Those Who Know Don't Say

The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Garrett Felber

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781469653822, 9781469653815
• eBook ISBN: 9781469653839
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.

By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways — Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder — while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.

CHAPTER ONE

The Making of the “Black Muslims”

You never heard me today refer to myself as a Black Muslim. This is just what the press says.… This is what the newspapers call us. This is what Dr. Eric Lincoln calls us. We are Muslims. Black, brown, red, and yellow.

—MALCOLM X, 1963

During the summer of 1942, after the forced removals and mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans in the western United States, the FBI and police arrested eighty African American “admirers” of Japan in Chicago, with the FBI claiming that the Nation of Islam was receiving military equipment from Japanese spies. Among them was Elijah Muhammad, who had already been arrested once that summer for draft evasion. He was held for over a month on a $5,000 bond before thirty Muslims wearing “red buttons showing a ‘mystical’ white crescent … [with] turbans of varying colors worn by the women and crescent rings on the hands of the men” surrounded the jail for fourteen hours, demanding that they, too, be put in prison for draft evasion.¹

The second, more dramatic raid in Chicago was the culmination of months of coordination between police and the FBI. Federal agents reportedly infiltrated temple meetings in blackface before eventually arresting members and confiscating materials. After the raid, a federal jury found “hundreds of books, pamphlets and documents said to advocate overthrow of the white race by Negroes with the aid of the Japanese,” as well as wooden guns and flags, which the FBI believed were used in “military drills preparatory to the day when they would take over the government.”² After “waiting on the go-ahead from Washington,” agents struck in September 1942. In court, Muslim men claimed to be “Asiatic” and explained that their surnames had been stolen during their ancestors’ enslavement. When asked why they had not registered with the Selective Service, they answered, “I have registered with Allah.”

The NOI’s identification with Japan had earned it a place among the groups targeted by the FBI’s new RACON (short for “racial conditions”) program. A young J. Edgar Hoover had designed RACON to investigate “Foreign-Inspired Agitation among the American Negroes” during the war.³ By the summer of 1942, the Nation of Islam was among the Black Nationalist groups in the crosshairs. The federal agents’ racial anxieties were clear. A Washington FBI field office agent remarked of Muhammad’s appearance, “Although he is a Georgia negroe [sic], he looks like a Japanese, having slant eyes.”⁴ Muhammad was informed that his crime was his public identification with the United States’ wartime enemy.⁵ He wouldn’t be the last.

A year later, an eighteen-year-old Malcolm Little appeared before a local draft board in Manhattan. “With my wild zoot suit I wore the yellow knob-toe shoes, and I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk,” he recalled. In his flowing hipster outfit, similar to one that Chicanos known as Pachucos had been beaten for wearing that same year in Los Angeles by American servicemen, Malcolm started “noising around that [he] was frantic to join … the Japanese Army” and intimated to the psychiatrist at the draft board that he wanted to organize Black soldiers to kill whites.⁶ Biographer Manning Marable commented that Malcolm’s self-presentation “directly repudiated the militant, assertive Black model of his father,” who was a Garveyite.⁷ Yet Robin Kelley explained that “while the suit itself was not meant as a direct political statement, the social context in which it was created and worn rendered it so.”⁸ Amid the wartime fabric rationing of the time, sensationalist crime rhetoric about Pachuco zoot suiters, and the internment of Japanese Americans, Malcolm’s cultural politics were already signaling the anticolonial global solidarity that he would find and embrace with the Nation of Islam in prison. Both Malcolm and Muhammad saw World War II as a “white man’s war” and framed their opposition by identifying with the Japanese cause. In 1950, the FBI opened a file on Malcolm X provoked by a letter he wrote to President Truman from prison in which he identified himself as a Communist who had “tried to enlist in the Japanese Army.”⁹

The incarceration of these two men has often stood in for the larger history of Muslims in prison, individualizing an experience which was in fact deeply communal. In April 1942, for example, James Nipper, a window washer for the Department of Agriculture, explained to a judge in Washington, D.C., that he had not registered for the draft because he was taught to “be on the side of our nation Islam, which is composed of the dark peoples of the earth, consisting of the Black, brown, red and yellow people.” John Miller and Harry Craighead both testified that they joined the “Islam Nation” in 1940.¹⁰ Frank Eskridge said, “Allah is my keeper and Allah has my card.”¹¹ John X explained that “Anderson is my last name, but that is only a name YOU gave me. Such family names are the names of former slaveowners whose human chattels assumed their masters’ names upon regaining freedom.”¹² By 1945, as NOI membership dipped below one thousand, nearly two hundred Muslim men had served time in federal prison for draft evasion, constituting the largest group of Black conscientious objectors (COs) during the war.¹³

The Nation of Islam’s decision to “register with Allah” brought Muslims into contact with other war resisters who challenged racial segregation, U.S. imperialism, and prison censorship. But incarcerated Muslims were largely regarded by prison officials during this period as “model prisoners” or, as one wrote, as “meek” [but] potentially dangerous.” Historians have speculated on the lessons Elijah Muhammad took from his incarceration, citing the self-sufficiency of prison farming and the use of radio broadcasts, both of which were incorporated into the Nation of Islam upon his release. Significantly, prisons became active recruiting grounds for new members. Perhaps most importantly, the near devastation of the Nation of Islam during the war due to FBI surveillance and the imprisonment of high-ranking members made Muhammad profoundly aware of the cost of conspicuous political stands. Part of the Nation of Islam’s growth during the next decade relied on its omnipresence in Black communities and its invisibility to white America. All that would change in the summer of 1959 with the television documentary The Hate That Hate Produced.

The program sensationally situated the NOI as a “hate group” similar to the Ku Klux Klan by referring to Black Nationalists as “Black racists” and “Black supremacists.” It was singularly responsible for launching the NOI into national discussions of race. Mike Wallace (later of 60 Minutes fame), who was the documentary’s narrator, later remarked that it was the “first time that the Black Muslims came to the attention of White America.”¹⁴ Within a month, Time magazine ran a feature called “The Black Supremacists,” which described Elijah Muhammad as a “purveyor of cold Black hatred,” who demanded his followers pray toward Mecca five times a day “even if it means falling upon their knees in the streets.”¹⁵ For its viewers in New York City, the documentary provided a framework for misunderstanding Black Nationalism and Islam. For law enforcement, it fomented fear and justified repression and surveillance. As Zaheer Ali argues, it was “the first major example of Islamophobia in the mainstream U.S. media.”¹⁶

As word of the Nation of Islam spread like wildfire through the press, C. Eric Lincoln seized on it as the topic for his dissertation at Boston University. When the book was published in early 1961, the phrase he coined—“Black Muslims”—immediately became ubiquitous.¹⁷ Just as The Hate That Hate Produced gave white audiences an intellectual framework to understand Black Nationalism as reverse racism, “Black Muslims” became the lexicon through which the NOI’s religious standing could be easily dismissed. Particularly coming at a time when the NOI was attempting to make inroads with emerging anticolonial leaders and respond to other American Muslim groups who challenged Muhammad’s claim to prophetic leadership, the “Black Muslims” moniker provided a means for understanding the NOI’s practice of Islam as outside the bounds of religious legitimacy.

The book and the documentary offered frameworks for dismissing the organization’s relationship to anticolonial politics and orthodox Islam at the precise moment the group was making concerted efforts to engage both. Rather than being recognized as bridging Muslims throughout the world and global Black freedom movements, the Nation of Islam was portrayed as peripheral to the two. The idea of the “Black Muslims” as a hate group, or an example of the emergent falsehood of reverse racism, was facilitated and propagated by carceral officials. It was pliable enough that law enforcement could suppress Muslim practice in prisons and police local mosques by claiming that the NOI was a subversive political group in the guise of religion while offering civil rights organizations the language to dismiss it within the Black freedom struggle. But this suppression and surveillance often helped grow the organization, and Muslims found creative ways to practice Islam and express Black self-determination and anticolonial solidarity, even in the state’s most repressive spaces.

The Dialectics of Surveillance and Resistance

Since its founding, the Nation of Islam struggled to define itself against the identities imposed on it by academics, journalists, and law enforcement. As Su’ad Abdul Khabeer points out, “Black Muslims have been monitored by the United States government since the 1930s.”¹⁸ In the first academic study of the NOI in 1938, University of Michigan sociologist Erdmann Beynon began, “The Negro sect [is] known to its members as the ‘Nation of Islam’ or the ‘Muslims,’ but to the police as the Voodoo Cult.” Beynon’s article, published in the American Journal of Sociology as “The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” privileged the latter.¹⁹ Moreover, the entanglement of law enforcement surveillance and academic knowledge production was present at the very inception of scholarship on the NOI. As the FBI later revealed, Beynon and “a detective from the Detroit Police Department who was in charge of the investigation of the group conferred with each other quite frequently and swapped information.” Richard Brent Turner observes that this collaboration began a “tradition of scholarly representations of the Nation of Islam that accepted local and national law-enforcement agencies’ signification of the organization as a cult.”²⁰

Before the ubiquity of the “Black hate” paradigm, the NOI was described through a package of Orientalism and African primitivism by the press, police, and Black communities. Non-Muslims’ characterizations of the NOI featured phrases such as “cult practices [of] human sacrifice,” “sinister influences of voodooism,” and a “jungle cult” with women dressed “in long flowing robes of vivid colors reaching below the ankles [and] male members wear[ing] fezzes and other regalia.”²¹ One journalist described how Muslims entering the temple “uttered the password Ossa lossa lakam” (an attempt to transliterate “As-salaam alaikum”), and a police raid on the Detroit temple found communications with “unintelligible scrawls” written in Arabic. Some called them “Islams,” indicating the high degree of bewilderment surrounding the religion.²² The charge that the group was exploiting uneducated people was common, as Black Christian clergy accused founder W. D. Fard of “prey[ing] upon the more gullible members of their people,” and the Black press commented that “leaders shunned contact with the educated Negro.”²³

These early ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter One. The Making of the “Black Muslims”
• Chapter Two. Shades of Mississippi
• Chapter Three. Whose Law and What Order?
• Chapter Four. We’re Brutalized Because We’re Black
• Chapter Five. The State the State Produced
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index