Elijah Muhammad

Elijah Robert Poole was born on the seventh of October 1897 at Sandersville in Washington County, Georgia, the seventh of thirteen children of William Poole — a Baptist preacher and sharecropper — and Mariah Hall, both formerly enslaved. He completed only the third grade of the segregated rural schools of Washington County and worked through his teens as a field hand and a sawmill operator before joining the great northward migration of the 1920s. He moved with his wife Clara Evans and the first six of their eight children to Hamtramck near Detroit in 1923.

In 1931 at a meeting held in the back of a furniture store on Hastings Street in the Paradise Valley neighbourhood of Detroit, he met the silk-peddler and itinerant preacher Wallace D. Fard, who had been holding similar meetings across Detroit since July 1930. Fard preached the doctrine that the African American population were the lost descendants of the Tribe of Shabazz, that they were Asiatic Black men whose ancestral religion was Islam, and that Christianity was the religion of the slavemaster. Poole became Fard's principal disciple, was given the surname Karriem and then Muhammad, and was named in 1932 the Supreme Minister of the new Allah Temple of Islam.

Fard disappeared at the end of June 1934, never to be located by his disciples or by the FBI. Elijah Muhammad assumed the leadership of the body, renamed it the Nation of Islam, and moved its headquarters to Chicago. Across the following forty-one years he built the Nation from the surviving Detroit core into a national denomination of an estimated four hundred thousand members at his peak in the 1960s. He founded the FOI security order, the Muhammad University of Islam school system, Muhammad Speaks newspaper, and the agricultural and commercial enterprises by which the Nation became one of the largest Black-owned business networks in the United States. His most consequential lieutenants included Malcolm X — with whom he broke in 1964 — Louis Farrakhan, and his son Warith Deen Mohammed, who would on inheriting the leadership in 1975 align the body with mainstream Sunni Islam.

He died at the Mercy Hospital in Chicago on the twenty-fifth of February 1975, at seventy-seven.

He is honored here as the organiser of mid-twentieth-century African American Islam.