Jr. Conyers - Law, Culture, and Africana Studies

Why would anyone become a member of the Nation of Islam after the assassination of Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) on February 21, 1965, in New Yorks Audubon Ballroom? More than any other leader, Malcolm X stood at the ideological vortex in the dynamic movement for black liberation. His fiercely smart rhetoric helped to shift the dominant political struggle from a strategy of civil rights liberalism to eclectic expressions of Black Nationalism. As the most charismatic and visible spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm moved beyond the Honorable Elijah Muhammads (the Nation of Islams undisputed leader from 1934 to 1975) call for economic self-sufficiency nationalism. Combining an application of armed self-defense by any means necessary (in a political climate that hosed racist government repression in the form of the state police) along with a lethal critique of white folks as devils, Malcolm appealed to the most socially isolated, politically dispossessed, and economically desperate members of the black proletariat. It was Malcolms undivided commitment to create a powerful group of believers in the Nation of Islam that resulted in a substantial membership increase. In 1955, there were only sixteen temples largely located in the urban North, but by 1960 over fifty temples were sprinkled throughout the United States with registered membership estimated between 50,000 and 250,000.

Malcolm has become a militant martyr for the Nation of Islam and a Black Power paradigmthe archetype, reference point, and spiritual adviser in absentia for a generation of Afro-American activist. Clearly, Black Power advocates had multiple visions, but the Nation of Islam provides one of the most imaginative sites to explore their concerns about intimate gender relations, or what Paulette Pierce insight fully calls boudoir politics, and the creation of a black nation. This article is an effort to complicate our understanding of African-American identity, political subjectivity, gender prescriptions, and nation building during the peak of the modern Black Power movement. Furthermore, I suggest that in the post-Malcolm X period, the religious nature of the Nation of Islam was not the major impetus for new membership. Above all, the Nation of Islams secular programs, promising power and wealth, were the key to its expansion.

It is through a consideration of historical shifts in the Nation of Islam that one can locate key transformations and continuities in the meaning of Black Power. The formative years of the Nation of Islam (1930s) developed within a milieu of restrictive, second-class citizenship for African-Americans. W.D. Fard Muhammad, the founder and self-pro-claimed prophet of the Nation of Islam, was known by his followers as a divine black messiah (Allah in the flesh), and he designated Elijah Muhammad as his last Messenger.

The elevation of black Americans most notably above black Africans paralleled the collective gouging of Caucasians as white, blue-eyed devils who were grafted out of Black people specifically to bedevil the planet. Fard Muhammad advocated a separate nation from Caucasians, a place where its members were protected from a Jim Crow government and all of the sins from the devil. After he mysteriously disappeared in 1934 from Detroit (the Nation of Islams center), Elijah Muhammad continued this millennialistic mission to reject the devils institutions. A complete withdrawal from American society was presumed to be the key to the resurrection of black people. So, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted social security in the late 1930s, the Messenger told his members to refuse the identification numbers since they were the mark of the beast. For Muhammad, social security digits not only kept individuals under surveillance but were also no different from the surnames black folks had inherited from slavery. Both systems of identification represented white domination. The federal government became redefined white domination.