"Every white man knows his time is up," snapped the frail-looking Negro in the embroidered pillbox to 5,500 Negroes packed into Manhattan's St. Nicholas Arena one hot afternoon last week. "I am here to teach you how to be free. Yes, free from the white man's yoke. We want unity of all darker peoples on the earth. Then we will be masters of the United States, and we are going to treat the white man the way he should be treated." Roared the crowd: "That's right! More! More!" For more than two hours, as shouts and applause rose in regular cadences, the scowling, incendiary speaker obliged by pouring out his scorn upon all "white devils," "satisfied black men," the "poison" Bible, Christianity's "slave-master doctrine," and America's "white for white" justice.
The purveyor of this cold black hatred is known to some 70,000 Negro followers (he claims 250,000) in 29 U.S. cities as Elijah Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, head of a stern, demanding, disciplined black-supremacist religious sect called "the Moslems."* Calmly feeding the rankling frustration of urban Negroes, the Moslems reach deep among the least-educated, lowest-paid Negroes jammed into big-city slums from Harlem to Los Angeles. Muhammad's virulent anti-Americanism and antiSemitism, plus his elite corps of dark-suited, shaven-polled young "honor guards," has lifted him well beyond the run-of-the-street crackpot Negro nationalist groups. The Moslems are of rising concern to respectable Negro civic leaders, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to police departments in half a dozen cities, and to the FBI.
Men Named "X." Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole, son of a Baptist minister, in Sandersville, Ga. on Oct. 7, 1897, later moved with his family to Detroit. One momentous day, he tells the faithful, he met one Fard Muhammad, who revealed himself to be "Allah on earth"—on earth, that is, just long enough to pick the "messenger" for his black-supremacy doctrine. Messenger Elijah dropped his "slave-master name" of Poole, took up the spiritual surname Muhammad (lacking religious surnames, his ministers just use "X"). He founded Temple No. i in 1931, but soon ran into difficulties.
Detroit police arrested him in April 1934 on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor (six months' probation), and in November some of his would-be followers got disgusted with his teaching, drove him out of town. He set up permanent headquarters in Chicago, preached against the white man's draft registration in World War II. When FBI agents tracked him to his mother's Chicago home in September 1942, they found him rolled up in a carpet under her bed. He was in federal prison at Milan, Mich, for draft dodging until 1946, later made a play for recruits among ex-convicts. His New York leader, Malcolm X, once Malcolm Little, is an ex-convict who has been arrested for larceny in two states.