Home › Ideas & Media › Religion & Religious Movements

Elijah Muhammad

1897–1975 · 78 years Specialist

A sharecropper's son who built the Nation of Islam

Portrait of Elijah Muhammad — New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Wolfson, Stanley, photographer. — 1964 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Elijah Robert Poole was born October 7, 1897, in Sandersville, Georgia, the seventh of 13 children of William Poole, a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, and Mariah Hall. His formal schooling ended in the fourth grade, and by his teens he was working sawmills and brickyards, labor he later said taught him more than any classroom had. He watched three lynchings before he turned 20 and said the violence stayed with him longer than anything else from Georgia. In 1917 he married Clara Evans, then 17, and in 1923 the couple joined the Great Migration north, settling first in Hamtramck, Michigan, then Detroit, where factory work and a precarious new life waited.

In August 1931, Elijah Poole heard a Detroit peddler named Wallace Fard Muhammad preach that Black Americans were the original people, robbed of their true religion, and joined him, taking the surname Muhammad. When Fard disappeared in 1934, Muhammad declared himself the Messenger and spent four decades building a single Detroit temple into a national organization. Convicted of draft evasion in 1942 for refusing to register for the wartime draft, he served four years at a federal prison while his wife, Clara, ran the movement in his absence. After his release, the Nation expanded fast: temples in nearly every state, a network of farms and small businesses, and a newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. He mentored the movement's most famous convert, Malcolm X, until Malcolm broke with him publicly in 1964, and died February 25, 1975, leaving a national institution built from a fourth-grade education.

At the center of Muhammad's teaching sat a doctrine of racial creation: that a Black scientist named Yakub had bred white people into existence as a race of devils, and that Nation members were the original human family reclaiming lost knowledge. That teaching gave discipline and identity to a following the wider civil rights movement rarely reached, and it estranged nearly everyone outside it. The contradiction that cost him most sat closer to home. Muhammad fathered at least nine children outside his marriage, several with young secretaries in his household, and when Malcolm X confirmed the affairs and confronted him, the relationship between the two men broke for good. Malcolm was assassinated February 21, 1965, months after leaving the Nation. Muhammad's response, that Malcolm got just what he preached, closed off any chance of reconciliation.

Muhammad's son Warith Deen Mohammed succeeded him within days and, within a year, dismantled much of what his father had built: renouncing the Yakub doctrine, opening membership to all races, and steering most of the movement toward mainstream Sunni Islam. Louis Farrakhan rejected that dissolution and rebuilt a separate Nation of Islam under the original name and doctrine beginning in 1978, an organization that still operates today. The two inheritances, one absorbed into orthodox American Islam, one continuing Muhammad's separatist theology largely intact, have never reconciled, and both still describe themselves as carrying his legacy forward.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Elijah Muhammad's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Nation of Islam mission
Built from a single Detroit temple into a national movement after Fard's 1934 disappearance 1934
Muhammad Speaks other
Nation of Islam newspaper — reached a circulation over 600,000 by the mid-1960s 1960
Message to the Blackman in America book
Collected his core theological and social teachings 1965
University of Islam schools other
Nation of Islam school system, expanded under his leadership with Clara Muhammad 1934
Mosque Maryam building
Former Greek Orthodox church in Chicago converted into the Nation's headquarters temple 1972

Life in brief

with age at each point

October 7, 1897 aged 0 Born Elijah Robert Poole in Sandersville, Georgia
1917 aged ~20 Marries Clara Evans in Georgia
1923 aged ~26 Migrates with his family to Detroit Part of the Great Migration north.
August 1931 aged 33 Meets Wallace Fard Muhammad and joins his movement Takes the surname Muhammad.
1934 aged ~37 Assumes leadership after Fard's disappearance Declares Fard to have been Allah in person and himself the Messenger.
May 8, 1942 aged 44 Arrested for draft evasion Convicted — serves four years at Milan, Michigan, 1942-1946.
March 1964 aged 66 Malcolm X publicly breaks with him
1972 aged ~75 Mosque Maryam opens in Chicago
February 25, 1975 aged 77 Dies in Chicago