RACES: The Black Supremacists

“Every white man knows his time is up,” snapped the frail-looking Negro in the embroidered pillbox to 5,500 Negroes packed into Manhattan’s St. Nicholas Arena one hot afternoon last week. “I am here to teach you how to be free. Yes, free from the white man’s yoke. We want unity of all darker peoples on the earth. Then we will be masters of the United States, and we are going to treat the white man the way he should be treated.” Roared the crowd: “That’s right! More! More!” For more than two hours, as shouts and applause rose in regular cadences, the scowling, incendiary speaker obliged by pouring out his scorn upon all “white devils,” “satisfied black men,” the “poison” Bible, Christianity’s “slave-master doctrine,” and America’s “white for white” justice.

The purveyor of this cold black hatred is known to some 70,000 Negro followers (he claims 250,000) in 29 U.S. cities as Elijah Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, head of a stern, demanding, disciplined black-supremacist religious sect called “the Moslems.”* Calmly feeding the rankling frustration of urban Negroes, the Moslems reach deep among the least-educated, lowest-paid Negroes jammed into big-city slums from Harlem to Los Angeles. Muhammad’s virulent anti-Americanism and antiSemitism, plus his elite corps of dark-suited, shaven-polled young “honor guards,” has lifted him well beyond the run-of-the-street crackpot Negro nationalist groups. The Moslems are of rising concern to respectable Negro civic leaders, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to police departments in half a dozen cities, and to the FBI.

Men Named “X.” Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole, son of a Baptist minister, in Sandersville, Ga. on Oct. 7, 1897, later moved with his family to Detroit. One momentous day, he tells the faithful, he met one Fard Muhammad, who revealed himself to be “Allah on earth”—on earth, that is, just long enough to pick the “messenger” for his black-supremacy doctrine. Messenger Elijah dropped his “slave-master name” of Poole, took up the spiritual surname Muhammad (lacking religious surnames, his ministers just use “X”). He founded Temple No. i in 1931, but soon ran into difficulties.

Detroit police arrested him in April 1934 on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor (six months’ probation), and in November some of his would-be followers got disgusted with his teaching, drove him out of town. He set up permanent headquarters in Chicago, preached against the white man’s draft registration in World War II. When FBI agents tracked him to his mother’s Chicago home in September 1942, they found him rolled up in a carpet under her bed. He was in federal prison at Milan, Mich, for draft dodging until 1946, later made a play for recruits among ex-convicts. His New York leader, Malcolm X, once Malcolm Little, is an ex-convict who has been arrested for larceny in two states.

An ascetic little man, Elijah sternly demands that his followers give up tobacco, dope and alcohol, bathe often, pray toward Mecca five times a day, even if it means falling upon their knees in the streets. Moslem women should dress modestly, use no lipstick, never allow themselves to be alone in a room with any man except their husbands. Attacking all forms of dependence upon whites, Elijah set up a Moslem restaurant, cleaning business, barbershop, butcher shop, grocery store and department store on Chicago’s South Side, a cafe in Harlem, a cafe and a farm near Atlanta, also bought himself a luxurious, 18-room house near the University of Chicago. He founded “Universities of Islam” in Chicago and Detroit (the latter accredited by the local school board through the ninth grade) to teach his dogma to children and teenagers. Sample from his official temple creed: “There is no good in white men. All are the children of the devil.”

Muhammad also trained muscle. Each congregation has its “Fruit of Islam” force of young men, who take judo training in their temples, are commanded by Muhammad’s son-in-law, burly “Supreme Captain” Raymond Sharrieff. The F.O.I. protects its racist chief as if he were in constant danger of assassination. At each mass meeting, the F.O.I, frisks every male who attends, while “Sisters” in flowing white robes and headpieces stand inside a separate entrance (segregation by sexes also) to frisk each woman, put all potential weapons such as nail files in checking bags.

“Worse Every Day.” Muhammad’s doctrine of total hate found a ready medium in some Negro newspapers, which began to exploit Negro hopes and fears after the Emmett Till case. The Pittsburgh Courier, Negro national weekly, and the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch, booming West Coast Negro paper, not only gained attention from his personal column, but also found their circulations boosted fast by Moslems who hawked the papers on street corners as a spiritual duty. Such leading Negro Harlem politicos as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church) and Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack have curried Moslem favor, even though full-fledged Moslems are enjoined not to vote.*

Thus far the Moslems have been strictly law-abiding—a fact that worries some cops more than minor outbreaks of violence. “It’s getting worse every day,” says a Los Angeles police official, “and I only wish I knew what it’s going to take to light the fuse.” The Moslems themselves talk of 1970 as their DDay, expansively predict that before that time the big white nations will have eliminated each other with atomic warfare and Black Africa will stand unchallenged. Says Chicago Urban League’s Negro Director Edwin C. Berry: “A guy like this Moslem leader makes a lot more sense than I do to the man in the street who’s getting his teeth kicked out. I have a sinking feeling that Elijah Muhammad is very significant.”

*Which outrages the U.S.’s 100,000 true Moslems, who back their centuries-old stand against racial discrimination with chapter and verse from the Koran. Chapter 49, verse 13: All mankind We created/ You are from a single pair / Of a male and a female/ And made you into/ Nations and Tribes/ Ye may know each other/ (Not that ye may despise/ Each other).

*Among the top-ranking Xegro villains of the Moslems and African Nationalist fringe groups: U.N. Under Secretary Ralph Bunche, who won a Nobel Prize for making peace between Israel and the Arabs, hence is condemned as “the George Washington of Israel.”