Notes Introduction 1. See Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 50–54; Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 20–21; Richard B. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 160–66; and Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 68–71. 2. See the seminal account of Erdmann D. Beynon, “The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” American Journal of Sociology 40, no. 3 (May 1938): 894–907; and compare C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 11–16, and E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism : A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 43–46. 3. See Clegg, Original Man, 21–40, 77–97. 4. Muhammad’s criminal record is reproduced in SAC Chicago to FBI Director, 26 May 1969, 7–8, in Reel 3 of the FBI File on Elijah Muhammad (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1996). For accounts of the NOI’s rise in the late 1940s and the 1950s, see Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism, 63–82, and Clegg, An Original Man, 97–118. 5. Muhammad Speaks, 29 June 1973, 31. From this point on, I abbreviate Muhammad Speaks as MS. 6. See further Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973). 7. One popular collection of Malcolm X’s speeches is Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). 8. These were official positions of the NOI, printed toward the back of Muhammad Speaks newspapers throughout the 1960s and 1970s in a section entitled “What the Muslims Want.” The NOI also demanded freedom, justice, equality, an amnesty for black prisoners, a tax amnesty for black citizens, and an end to police brutality. 9. George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 286–91. 10. See Autobiography of Malcolm X, 288–342. 11. See Abass Rassoull, “Clarifies Muslim Accomplishments,” MS, 29 March 1974, 3. 12. Claude Clegg has catalogued the various estimates of membership numbers in the 1960s. He notes that the movement itself said that it had over 100,000 members, and journalists like Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax repeated these claims. Clegg’s educated guess, however, is that there were 20,000 members at the height of the movement’s popularity, while many more people sympathized with the movement. See Clegg, Original Man, 114–15. In 1965, the FBI estimated that there were only 5,000 full-fledged members. See “Nation of Islam: Cult of the Black Muslims,” May 1965, pt. 2, p. iv, of an internal report declassified under the Freedom of Information Act available through the FBI’s Electronic Reading Room: ‹http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/nation_of_islam.htm›. 13. See further “Recruitment and Membership Procedures,” in the FBI’s “Nation of Islam: Cult of the Black Muslims,” May 1965, pt. 3, pp. 57–59. Johnny Percy X Moore, for example, converted to Islam, stopped attending his local mosque, committed a crime, was sentenced to San Quentin prison, and then renewed his commitment to Islam. See “San Quentin Inmate Thanks Allah for Spread of Truth,” MS, 6 September 1968, 25, and compare Brother Ralph 4X Brown, “Advice to the Lost,” MS, 28 March 1969, 32. For an example of a believer who went from being a Christian to a Muslim and later repeated the same cycle, see Sharon 2X, “Islam Gives Happiness,” MS, 7 April 1972, 18. 14. Most African American religionists were, as they are now, Christians of one sort or another. See further C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). 15. For an account of how marginal religious groups have helped to shape mainstream American culture, see R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 16. The best-known academic article on the NOI was the sensationalistic account of Beynon, “The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit.” For an introduction to the FBI’s investigation of the NOI...