Any objective evaluation of the Black Muslims as a religious body must begin with a fresh look at religion itself, its origin and meaning. The current, widespread antipathy toward the Black Muslims makes such a basic review of the roots of religion all the more necessary. Above all we must shut out the voices of those who insist that the Black Muslims are not a religion because they—the critics—don’t like what the Muslims preach and do. After all, the Mormon Church holds, among other things, that the Negro is inferior because he is the descendant of Ham, the accursed son of Noah. As a result Negroes are allowed to join the Mormon Church, but are barred from high church office. But none of us will take the position that the Mormons are not a religion.
To understand the Black Muslims—and the Mormons, for that matter—we must retrace that contorted and tribal path man and God have walked together en route to the here and now.
Religion as a Group Experience
The world has always been a mystery to man. It excites his imagination, challenges his courage, and piques his intellect. But the individual never meets the world alone. He is of his group; the group is part of the world he inherited on the day he discovered himself and the other members of his group—like the thunder and the lightning and the sun and the trees and the rivers and the canyons and the hurricanes and the manna trees that are part of that which confounds him. Collectively confounded, then, the group members react as one. They create a god almost always in their own image and attribute to him all of the omnipotence and omnipresence required to account for a plot of matter spinning dizzily through space into nowhere. And if he is in their image, then he is their father and they are his children. He watches over them and protects them from the pestilences that come by day and the evils that crawl by night. They are his chosen people and he walks with the warriors of the tribe as they go forth to battle temporal evil, which is to say, anything and anybody that differs from their tribe.
In return, the tribesmen insist that god make demands upon them. And god grants their request: He commands them to bow down and worship him, and to put no other god before him. He commands them to love one another even as they love him and he loves them. His commandments on social ethics always parallel the social history of the tribe involved. If one day some members of the tribe feel sick from having eaten the meat from a given animal, then god decrees that such meat is unclean and that it is sinful to eat of it. If the social history of the people discloses that the affinity between the man and his woman is so intense that the intrusion of any other man or woman upon that relationship brings on community disorder, then god decrees that a man shall have one wife and a woman one husband, and then commands that the neighbors covet not the man’s wife or the woman’s husband. And when the tribe matures to the point of having old men, elders, steeped in the history of the tradition of the people, god orders that the aged be respected and all be venerated as his leaders on earth.
Thus it is that the god of a tribe becomes “their” god. History is replete with battle scars left when the gods of an opposing people fought it out on the plains and in the valleys. When tribe meets tribe in war, at least one of the tribes is bound to lose. But even in defeat the god of the tribe becomes more powerful than ever before as the tribe is convinced that, though it has lost a battle, it will eventually win the war. Thus, in the words of one of the great tribal leaders, “Our god is able to deliver. But if not, we will not bow down and serve your god.”
Although tribal life revolves around the god concept, few tribal states have actually become theocracies. Religious leaders have taken their place beside temporal leaders, and they function in concord, under the umbrella of their god to make the state a practical institution.
With the dawn of modern history, gods began to fuse and merge as people began to widen the circle of their experience and accept the reality of tribal pluralism, and civilizations that have survived to matter in the context of the current world are those that fly the banner of the world’s four or five major religions.
Modern man knows little of all this because he inherited already thought-out religions. Thus he has no idea how primitive and crude his gods once were. And it is precisely because of modern man’s religious sophistication that the Black Muslims rasp: At stage center, and before an audience that is weary of racism and religious bigotry, the all-black Nation of Islam gleefully re-enacts the shoddy scenes of our cultural beginnings.
“We are in the image of God,” Malcolm says.
“Make it plain, Brother Minister. Make it plain.”
“That means that God—we call him Allah—must be black like me!”
“All praise due to Allah.”
“God was here in the beginning.”
“Yes sir, that’s right.”
“So we were here from the beginning”—and Malcolm X smiles.
The people come roaring to their feet with shouts of thanks and deliverance.
“And that which was here from the beginning must be the daddy of everything else. Am I right or wrong?”
“You right. That’s right.”
“This blue-eyed devil talking about he is superior. It’s about time he found out that we are his pappy!”
“Make it plain, Brother. Make it plain.”
“Now listen to this,” Malcolm told a rally of three thousand on a Harlem street corner, “and you will know why black is superior.”
“Come on. Come, let’s hear it!”
“Black is the prime color. It is the strong color.”
“Yes!”
“You can get any other color you want by mixing colors, but you cannot find colors that you can mix and produce black. Only black can produce black.”
“Make it plain.”
“And if black is prime, that means it is God, that means it is good.”
“That’s right!”
“Therefore the less black you are the less good you are.”
“All praise due to Allah.” And now the people sense the great truth that is about to come, and they begin to break with laughter.
“Therefore when you are white, you are as nonblack as you can be.”
“Make it plain, Malcolm. Make it plain.”
“Therefore when you are white you are absolutely nongood; am I right or wrong?”
“You right!”
“In other words,” Malcolm shouts, “the white man is therefore absolutely evil, a snake and a devil, and his time of destruction draws nigh!”
With this the crowd breaks with joy. The applause lasts for several minutes; white policemen standing guard at the meeting nudge white onlookers, telling them to “move on.”
This argument, that God is black and the white man a devil, presents the Black Muslims with the identical philosophical dilemma that has plagued most religions: How could a good (black) God create a bad (white) thing?
The doctrine concerning Yakub is the Black Muslims’ attempt to answer that riddle. In biological terms of reference, accepting the Muslim notion that the black man is the original man, they must explain how the black race produced white people. Elijah Muhammad states the argument in these terms: The Caucasian race was created out of the weak of the black race; they are the handiwork of Yakub, a black scientist who rebelled against Allah. Dr. Eric Lincoln is correct when he says that the doctrine of Yakub is the central myth of the Black Muslim movement. But it is also the tenet the Black Muslims seem to know least about.
Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier, Elijah Muhammad detailed in these words the mechanics by which the black scientist Yakub made the white man:
Who are the white race? I have repeatedly answered that question in this [column] for nearly the past three years. “Why are they white-skinned?” Answer: Allah (God) said this is due to being grafted from the Original Black Nation, as the Black Man has two germs (two people) in him. One is black and the other brown. The brown germ is weaker than the black germ. The brown germ can be grafted into its last stage, and the last stage is white. A scientist by the name of Yakub discovered this knowledge ... 6,645 years ago, and was successful in doing this job of grafting after 600 years of following a strict and rigid birth control law.
According to Elijah Muhammad the experiment was a success, but it also resulted in the “blue-eyed devils” who now people the world and have low physical and moral stamina. Muhammad then goes on to show the physical superiority of the black man by underlining the victories of Negro ballplayers and prize fighters. He then points up what he calls the low morality of the white man by citing the gas chambers of Germany, the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, and all the abuses white Southerners (and Northerners) have heaped upon the Negro.
Summing up the results of Yakub’s experiment, Elijah Muhammad issues this finding:
The human beast—the serpent, the dragon, the devil, and Satan—all mean one and the same: the people or race known as the white or Caucasian race, sometimes called the European race.
Since by nature they were created liars and murderers, they are the enemies of truth and righteousness, and the enemies of those who seek the truth....
But their certification of the white man as a devil, one incapable of doing good, rests on more than metaphysical grounds. It involves history. To make their historical point the Black Muslims part company with the established world historians. They begin their argument by establishing—with some accuracy—that the black man in Africa had a developed civilization at the time that, in Malcolm’s words, “the white savages of Europe were living in caves and crawling around on their all-fours.” It was the intrusion of the white man into Africa that spoiled things and brought slavery to the New World.
The decline of the black man in Africa is only temporary. The white devil was given about six thousand years to flaunt his evil and then he was to be destroyed as the black man returned to power. The white man’s time ran out just as World War I was raging; the Black Muslims overcame the fact that this was an excellent time for the prophecy to come true—after all, white people were out to destroy each other—with the argument that sets the American stage for the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
The only reason the destruction of the white man didn’t come off on schedule, according to the Muslims, is that so many black men are all mixed up with the white, that it is impossible to destroy the evil men without destroying some “originals,” that is to say, Negroes. This, then, is what Muhammad and Malcolm are talking about when they speak to “the lost-found black man in the wilderness of North America.” They are really saying that the restoration of black men to world power is being delayed because of the American Negro; the white man has been given a new dispensation, actually, not because he deserves it but to give the Negro time to separate from those scheduled for destruction.
Herein lies the reasoning behind Muhammad’s talk about a separate state; this is why the Black Muslims with their tremendous power over people are unable to participate in any of the current civil-rights actions; they can’t help fight for better jobs, better schools, or better housing. They are committed to getting out from among the white man as soon as possible, lest they share his doom of the fire, which is sure not only to come next time, but to come soon.
To plug up the logical and emotional leaks in such an argument as this, the Black Muslims must propagate a continuously expanding “line.” They must maintain the “Islamic” tinge but at the same time keep their teaching within American terms of reference that Negroes can understand; they must take Negroes who have a struggle with English and teach them Arabic; they must convince the most Western of men that they are Arabs.
This cultural island-hopping can backfire, sometimes with amusing results. I attended a Black Muslim bazaar with writer Alex Haley. Elijah Muhammad was scheduled to appear but sent his son, Akbar, instead. Akbar, a slender, dark-brown twenty-five-year-old, came before the crowd of some two thousand garbed in a flowing white sheet. In Middle Eastern Arabic circles Akbar would have been considered in his Sunday best, but to Harlem Negroes Akbar’s dress smacked of the Ku Klux Klan, hardly an image one wishes to raise in a man he hopes to convert. Yet this is the cross-cultural problem the Black Muslims must continually deal with.
I have seen Malcolm X do this with tremendous effectiveness. I once debated with him on TV in Los Angeles. He took the stand of a Muslim, saying that the Moslem faith was the black man’s original culture. Malcolm must make this basic thrust or all else he says rests on historical sand. As we were leaving the studio, we were greeted by several white students, Moslems from Persia, who complained to Malcolm that they had attempted to visit Muhammad’s temples and were refused entry because they were white blue-eyed devils. Malcolm glossed the matter over, and they all parted wishing Allah’s blessing each upon the other. In reality, Malcolm is not interested in any white people, Moslem or not. These Persians could no more get in a Black Muslim temple than Governor Faubus could. “Let’s look at it this way,” Malcolm told the Persians. “If a lion is in a cage, his roar will be different from the roar of the lion who is in the forest. That,” he concluded, “is why you couldn’t get in our temple. But both the lion in the forest and the lion in the cage are lions. That is what matters. Lions love lions; they hate leopards.”
Translated, Malcolm was saying that the American Negro, as a Moslem, must make different noises from the free Moslems of, say, Persia, because the American Negro is in a cage. The cage, of course, is white civilization; that is why the roar of the American Negro Moslem is so provincial; that is why Persians would do well to worship Allah in their own way in their own temples, while the Black Muslims and Allah have their rendezvous in a dinky auditorium over a pool hall in Los Angeles’ Negro ghetto.
It is in such meetings that Malcolm adds the historical ingredient to his theology. It takes two forms:
First, the Black Muslims excite Negroes to shouts by proving that the Negro is somebody, a man with a past and a history. I know from personal experience that Malcolm X is one of the best-versed people in America on African history. I have sat with him in private and general gatherings where he has recited startling facts about the nature of early African civilizations. When challenged, Malcolm is always able to produce a text—and a legitimate one at that—to support what he says. Malcolm’s teachings come as a surprise not because they are new, previously unknown facts about Africa, but because the entire system of education in the Western World, particularly in America, has carefully distorted the true history of Africa to support the notion of white, male supremacy. And so it is from Malcolm X, not from his sixth-grade history teacher—who is probably white—that the Negro child in the North learns the truth about Africa and what once really happened there.
The second historical aspect of the Muslim doctrine involves an intensive study of the role of the American Negro in American history. Here again Malcolm and his followers walk into a void left by the American education system. The black child in Harlem learns about the Revolutionary War but he does not learn that the man who set it off by leading the Americans in the Boston Massacre was a Negro, Crispus Attucks. The black child sees the clock work but he does not know that Benjamin Bannaker, a Negro, invented the pendulum. The black child visits the blood bank but he does not know that a Negro, Dr. Charles Drew, discovered how to preserve blood and thus made the bank possible. Nobody tells the Negro child these things in school. On the contrary, the child is taught that American civilization flowed, for the most part, from white brains. And when Malcolm, to use his words, “pulls the cover off the white devil and tells black men the truth about the work of their ancestors,” the Negro child shrieks with pride and joy—probably for the first time in his life.
Malcolm X brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves as a race or as individuals. Their encounters with white people are always unpleasant situations in which Negroes find themselves embarrassed or emasculated. Think it out for yourself: What contact does the Negro in Harlem have with the white man?
The white man is the man they must meet every morning when they go to work in the garment district; the man they must meet when the rent is due; the man they face when they go to the pawnshop; the man who comes and sells things on credit; the man who buys the installment paper and comes to collect the payments; the man who gets work when they cannot; the man whom they see on TV loosing dogs on Negro children; the man they face as a schoolteacher who does not understand them and who is often contemptuous of them—the man, the man, the man, the white man, the goddam white man! And when Malcolm X says the white man is a devil, they roar “amen” because every experience they have with a white man is a devilish one.
Chilling though it may be, the Black Muslims have erected their teaching on a group experience common to all American Negroes. Few of us concur in their conviction and sentencing of the white race. But none of us can question the accuracy of the indictment on which that conviction rests.
Elijah Goes to Mecca
The hajj, the long, dusty pilgrimage to Mecca that every Moslem looks forward to, is the final criterion of whether one is or is not a Moslem. Only certified followers of Islam are allowed to enter Mecca during the holy period of the pilgrimage.
“Elijah Muhammad is not a Moslem,” said Imam Talib Ahmad Dawud in 1960. “He is just plain Elijah Poole of Sandersville, Georgia.” Dawud, an American Negro and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood USA, was then locked in a bitter struggle with the Black Muslims over the question of their religious authenticity. But the Imam’s remarks couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Even as Dawud was denouncing the Black Muslims, Elijah was packing his bags for a trip “back home where I can visit and pray with my own people.” Several days after he departed from New York, Elijah placed his credentials before the eagle-eyed hajj committee, the final judge of who may march to Mecca and pray. Elijah Muhammad was admitted without delay, and Black Muslims—the word was cabled back and came over the wire services—held meetings of praise and thanks all over the nation.
That was that. Muhammad was admitted to the hajj, he made the holy walk to Mecca. Who, then, is to dispute his religious credentials?
Muhammad’s journey to Mecca brought an end to all the arguments about his true affiliation with traditional Islam. When Mike Wallace and I were preparing a TV documentary on the Black Muslims, the orthodox Moslems denounced the movement. “They teach race hate,” one Islamic spokesman told us, “and that means they couldn’t be Moslems.” The Federation of Islamic Associations of Chicago is the official Moslem organization in the United States and Canada. They have denounced Elijah; they have praised him for conducting the largest Arabic school in America and for accepting the Koran as law, but federation officials are “suspicious” of him. These Moslems, however, are largely of European descent, although their ranks are peppered with a few Negro converts. Their rejection of Elijah rests on his argument concerning racism, and they flinch when Muhammad calls himself “The Messenger of Allah.”
Rejection from such a group is grist for the Black Muslims’ mill. Malcolm X holds them up to high ridicule and scorn, saying they have been corrupted by Christianity and that they look very much like “the blue-eyed devil who enslaved us and took away our culture.” In his “University Speech” (see Part Two of this book) Malcolm rains fire upon these “European Moslems” who have “passed us by in an attempt to make our slave masters Moslems.”
There are several clear differences between Black Muslims and orthodox Moslems. Whether these differences read Elijah and his followers out of the Islamic brotherhood is a matter to be determined by Islamic officials. These are some of the differences between the two groups:
—The Black Muslims will not allow white persons in their temples; orthodox Moslems accept worshipers of all races.
—The Black Muslims maintain a separate movement; there seems to be little or no organizational link with the orthodox Moslems. The Black Muslims do not visit the orthodox Moslem temples, and the orthodox Moslems do not come to hear Malcolm X.
—Nowhere in the Koran or in any orthodox Moslem literature is there support for the Black Muslim’s teaching about the evil scientist Yakub. Nor is there any support in the teachings of orthodox Moslems to support Elijah’s account—see his “Atlanta Speech” in Part Two—that this world was once the moon and was blown up by an evil scientist who wanted to destroy true followers of Allah.
—Orthodox Moslems universally condemn the Black Muslim teaching that the white man is a devil by nature.
—Orthodox Moslems universally object to the Black Muslim preachment concerning a separate state.
But once Muhammad walked into Mecca these differences ceased to matter. To be sure, orthodox Moslems want no part of Elijah and, if pushed, will denounce him. But the hajj committee has rendered what must be accepted as the final verdict.
Behind this trip to Mecca lies a typical Black Muslim story. Malcolm X had visited the Near and the Far East the year before. His mission was to make certain key contacts for Muhammad. I followed Malcolm by some several months into Cairo, Egypt, and talked with Moslem officials who had received him with open arms. Malcolm was in Cairo during the holy season, at the very time when thousands of chanting Arabs were wending their way toward Mecca. Malcolm himself was cleared to make the hajj; he could have gone to Mecca in 1959 and that would have settled the controversy once and for all. Malcolm elected not to go, not to upstage his teacher and leader. Instead he returned home with the word that all was well in Mecca, that Elijah and his family would be received there with open arms.
The following year, while Malcolm remained at home, Elijah went to Mecca.
Malcolm’s ambassadorial work in Cairo—and that is precisely what it was—stunned many of his American detractors. Others of us who had been close observers of the movement were not surprised. We knew that Malcolm has always maintained excellent relations with top Arabs at the United Nations. Few, if any, of these meetings were ever public. But they did occur and there is every indication that they are still going on. The road to Mecca was cleared long before Malcolm and Elijah left these shores; powerful pro-Nasser Arabs are quietly in Malcolm’s corner, and many Black Muslim bazaars open with the reading of cabled greetings from “Our Beloved Brother Gamal Abdel Nasser.”
The emphasis of orthodox Islam is universal love and brotherhood among men of all races. The central teaching of the Black Muslims is that all white men are devils and will soon be destroyed. It seems superfluous to point out the wide disparity between these two views. But both Muslim and Moslem worship Allah. And that—at least so the hajj committee said—is all that matters.
The answer to this ambiguity, I suspect, lies in the gangling structure of the Moslem hierarchy. Unlike, say, the Catholic Church, the Moslem faith is not a tightly knit, fully administered organization. I have talked with Moslems about all this, and while they would rather that Elijah did not say much of what he says, they are still smarting over the Christian Crusades and readying for the moment of truth with the Jews. The Black Muslims carefully describe themselves as “anti-Zionist” rather than as against the Jews. But herein, I suspect, is the resolution of the entire matter of Elijah’s relationship to orthodox Islam.
A high Islamic official in Cairo explained it to me in these words: “Of course your Black Muslims are improperly informed. But they are turning men to Allah, away from Christianity, toward Mecca. This is what we want; this is what we must have. We need new blood in western Islam. If Muhammad can give that new blood we welcome him. As for his teachings,” the official continued, “we will see to it that the correct view is given to the black man in America. Now the thing is to get them facing toward Mecca.”
Is This a True Religion?
Although Elijah has made his holy pilgrimage to Mecca, the debate over the religious validity of the Black Muslims still rages, with the movement’s critics holding to their charge that Elijah Muhammad teaches hate whereas true religion teaches love. A case can be made that these critics are doubly in error, first in their assumption that their own faith teaches universal love, and secondly in their conclusion—aided by news accounts—that the Black Muslims actually preach hatred of others.
Every religion is a closed network of believers; it has its dogma, its ritual, its gods. The followers of that faith are taught to love one another and are urged to proselytize sinners (outsiders) wherever they can be found. Most religions draw creedal, not racial, lines. Persons of any race may embrace the tenets of the faith and become members. However, this is not always the case and racial overtones have crept into major world faiths.
The late, and loved, Pope John flirted with immortality by coming to grips with the issue of racism in religion. Not only did he infuse the Church with the fresh air of universalism, but he halted a service because a priest violated—forgot, actually—His Holiness’ order that a reference to the Jews as a “perfidious people” be stricken from the Catholic prayer service. The pending second session of the ecumenical council may see the introduction of a proposal that would call on the Church to speak out against anti-Semitism. The proposal was not brought up in the first session because the Church fathers feared what the Arabs might say!
The Jews and the Protestants face essentially the same problems as the Roman Catholics. St. Paul rose to glory because he translated being a Jew from a biological to a spiritual proposition. Many Jews have not accepted that translation and they snicker when Sammy Davis, Jr., walks into their temple. Racism is such a fact of American Protestant church life that most major denominations are divided along racial lines. Then there is the question of religion and geography. The world’s major faiths were spawned in certain areas and took root among people of a common ethnic stock. Thus the followers of Buddha are apt to be Orientals; but for slavery and colonization all of the followers of Christ would be European. But for the same kind of cultural intermingling, Allah’s followers would be the peoples of Asia Minor and North Africa, and the black peoples below the Sahara would still be practicing the varied tribal and family faiths mentioned earlier in this essay.
But time and trouble make saints of everybody ... and universalism occurs only when feuding faiths clash on the plains of practical reality. Thus American Protestants now have a commission that is given over entirely to eliminating all anti-Semitism from the gospel of Christ. The Episcopal Bishop of California, James Pike, has gone so far as to suggest that we take down the cross as a symbol of our faith lest this encourage the teaching that the Jews killed Our Lord. This teaching—that the Jews killed Christ—is no longer fashionable as it was when I was baptized. Now one is told that the Romans killed Christ. And since the once-heathen Romans are now Christians—even though they are Catholics—I suppose this makes things better.
Now let’s turn to the other side of the coin.
During a recent lecture before the Jewish Graduate Club at Columbia University I talked about the need for all orthodox religions to relax their dogmas and accept other peoples as equals. One fiercely intent man leaped to his feet and shouted to me, “You want to rob us of our culture because you people don’t have one of your own!” This was sheer nonsense and the host rabbi rose to say so. But I pressed the issue: Could I join their temple? The younger Jews shouted “Yes—we would love to have you.” The older fellows were not quite so sure.
“Are you as Jews chosen of God, thus the only ones who are really blessed?” I asked one of the fundamentalists.
“Yes,” he shot back.
“Are you chosen in a way that I can never be?” I continued.
“Yes.” He faltered. “You are not a Jew; you cannot be among the elect.”
By this time the younger Jews were on their feet screaming denunciations of him. But the issue of ethnic exclusiveness that splits today’s Jewish community had been laid bare.
Dogma and ritual are further evidences of the tribalism endemic to religion. I was born and raised a Baptist; long before I could read and write I knew that any person who had not been immersed in water was doomed to Hell. There was nothing to argue about, no need for polemics and reasoning; there would be no Methodists in Heaven!
The point of truth is this: Ethnic and dogmatic bigotry are imbedded in every religious faith plying its wares in the world market; we religious liberals are students of apologetics, sophisticated believers who prefer to forget our crude and tribalistic roots in favor of an enlightened social ethic. Alas, along came Elijah and made us see ourselves as we once were; along came Malcolm X and made us understand what we are now, and why.
The argument that the Black Muslims are not a valid religion because of the exclusivity of their fellowship, then, is clearly spurious. Every religion is a sort of sanctified country club, a coming together of peers in the name of their god. The second argument against the religiosity of the Black Muslims is equally spurious: Like all faiths, the Black Muslims never say hate the other fellow; they say love your own kind. Religious bigotry is Western civilization’s major moral blind spot, and Malcolm X has taken up squatters’ rights just there.
Thus it is that secularism must save the church—the layman must lead the clergyman to the mourner’s bench and make him confess brotherhood in the name of a democratic and pluralistic society. The nature of our social moment demands that we free God from racialism and dogmatics. Racialism, the malignant one of the two cancers, must be dealt with first since it is the prime moral issue of our time. And it must be dealt with by all peoples of all faiths working in concert. Should our social order change, should we somehow come to grips with the evils that have spawned the Black Muslims, the movement would be forced to refine itself or perish.
Malcolm X is the best authority for this. I have often pressed him on his categorical denunciation of the white man as a devil, and his reply is always the same: “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that the white man is a devil. We hold to that teaching because history proves the white man is a devil. If he is not a devil,” Malcolm X concludes, “then let him prove it. Let him give justice, freedom, and equality to our people.”
I have deliberately kept my analysis of the Black Muslims in personal terms of reference because this is precisely how most Negroes feel about the matter—after all, the attraction of the movement for Negroes is one of the major points of this essay.
“Of course I disagree with Malcolm,” the wife of a Negro newsman told me. “But I disagree with a lot of other religions, too. If he teaches hate, so do they; what’s the difference? I wonder why the white people are after him.” She smiled. “Could it be because he is colored?”
The Black Muslims have their God, their gospel, their ritual trappings, their approval from official heads of the Islamic faith. As a religion, then, there is little left to do but disagree with them and then leave them alone.
This, of course, pains liberals, Negro and white, who want to hear a ringing denunciation of the Black Muslims. Negro leaders are always quick to denounce Elijah, but the Negro masses are strangely silent. There is a reason for this silence, something both the Negro leadership and the white power structure would do well to examine: Deep down in their hearts, as James Baldwin so accurately states, the black masses don’t believe in white people any more. They don’t believe in Malcolm either, except when he articulates their disbelief in white people. In the end—and this is the thing white people will be a long time in grasping—the Negro masses neither join nor denounce the Black Muslims. They just sit at home in the ghetto amid the heat, the roaches, the rats, the vice, the disgrace, and rue the fact that come daylight they must meet the man—the white man—and work at a job that leads only to a dead end.
This brings me to the core of the matter, to the final measure of every religion: it is a thing called compassion, a concern and caring about the other fellow. It is rooted in the glaring awareness that we all have fallen short of the high mark set for us, and thus we need the honest sympathy and understanding of all men everywhere.
For though you may have your God, your holy book, your ritual, and your symbols; though you may give of your wages to build the temple; and though you may have been to Mecca, or Jerusalem, if you have not compassion you are but meanness couched in Scripture, you are but an ancient stink, a reason for men to hold their noses as they crawl on toward a land of human understanding and brotherhood.
The Nation
Once the convert becomes a Black Muslim he is baptized as a citizen in the Nation of Islam. They have a flag, a symbol, and a cause. From this day forward his life centers around activity at the Muslim restaurant and temple.
Who are these Black Muslims? Where do they live, and what do they do for a living?
These questions baffle all observers because any Negro you encounter could be a Black Muslim. Usually the men wear identifying pins, and the Muslim women can generally be spotted by their dress, particularly the long, flowing headpiece. But these identifying signs are not always present. I have encountered Black Muslims working in printing plants, in barbershops, as messenger boys, as night-club entertainers, and as cab drivers. I will never forget taking a stroll in Central Park where I came across a Muslim sister working as a nursemaid to three white children! Since most nurses and maids are Negroes, the rise of the Black Muslims has sent a quiet but very real chill through the employment agencies in several major cities. After all, there is no telling what these Muslim women will do when the “word” comes, when the Battle of Armageddon is declared. And there is no way for employment agencies to determine if Negro applicants are Black Muslims before sending them out as servants in white homes. Nor is there any way for heads of households to know just who their butlers and cooks are. To borrow from James Baldwin, nobody knows their name. It could be “X.”
The Black Muslims flatly refuse to discuss their organizational finances with anyone. However, observers of the movement are convinced that the tithes collected at temples and the income from temple restaurants form the basis of the Muslim economy. The local restaurant—and most of them are called “Shabazz” restaurants after Malcolm X whose “restored” Arab name is Shabazz—is under the supervision of the local minister. He seems to have fairly complete control, but all matters are subject to review by Malcolm X as Elijah’s roving ambassador. The local ministers are allowed a certain portion of what they raise, but only top insiders know just how Mr. Muhammad makes this determination. The major leaders of the movement all seem to have taken a vow of poverty and live on expenses furnished by the movement itself. I know this is true of Malcolm X and I suspect it to be true of others.
But it must be remembered that the Black Muslims are both thrifty and industrious; they are encouraged to open their own businesses and many of the top leaders are themselves businessmen. Elijah Muhammad, Jr., runs one of the largest bakeries in Chicago; Raymond Sharrieff is said to have ownership in a clothing store there. All evidence indicates that local Muslim leaders finance themselves through various enterprises and that the bulk of the funds raised in the temple itself flow on to the movement headquarters in Chicago.
Whoever and wherever these Black Muslims are they lead an exacting, regimented life. In their homes they practice strict dietary laws—precisely those of the kosher Jews—and avoid contact with white people as much as possible. The private role of both the man and the woman in the family is clearly defined, and the children are indoctrinated with the faith while they are still young. Muslim men are watched by The Fruit and must engage in some kind of gainful employment. They are encouraged to go into small business whenever possible; they are assured of patronage from their fellow Muslims. A number of Negro businessmen have been attracted to the Nation of Islam because it provides them with a ready source of customers. Other Muslim brothers can be seen on the streets every day selling Muslim newspapers. They are allowed to keep a goodly portion of what they earn and are thus independent. The temple restaurants employ scores of Muslim men and women, thus decreasing the ranks of their unemployed. Other Muslims are door-to-door salesmen and find easy entry in the Negro community, where the white door-to-door salesmen have become anathema.
But the average Black Muslim works for some white man somewhere in some capacity. He is urged to learn a trade and thus ready himself for the day when he will be called upon to be one of the heads of industry and commerce in the Muslims’ own, separate state.
The Black Muslim men are lectured constantly about family responsibility and are subject to trial before their peers if they violate the rules of the order. Punishment can vary from a small fine to temporary or permanent banishment from the temple. No Muslim will associate with an offender for the duration of his exile. It is said that Malcolm X’s brother was once banished and that Malcolm refused even to write the man until the period of punishment had been served.
Black Muslim women are schooled in the art and need for homemaking, and are taught to take a back seat in the presence of their husbands. Muslim women almost never talk to strangers—non-Muslims, that is—and maintain a general silence that is unnerving. They also eschew make-up and fancy dress. When I first encountered the Muslims some five years ago, this ban on feminine adornment was rigidly enforced. But there seems to have been a strong revolt among temple women and the ban has been relaxed to the point where employing make-up is now optional. Yet I have seen few Muslim women exercise this option. The wife of a major Muslim official, say Joseph X of New York, certainly wouldn’t exercise it.
The Black Muslims are a male-oriented organization. A man reaches real stature in the movement when he becomes a member of The Fruit of Islam, the functional and disciplinary arm of the movement. The Fruit hold separate temple services, where they are taught, among other things, every possible method of self-defense. Every local temple has a Captain of The Fruit—in New York it is Joseph X—and the entire network is headed by the son-in-law of Elijah Muhammad, Raymond Sharrieff. The Fruit enforce brotherhood among the men of the temple and form the honor guard whenever Malcolm X or Elijah Muhammad makes a public appearance. The Fruit work under the local minister, but there is a line of authority that runs down to the local captains directly from Sharrieff’s Chicago headquarters. The Muslim Girls Training Class (MGT), for young women, is headed by Sister Lottie X, also of Chicago.
The division of authority seems to be along these lines: The local Fruit and MGT work under the local minister on local matters. But unless the matter in question is one of clearly defined doctrine the local minister gets clearance from Chicago before issuing his orders. On national matters, those affecting the movement as a whole, The Fruit and the MGT take orders directly from headquarters. These orders are issued to members of the temple who obey without question.
One of the functions of The Fruit and the MGT is fund-raising. None of the rumors about Muslims receiving help from outside—Communist or segregationist—sources has proved true. The fact of the matter is that the Black Muslims are hard-working, frugal people; they never buy on installment, and they give a tenth—at least—of their earnings to the temple. This income is augmented by bazaars, plays, rallies, and the sale of their own newspapers and magazines. Then there is the matter of the various lawsuits the Muslims have carried on with astonishing success. The Black Muslims have collected upward of a quarter of a million dollars I know about in the past four years or so, mostly as a result of police brutality against their members. These suits are filed in the name of the individual Muslim but they are carried on by the temple, and I suspect the temple shares in the results.
Further regimentation of life within the Nation is achieved by demanding that members send their children to Black Muslim schools wherever possible. In two cities, Chicago and Detroit, the Muslims have “universities” where they train the children from kindergarten through high school. It will be recalled that Elijah Muhammad first got into trouble with the law when he decided to send his children to the Muslim school rather than the public schools. Now authorities in both cities have approved the Muslim schools as accredited centers of learning.
These schools are well disciplined and skillfully run. Early in 1962 there was considerable concern in Chicago over just what the Black Muslims were teaching in their schools. A biracial committee visited the University of Islam there and came away stunned. Said committee member Judge Edyth Sampson, a former U.S. delegate to the United Nations, “These people are doing a magnificent job with their young students. I am deeply impressed by what I saw.”
What Mrs. Sampson and her fellow committee members saw was essentially this: Black Muslim boys and girls stand muster for cleanliness and decorum each morning. The classes are separated, boys in one section, girls in the other, and the students’ day is divided between religious and secular education. They are taught both English and Arabic; they are drilled in the history of the black man in Africa and America. Then they are taught the history of the Black Muslim movement from Fard down to Minister Malcolm X.
In 1963 Sister Christine X, one of the directors of the school, authored a new first reader which is now being employed. The exercises in the book are something American educators would do well to study:
My name is Nora X. My father’s name is James X, and my mother is Frances X. We are Muslims. We have our own flag. Our flag is over there on the wall. The symbols on our flag are a star and a crescent.
Then the students are told to use the following words in sentences: Allah, black, Muhammad, God, Temple, nation, flag, Armageddon, Elijah.
Other exercises in the book call for the student to write short essays on Mr. Muhammad and other notables within the movement. Then as the students progress through school they are taught to link subject matter to the history of the black man. For example, when the students are being taught mathematics they are repeatedly reminded that much of modern math is based on work done by the Egyptians; they are not allowed to forget that English is not their native tongue, that their language is Arabic, that the white man robbed them of their tongue when he kidnaped their foreparents from Africa.
The thing that arrests me most about these schools is that they are now turning out the first generation of youth completely schooled in the Black Muslim doctrine. Unlike Malcolm X, John Ali, and other prominent Muslims of today who had to be “de-brainwashed” before they saw the light, the movement now has several score teen-agers who have been grounded in their faith just as a devout Catholic child is reared in his. As of now the movement suffers greatly from a lack of trained leaders. Only a handful of capable men and women are available to the organization and the nature of their doctrine is such that trained Negroes are hardly apt to join. But a few more years will see the emergence of well-trained Black Muslims who, I am certain, will give the organization more administrative order than it now has.
Meanwhile the Black Muslims are bombarding Negroes all over the nation with their message to the “lost-found, so-called Negro in the wilderness of North America.” For a number of years Mr. Muhammad had a weekly column in some of the nation’s best Negro newspapers. Now the Muslims publish their own weekly, Mr. Muhammad Speaks, a thirty-six-page tabloid that has the largest circulation of any Negro newspaper being published. The Muslims also conduct a weekly radio program on stations in some forty cities throughout the nation. All this is augmented by the appearances of Malcolm X on radio and TV programs each week. All in all, the Black Muslims have covered the nation; their basic teachings are known and debated by Negroes everywhere.
On the whole, then, the state of the Nation of Islam is good; its population is growing, its economy is well into the black, and its foreign relations—though strained—are better than they have ever been before.