Elijah Muhammad

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Elijah Muhammad

Elijah Muhammad (born October 7, 1897 in Sandersville , Washington County , Georgia , † February 25, 1975 in Chicago ) was an American black civil rights activist and head of the Nation of Islam for 42 years .

Life

Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Robert Poole, the seventh of thirteen children, and grew up in Georgia. His father William Poole Sr. (1868-1942) was a Baptist preacher and farm laborer, his mother was Mariah Hall (1873-1958), housewife and farm worker. Both parents worked as so-called sharecropper , very poorly paid farm workers who paid off debts through work . Elijah also started working as a sharecropper in the field very early on.

Poole married Clara Evans (1899–1972) in 1917. Between 1910 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated from the southern states to the north of the USA (so-called first great migration ). This included Poole and his wife in 1923. They both left Georgia, where racist laws were still in force at the time , the so-called Jim Crow Laws , which discriminated against blacks. Poole himself had witnessed three blacks being lynched before he was twenty . About this he later told his biographer, "I have seen enough white man's cruelty for the next 26,000 years." The Pooles moved to Hamtramck , Michigan .

Elijah Poole claimed to have received the word of God in 1931 in the form of Wallace Fard Muhammad . Poole joined the nation . He gave up his "slave owner name" and initially took the Islamic name Kariem, later the name Muhammad. Elijah Muhammad later directed Temple Number 2 in Chicago. His younger brother, Kalot Muhammad, became the leader of the Fruit of Islam , the nation's self-defense group .

Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death. Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam had more than 20,000, at times up to 50,000 members, operated 130 temples and offered extensive social services. In 1934 he founded the Muhammad University of Islam. During World War II, he refused to fight because he saw this war as unjust. He was sent to prison for four years and served his sentence in the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan , Michigan.

The civil rights activist Malcolm X , for whom Elijah Muhammad was initially a foster father, later distanced himself from him and his organization, since he viewed Muhammad's teaching and work as being contrary to orthodox Islam . Above all, Malcolm X rejected separatism and the racist ideology of Black Supremacy propagated by the Nation of Islam . Muhammad was - u. a. by Malcolm X - alleged that he had fathered at least six illegitimate children, which the latter justified by saying that he must be the last of the prophets to repeat the sins of all prophets. Thomas Hagan , a member of the Nation of Islam and one of the killers of Malcolm X, declared in 1977 that the murder of Malcolm X was also a retaliation for his criticism of Elijah Muhammad.

Elijah Muhammad died of heart failure at the age of 77 on February 25, 1975 at Mercy Hospital in Chicago.

Honors

Representations in the film

Wives of Elijah Muhammad

  • Clara Muhammad
  • Tynetta Muhammad

Children with Clara Muhammad

  • Ethel
  • Lottie
  • Jabir Herbert Muhammad
  • Warith Deen Mohammed
  • Akbar Muhammad
  • Nathaniel Muhammad
  • Emmanuel Muhammad

literature

  • Herbert Berg: Elijah Muhammad and Islam . New York University Press, New York 2009. ISBN 978-0-8147-9113-4 .
  • Claude Andrew Clegg: To Original Man. The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad . St. Martin's Press, New York 1997. ISBN 0-312-15184-5 .
  • Louis E. Lomax: When the word is given. A report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World . The World Publishing Company, Cleveland 1963.
  • Dennis Walker: Islam and the Search for African American Nationhood. Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam . Clarity Press, Atlanta 2005. ISBN 0-932863-44-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claude Andrew Clegg: An Original Man. The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad . St. Martin's Press, New York 1997.
  2. ^ Richard Brent Turner: From Elijah Poole to Elijah Muhammad . In: American Visions , October / November 1997 issue.
  3. ↑ Karl Evanzz: The Messenger. The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad . Pantheon, New York 1999. ISBN 0-679-44260-X .
  4. ^ Southern Poverty Law Center , accessed November 2, 2014.
  5. ↑ Website of the Muhammad University of Islam (English)
  6. ↑ Essien Usoden Essien-Udom: Black Nationalism . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1962.
  7. ^ Mattias Gardell: In the Name of Elijah Muhammad. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam . Duke University Press, Durham 1996. ISBN 0-8223-1845-8 . In it the chapter X Terminated , pp. 76-84, especially p. 81.
  8. ↑ Article in the New York Times
  9. ↑ Molefi Kete Asante: 100 Greatest African Americans. A Biographical Encyclopedia . Prometheus Books, Amherst 2002. ISBN 1-57392-963-8 .
personal data
SURNAME Muhammad, Elijah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Poole, Elijah Robert (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American black civil rights activist and head of the Nation of Islam for 44 years
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Sandersville , Washington County , Georgia
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1975
Place of death Chicago