlanta (the head of a splinter group of the Nation of Islam), Elijah Muhammad was the seal of God’s prophets, the Messiah whose coming was foretold in the Holy Bible and the Holy Quran. Muhammad himself fostered this idea and, for years, tried to convince his family (some of whom had studied Islam at prestigious universities in the United States and in the Middle East) that he, Elijah of Gilead, and the seventh-century prophet Muhammad were one and the same.10

  For Imam Wallace Muhammad of Chicago, his father Elijah was a proud parent of eight children who brought African Americans back to their “old-time religion,” as millions of Africans who came here in chains were Muslims.11 But he was not, Wallace and orthodox Muslims vehemently insist, the prophet portrayed by Farrakhan and Silis Muhammad, and obviously not the same Muhammad who transcribed the Holy Quran. To millions of African Americans, Elijah Muhammad was not so much a prophet as a self-schooled psychoanalyst who advanced unorthodox theories about the nature and role of religion and race in mental dysfunction. When they were publicized in the early 1960s, Muhammad’s ideas shocked seminarians and the medical establishment alike. His theories on human behavior, like those of B. F. Skinner, at first stunned behavioral psychologists, but they subsequently used some of them in dealing with their own clients of color. His ideas concerning the nexus between diet and disease were dismissed thirty years ago, but have since been confirmed by federally funded studies and by nutritionists around the world.12 To many Jewish groups, he was an uneducated antisemite whose philosophy was expressed in the outlandish orations of Khallid Muhammad, a former Farrakhan protégé.13 To orthodox Muslims, he was a heretic akin to the founders of the Baha’i faith and the Ahmadiyya Movement. All these perceptions, like the tactile experiences of the ten blind men describing the elephant, reflect elements in his persona; any one or group of them fails to capture the complete picture of the man.

  Hence, this biography. It is, in some respects, strange that no authoritative and comprehensive biography of Elijah Muhammad appeared before the centennial of his birth. I can recall quite vividly the interview District of Columbia talk-show host Cathy Hughes did some years ago with former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali in which this very issue was raised. Why, Hughes asked, did Ali suppose there were no biographies of “this great man” whom he, too, called “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

  “The Champ,” as Ali is endearingly referred to by his admirers, couldn’t explain why, except to suggest that Americans were still unwilling or uninterested in acknowledging Elijah Muhammad’s contributions to African-American history and the growth of Islam in the West. Elijah Muhammad’s impact on the social and religious roads that African Americans have taken is undeniable, as Ali pointed out, but the reasons for the absence of an accurate, thorough biography since his death in 1975 have little or nothing to do with denying him his mark on black history.

  The real reasons are multifaceted, but foremost among them are, on the one hand, the shroud of secrecy that characterized Elijah Muhammad’s relationship with the media and, on the other, the iconoclastic nature of the Nation of Islam, the sect Elijah Muhammad cofounded in the early 1930s and led until his death. Muhammad’s disciples—from his own children to Farrakhan to rank-and-filers—were reticent about discussing his life because they were afraid that outsiders would deliberately distort his character and pervert the portrait of his life. Many of those I interviewed expressed the view that a non-Muslim biographer would paint an even darker and grimmer picture of the man and his religious movement than the mainstream media did while he was alive. Several of the Muslims I talked to cited press coverage of the bombing of the World Trade Center and the subsequent skewed depictions of the bombing suspects (all of them Muslims) as an example of the mainstream media’s Judeo-Christian bias.

  An equally important reason for the lack of an authoritative biography is that for a long time many scholars and Muhammad’s critics feared the wrath of his diehard followers, some of whom have a “mujahedin” mentality. The most rational basis for this fear of vengeance was, of course, the assassination of Malcolm X, the first person to publicly criticize Elijah Muhammad, his mentor. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was shot sixteen times during the opening minutes of an address to his followers in Harlem. Although the actual assassins were identified only recently, it has since been discovered that there were at least a half-dozen squads assigned to Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom that afternoon, all bent on ensuring that the words Malcolm X uttered that day would be his last. Elijah Muhammad’s staunchest apologists now claim that Malcolm X’s corpse left a figurative path of blood from the Audubon Ballroom to FBI headquarters in Washington and CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where a joint covert counterintelligence campaign against Black Muslims had begun in 1964. The campaign, which was designed to “neutralize” Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad and to destroy the Nation of Islam in the process, was generally successful.

  Declassified government documents lend credence to this argument, but one truth remains unaltered and inalienable: Whatever role the government played in instigating internecine warfare between Malcolm X and Muhammad, the black men who killed Malcolm X had as much free will as everyone else. There are dozens of other instances of attacks upon Muhammad’s alleged detractors, many of which are chronicled in this book. As such, it is little wonder that journalists and scholars have shied away from writing anything that might be regarded as critical of him or injurious to his reputation. A parallel disincentive to scholars and writers interested in interpreting his life bears upon the issue of loyalty. Since the rise of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s, dogma among black nationalists is that one cannot claim to admire Malcolm X and simultaneously write dispassionately about Elijah Muhammad (the same argument has been made, by the way, about Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).

  To be sure, the Nation of Islam’s secretiveness and reputation for violence have not been the only impediments to writing a biography of Elijah Muhammad. The federal government—particularly the FBI—has hindered scholars wanting to write a comprehensive account of his life by violating the letter and the spirit of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act. As a case in point, on January 4, 1974, a German student working on a doctoral thesis on the Nation of Islam wrote then FBI director, Clarence Kelley, to request the Bureau’s files on Wallace D. Fard. At the time the student, Yeseult Cleirens, was a graduate assistant at Union Theological Seminary in New York to Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, author of The Black Muslims in America, the first comprehensive study of the Nation of Islam, which was published in the early 1960s. Ms. Cleiren’s request wasn’t rejected outright—that would have been a clear violation of the new law—but she was asked to prepay such exorbitant research and photocopying fees that she had to forgo her request.

  A testament to bureaucratic bullying, Kelley’s letter indicated that the FBI might charge as much as $12,000 for processing the main file on Fard, and that a $3,000 deposit was required b
efore the Bureau would even consider processing the file. Similar requests to the FBI from various scholars met with much the same response in the five years following Cleirens’s request.14 In September 1978, I filed a lengthy request pursuant to the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act on Elijah Muhammad, Wallace D. Fard, and other prominent members of the Nation of Islam. Although it took nearly a decade for the FBI to release some of the files, the file on Fard was a big disappointment. Contrary to Kelley’s suggestion that the file was a massive one, the main file contains fewer than 400 pages, and the field office files released thus far are about the same. Thus, documents that the FBI told Cleirens would cost thousands of dollars can be acquired today for less than $100.15 When the data from the Fard file were evaluated, along with information from files on some fifty individuals and organizations, I realized that Elijah Muhammad’s journey was as incredible and multidimensional as that of his most important and loyal disciple, Malcolm Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X.

  I think you’ll agree.

  PROLOGUE

  UNDERCOVER

  If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

  —Minersville School District v. Gobitis

  (U.S. Supreme Court)1

  Laws are silent in the midst of arms.

  —Cicero, Pro Milone2

  On September 20, 1942, under the cover of still slumbering skies, a swarm of Chicago police officers and FBI agents surrounded the South Side home of a fugitive proclaimed by his adherents as the “Prophet.”3 In a moment, they hoped, their extensive counterintelligence operations against the fugitive’s group and other black “pro-Japanese” organizations would pay the ultimate dividend: the arrest and apprehension of black nationalist leaders on sedition charges.