Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State by Garrett Felber (review)

Garrett Felber’s Those Who Know Don’t Say is an important addition to scholarship on the original Nation of Islam and the Black Freedom Movement more broadly. Felber’s book is thoroughly researched, insightful, and original. The book traces the Nation of Islam’s efforts to guarantee constitutional rights for incarcerated members and the varied ways in which the carceral state responded. Throughout the work, Felber details the sit-ins and litigation that resulted from efforts to challenge repression. Felber’s work argues that the original Nation of Islam challenged both the carceral state and the nation-state. In this regard, his work builds on and adds nicely to the existing scholarship on Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI). Felber’s work reconsiders the NOI’s “place and scope” (4) within histories of the Black Freedom Movement. Felber argues that the NOI’s erasure from histories of the Black Freedom Movement and global Islam is largely a result of the state’s determination to “privilege” some identifications over others (6).

Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam converted thousands of African American men and women to Islam, as taught by Elijah Muhammad, during the height of the Black Freedom Movement. Muhammad’s followers construed civil rights activists and secular Black Nationalists to be misguided. Yet, Muhammad and his followers were neither as far removed nor as nonengaged as earlier scholars have suggested. Indeed, Those Who Know Don’t Say complicates our understanding of the NOI’s activism during this period.

Elijah Muhammad’s secretive community was unveiled to the American public in 1959 via the documentary The Hate that Hate Produced. Felber’s arguments relating to the mainstream media’s portrayal and representation of the Nation of Islam and its membership are not entirely new. Indeed, several scholars have noted the impact that the infamous 1959 documentary had on perceptions of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and rank-and-file members. However, Felber offers a depth of analysis that is both welcome and refreshing. In doing so, he effectively builds on Zaheer Ali’s arguments relating to the backlash from the documentary being “the first major example of Islamophobia in the mainstream US media” (18). According to Felber, the hysteria surrounding the documentary helped to justify state repression.

The FBI’s campaign to neutralize and destroy Elijah Muhammad, his ministerial body, and his followers is generally well-known. Yet, the origins of the harassment that the community faced are neglected in existing studies. Felber’s work thus adds nicely to and enriches our understanding of this period. In the first chapter, Felber explores the origins, treatment, and responses of Black Muslim men who were incarcerated for draft evasion during the Second World War. The chapter also sets out in rich detail C. Eric Lincoln’s research on the Nation of Islam and the response to his book The Black Muslims in America. Felber argues that Lincoln’s work had a “significant impact” on “policing, prisons and the courts” (44). His assessment of Lincoln’s “voluntary collusion” with law enforcement (46) is an important one. Indeed, Felber’s arguments relating to how Lincoln’s work was deployed to justify the further repression of the NOI and its followers is significant.

Felber’s arguments relating to the NOI’s “deep” involvement in global Islam could have been further explored in chapter 1. Numerous scholars have documented the NOI’s encounters with both the larger Muslim ummah in the United States and Muslim communities beyond America’s borders. Felber’s work thus builds on a small number of studies that have considered such interactions and their significance.

Chapter 2 explores how incarcerated Muslims responded to prison discipline in both Clinton and Attica. Felber notes that such prisoners perceived the courts as “arenas of political struggle” (54...