The Five Percenters

Islam, Hip-hop and the Gods of New York

Michael Muhammad Knight

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780744490
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From Malcolm X to the Wu Tang Clan, the first in-depth account of this fascinating black power movement

With a cast of characters ranging from Malcolm X to 50 Cent, Knight’s compelling work is the first detailed account of the movement inextricably linked with black empowerment, Islam, New York, and hip-hop. Whether discussing the stars of Five Percenter rap or 1980s crack empires, this fast-paced investigation uncovers the community’s icons and heritage, and examines its growing influence in urban American youth culture.

1

Mecca

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Harlem! The Mecca of the New Negro! My God!

Carl Van Vechten

There is gold in New York.

Elijah Muhammad

The holy places were quiet as I rolled into Harlem early Sunday morning, the sidewalks empty and pull-down iron gates still covering the storefronts. My Brand Nubian tape offered the soundtrack, a clip of a Louis Farrakhan speech set to a looped groove from Marvin Gaye’s “T is for Trouble:”

the poor have been made into slaves

by those who teach lies

they don’t teach the law

of cause and effect

they make the people believe

when they see it rain

that a spook is producing it

but the rain is real

how then can the cause be unreal?

Elijah said that the ingredients needed to change the weather could be found at any five-and-dime store. Malcolm used to pester him to reveal the ingredients, but the Messenger always refused.

“The ingredients Malcolm sought in the five-and-dime store,” writes Amir Fatir, “were within him.”

the bloodsuckers of the poor make you think

that God is some “Mystery God”

well,

the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to us

that there is five percent

who are the Poor Righteous Teachers

who don’t believe the teaching of lies

of the ten percent

but this five percent are all-wise and know

who the true and living God is

and they teach that the true and living God

is the son of man

the supreme being

the black man of Asia

The Honorable Minister Farrakhan went on to explain how the Ten Percent—the rich, the bloodsuckers of the poor, the slavemakers of the poor—have control over the masses, the Eighty-Five Percent, and turn them against the Poor Righteous Teachers. This is how they’ve been able to kill the prophets, kill their communities ...

I parked and walked up Lenox Avenue, Malcolm X Boulevard. On my jacket I wore a pin of a man’s face with the word “ALLAH” underneath. The man on the pin did not look deliberately holy in any way, no turban or jewel-encrusted fez or even a beard, just a regular middle-aged black man that you could find anywhere with a regular jacket and a shirt with a collar. The pin was my passport, showing that I had traveled among the circles that understood. Sometimes it brought me into conversations that normally wouldn’t find me. This morning I was stopped by a black man who wore a big gold ring bearing a star and crescent—excuse me, I just noticed that you had that pin on, do you know who that is?

“This is the Father,” I told him. “This is Allah.”

“I know about him,” he said. “I built through all of that. It was just interesting, you know, to see a Caucasian with that on. So you’ve spent time with the Gods?”

“I go to parliaments.”

“And they’re okay with you?”

“They’ve been good to me.”

“Who’d you build with over there?”

“I’ve built with Abu Shahid, First Born ABG, Gykee, Allah B, Um Allah and Ja’mella, and I got my Supreme Alphabets and Mathematics from Azreal—”

“You ever read Sacred Drift?”

“By Peter Lamborn Wilson?”

“Yes, but his name wasn’t really Peter Lamborn Wilson. That was his pen name. His real name was Hakim Bey.”

“Yeah, I’ve read it.”

“I’m a Moor,” he explained, a Muslim in the line of Noble Drew Ali. He asked about my ethnic heritage. Irish, I told him. Then he asked if I knew the real story of St. Patrick. “The serpents were really Moors,” he said. “I don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but I commemorate it.”

I exchanged peace with the Moor and kept walking. Approaching the corner of 116th Street, I spotted the red-brick mosque with bright yellow trim and a giant green bulb of a dome on top. White curtains in the windows veiled the inside but the strength of this place, its heroes and history seeped through the brick and into the street. Malcolm X was once minister here, succeeded by Louis Farrakhan, and some stories have the Father teaching judo in the basement, back when his name was Clarence 13X.

In those days there was no green dome, which now sits where there was once a fourth floor. After Malcolm’s assassination the place was bombed out from the top down, with falling chunks of wall crushing fire engines. The dome came as part of a new beginning. During Farrakhan’s time it was covered with gold and topped with a crescent, and then Elijah’s son took over and threw Farrakhan out and changed everything. Elijah’s son took off the crescent and turned the dome green. Now this old Temple No.7 is a Sunni mosque, Masjid Malcolm Shabazz.

Memorial Day, 1965, the Father stood on this corner with a cluster of Harlem youths and tried to grasp all that had gone wrong. Malcolm was dead and the temple lay in ruins. The Father still had a slug lodged in his own chest. He also had these kids, these “Five Percenters” and a creed that Tamar Jacoby says “combined a bit of Islam with a ganglike esprit de corps.”¹ A police officer told them to move on. Forty years later, I followed in Allah’s footsteps to Seventh Avenue and made my way up the 120 series of streets, arriving at the lean white tower of the Hotel Theresa.

When Harlem was the black Mecca, this might have been its Kaaba, holding in its years the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles. This was where Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Sam Cooke became friends. Malcolm and Cassius tried to make a Muslim out of Sam; when he died out in California, Nation of Islam literature was found in his hotel room. In 1960, the same year that John F. Kennedy addressed a campaign rally in front of the Theresa, Fidel Castro took a room here. When Kruschev came to visit, Elijah’s Muslims marched outside with signs reading, “there is no god but Allah” so he could go back to Russia and tell his people how America treated the black man.

It was on this sidewalk that pedestrians heard orations from Malcolm, Charles Kenyatta and James “Pork Chop” Davis-Foreman, who’d preach on his stepladder from the 1940s, when he followed Marcus Garvey, all the way to his death in 1987. And on Memorial Day, 1965, this was where the police showed up again and took the Father away, so I wondered why there wasn’t a plaque or anything to commemorate it—Adam Clayton Powell had his own building across the street and even a statue in upward stride with his coat flowing behind him like a cape. The Theresa isn’t a hotel anymore, the famous marquee is gone and down in front there’s a White Castle. All I could do was stand there for a solemn moment and move along.

I passed the Masonic lodge to the next block and spotted the hand-painted emblem of a star-and-crescent and large 7 within an eight-pointed sun, marking the one-story Allah School in Mecca—headquarters of the Five Percenters, Nation of Gods and Earths. They used to call it Allah’s Street Academy, but the place has been through more than name changes: legal wars with the city, repeated arson and Gods with good hearts who couldn’t shake the demons. The surrounding sidewalk bears witness to its history, with old wet-cement signatures of Gods who have since gone warra al-shams, behind the sun. Prince, read one square. In the window sat an old framed photograph of the Father with his best friend, Old Man Justice. As I went in I saw a velvet oil painting of Allah in his collared shirt and jacket, and I remembered an old God telling me that the Father was darker than in those portraits—he was what they called a “knowledge seed” of deep black complexion; when he got a lot of sun his skin would almost turn purple and his features seemed to disappear. After the Memorial Day arrest, he’d go nearly two years without sun. Next to his portrait hung a proclamation from the City of New York, dated June 13, 2004, honoring the Five Percenters for their emphasis on strong families and education, along with contributions to the “tremendously rich history in the Harlem community.” On the other wall hung a black and white photo of Malcolm X addressing a street rally with his trademark damning finger-point, and it almost looks like he’s pointing at the bar across the street, the Wellworth where the Father would stare down a gunman who hoped to shoot his friend West Indian. I took the back door and sat in a chair outside with my tall can of sweet tea. I could see that where I sat used to be part of the building, destroyed during one of the arsons. It looked like the Five Percenters had started renovations—measuring dimensions, raking debris out of the dirt, getting ready to add on again.

An old God, thin and wiry and wearing a tassled skullcap with the word ALLAH across the front, stepped out and looked at me.

“Is that beer?”

“No, no, it’s sweet tea.” Relieved that I wasn’t disrespecting the School, the God introduced himself as Wise Jamel and told me about his history—he came from the First Resurrection back in 1964, he was with the Blood Brothers and then the Suns of Almighty God Allah, who then became the Five Percenters. He received his knowledge from none other than the famous Black Messiah.

I still had some time before the parliament, so I walked up to the corner of 127th and Malcolm X Boulevard and bought a bean pie from the Muslims. Walked past the current Masjid Muhammad #7 with its bowtie-wearing Fruit of Islam out in front. One of them noticed my pin of the Father, so I greeted him with “peace” and received the same in reply. I crossed over to Seventh and ate my bean pie on a playground at the St. Nicholas projects.

On the corner of 127th and Eighth I stopped and listened to a gray-bearded black streetcorner-preacher in suit and tie and cowboy hat, shouting at the top of his voice in the tradition of Pork Chop:

“I COULDN’T SAVE MY MOTHER, I COULDN’T SAVE NOBODY! GOD PUT ME ON THIS CORNER—”

I headed back down toward the Harriet Tubman School, where the Five Percenters had been holding parliaments since Mayor John Lindsay gave them authorization nearly forty years before.

With my blue eyes I stick out like a sore thumb at parliaments, which is usually a good thing because Gods love to share knowledge and speak for their Nation. Some Gods are naturally suspicious, less for my being white than being a writer; they have been screwed enough times in arenas of public opinion.

I keep waiting for some justification of what I’ve heard and read: security threat, hate group, racists, dope dealers, cop killers, snipers, militant rappers, radical black terrorists—but it never comes. Gods introduce themselves and build with me a little, just to see what I know and make sure I’m coming from a good place. They’re quick to get the important issues out of the way. You know we’re not a gang, right? And you know that we’re not Muslims? And we’re neither pro-black, nor anti-white?

One such exchange turned into a minor event, with a circle of Gods surrounding us on the sidewalk in front of the Harriet Tubman. The God with whom I had been building reached into his bag, pulled out a xeroxed zine and flipped through the pages to find a photograph of the Father standing next to a white man. “You see this man?” he asked. “This was Barry Gottehrer, he worked for the mayor, he was the mayor’s man. Look at his face, he doesn’t hate the Father! He’s not looking at the Father like the Father is anti-white!” He was right. Forty years later, Mr. Gottehrer was still firmly supporting the Five Percenters and had come to their defense on more than one occasion. “We believe in teaching all human families of the planet earth,” said the God.

“That’s peace,” I told him.

“Did you tell him that we’re not anti-white?” asked a middle-aged God in a Kangol hat.

“That was the first thing I told him.” By the end of the dialogue, we were exchanging phone numbers. The Five Percenters have always been respectful to me, and the ones that I found most gracious were usually older Gods that actually knew the Father, which should say something.

After going through the security God at the door I walked past the various tables peddling Five Percenter newspapers, bootleg movies, books and shirts and spotted familiar faces among the regulars. I had been to enough parliaments for many Gods to know who I was, and I could receive warm greetings of peace f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• 1 Mecca
• 2 Desert Fathers
• 3 Clarence and Malcolm
• 4 The Blood Brothers
• 5 Allah
• 6 The Burning Mosque
• 7 Matteawan
• 8 Allah and the Mayor
• 9 Swarms of Devils
• 10 The Lives of Nations
• 11 Warrior Stripes
• 12 Belly of the Beast
• 13 Song of the Gods
• 14 The Builders Build
• 15 Mothers of Civilization
• 16 The Azreal Question
• 17 The Road to Cream City
• 18 Show and Prove
• Appendix of Names
• Notes
• Index