“Come down off the cross and get under the crescent”: The Newspaper Columns of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X

The newspaper columns written by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad and published in African American newspapers in the late 1950s and early 1960s offer the first public delineation of the Nation of Islam’s world view. This essay examines the major themes discussed in these columns to argue that the Nation’s political and religious ideas were part of an evolving discourse simultaneously built on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Black Nationalist thought, and were responsive to the times within which they were written.