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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A new biography of Elijah Muhammad tackles tough issues, including the matter of blacks' collusion with the Japanese during World War II.
Jan 6, 2000 | Just when you thought your opinion of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its reality-challenged leaders couldn't fall any lower, you find yourself clearing a space in the basement of your mind. Washington Post researcher Karl Evanzz has written the comprehensive biography of Elijah Muhammad, NOI's co-founder and "prophet," and 704 exhaustively detailed pages later we know far more than we ever thought possible (or bearable) about the movement so lacking in intellectual, religious or moral underpinning that only the grinding boot heel of oppression could have produced it.
Given the book's commendable grasp, the only remaining question is how Evanzz could withstand the mudslide of murder, incest and stupidity facing anyone who tries to make sense of this mishmash religion that, for all its incoherent hatred, has brought 4 million black Americans to (something like) Islam. Reading about the weak, lethal and fanatically anti-intellectual leaders of the NOI made me want to wash my mind out with soap. This all goes double, of course, for the government counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) agents who worked so hard from as early as the 1940s to foment both political and actual fratricide among black activists, from the NOI's chaotic prototypes to the saintly (though libidinous) Martin Luther King and on to the nihilistic Elijah Muhammad himself. Few emerge from this sordid tale deserving to hold their heads up.
Those who know something about the Nation of Islam will not be surprised to read about the venality, hypocrisy, cowardice and megalomania exhibited by its main players -- Muhammad, along with Wallace D. Fard, Louis Farrakhan and various henchmen and competitors. Evanzz does deliver something of a surprise, though: Cast in the proper historical, cultural and international contexts, the emergence of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam seems slightly less ridiculous -- but only slightly.
"The Messenger" is really the story of what happens after a great evil ends. It's the story of America's racial chickens coming home to roost. After reading this book, any group in power thinking of oppressing another group will know the enraged and gibbering fiend they'd be loosing on their grandchildren.
Developed roughly between 1930 and 1940, the Nation's "theology" is difficult to follow. This is largely because, in that first generation after the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation had finally crumbled to dust, the movement's doctrine was made up as needed by whatever flimflam artist was proclaiming himself to be Allah that day. During this period it was clear that whites felt little anguish over their past actions toward blacks and had no intention of living peacefully and equitably with their former property. Reasonable black folks were disappointed but hopeful. Unreasonable ones were looking for revenge.
"The Messenger" is, then, the story of a life dedicated to exploiting the misery of his people for his own personal gain. Elijah, of course, was only one in a long line of con men (not all of whom were black) to recognize the hunger for release from the chronically low self-esteem and self-hatred under which many black Americans labored. The quick way out and up is to learn to hate someone else.
Muhammad, backed by a goon squad that Attila the Hun would have looked on fondly, taught a great many black people to hate and call it a religion. Given the sorry outlines of his tale, the book is most interesting as a work of history rather than the story of an individual life. Evanzz does two things that few others have dared: He deals directly with the tension between the black bourgeoisie and the lower classes of blacks in the freedom struggle, and he confronts squarely some radical blacks' outright collusion with the enemy during World War II.
Before he was "The Messenger" and a self-proclaimed divinity, Elijah Poole was a sharecropping preacher's son with a fourth-grade education, a drinking problem, a mind made gullible by suffering and a need to feel special. Born in 1897 in Sandersville, Ga., the seventh of 13 children, Poole had a childhood demarcated by his father's terrifying sermons, set against an atmosphere of Klan terror, lynchings (including a friend's), disenfranchisement and cotton-picking peonage. The young Poole read about caged Pygmies at the World's Fair and the Bronx Zoo. The wonder is that more black Americans didn't go the way of madness and race hatred.
In 1923, Elijah, by then a husband and father of two, had fled Georgia for Detroit, where he worked steadily but remained discontented, especially with the pie-in-the-sky aspects of Christianity. He drifted into black nationalist groups like Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey gave voice to the frustration many lower-class blacks had harbored silently in their hearts: They were subservient not only to whites but also to lighter-skinned, well-educated, NAACP-member, linen-napkin Negroes. But here was the chocolate-brown, self-made Garvey dismissing fancy black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and Roy Wilkins as "'blue-veined' mulattoes who were too wedded to integration to solve the problems of Africans of the diaspora." "Diaspora" -- now there's a word a Georgia field hand had probably never heard before. The concept elevated Poole's own plight from one of personal failing to part and parcel of what he saw as an unfolding international conspiracy.
