Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali in 1964. (Jack Kanthal/AP)
"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem."
— Malcom X (El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz) in his The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to journalist Alex Haley.
<aside> 📅 Join us on Tuesday, February 16 from 6-7:30pm for a presentation from Ustadh Mustafa Briggs titled 'Before Malcolm X: History of Islam in the Americas'. For most people, the history of Islam in America starts with Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement, but how many of us know about the Muslim travelers and explorers who came here before Columbus? Or the enslaved West African princes and scholars who left behind diaries and treatises in perfect literary Arabic? Or the brave Muslim warriors who fought for freedom in South America and the Caribbean before the abolition of slavery? Join us on Zoom to learn more.
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Emmett Till, aged 13 years old.
The Great Migration enabled the mass movement of Black Americans out of the rural South into cities across the nation—North, South, East, and West. Frustrated by violent lynchings, disenfranchisement, and the brutal realities of Jim Crow segregation, large groups of African Americans sought better opportunities by moving to cities. One such family was Emmet Till's.
Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Cathan, had moved north to Argo, Illinois from Mississippi along with her family as a child. A visit from an uncle prompted Emmett to request to visit his mother's hometown in Money, Mississippi. In 1955, Till left Chicago to visit his relatives with his uncle and cousins.
In Mississippi, a 14-year-old Emmett was accused of allegedly whistling at a white woman in a convenience store. Later that night, the store's proprietor and his half-brother came to Till's uncle's residence, kidnapped Emmett, and brutally lynched him. Once the story broke nationwide, the lynching of Emmett Till attracted national outcry, and quickly became one of the initiators of the Civil Rights Movement.
Watch: May 17, 1954 - Brown v. Board of Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkuiMr2tLJE
Much of popular knowledge on the Civil Rights Movement focuses on Southern civil rights activists' organizing against Jim Crow segregation. While Brown v. Board and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts are momentous events in American civil rights history, Black activism in Northern states is often overlooked as a dichotomy is constructed between the 'liberal', 'free' Northern cities and the Jim Crow South which practiced de jure segregation. In reality, Northern governments were also complicit in segregation and egregious human rights violations, including but not limited to redlining, the incitement of race riots, and intense carcerality which jailed many Black Americans as part of a system of de facto segregation.
Dr. Garrett Felber, an associate professor at the University of Mississippi, writes, "the Nation of Islam’s prison organizing—and black nationalism more broadly (exemplified most prominently during these years by the NOI)—should be seen as a central current of the postwar struggle for black freedom", emphasizing the centrality of the NOI's activism to the wider Civil Rights Movement.
“Sir, do you really think that other Negroes in this state are dumb enough to believe that you and these other white so-called liberals are really for the civil rights of Negroes in the South, while the HUMAN RIGHTS of Negroes here in YOUR state are being trampled underfoot?”
— The New York Amsterdam News coverage addressed to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's chastisement of Southern governors' civil rights violation despite his own transgressions at home (October 1962).
While their Southern compatriots were engaged in activism against Jim Crow, Black Muslims in Northern cities and the Western United States would organize in prisons against the carceral state's repression of public practice of Islam, fighting back against prisons' attempts to curtail what they believed to be a bad influence on inmates. Prisons were essential spaces for Black inmates' conversion to Islam. Alongside prominent figures like Malcolm X and Imam Jamil Al-Amin, thousands of Black inmates would convert to Islam in prisons. Intent on curbing the Muslim brotherhood that was forming in prisons, wardens took a great number of measures to restrict Muslim community building, all of which were fiercely protested against by Black Muslims.
Among the Islamic rituals which were prevalent among early Muslim communities in prisons were the observance of Friday prayer and halal dining. In Clinton Prison in upstate New York, for example, a small group of Muslims would gather outside for Friday prayers, and used a stove to cook halal meals as the mess halls did not offer halal options. Joseph X Magette describes being monitored by a prison officer during Friday prayers, saying his group of Muslims were “tolerated. I wouldn’t say we were admitted, but we weren’t denied the right to meet.”
Muslim men at Folsom Prison in California pray under surveillance in 1962 (California State Archives, Sacramento).
Prisons took various measures to control inmates' access to Islamic education. This included the outright banning of the Holy Qur'an, or only allowing some translations at the expense of others. Felber writes that wardens allowed "The Glorious Koran, translated by the white English convert Marmaduke Pickthall in 1930 but refused copies of the Arabic translation with English commentary by the Indian-born Maulana Muhammad Ali". Restrictions on Islamic texts meant that devout prisoners would rely on each other to pass down memorized surahs to new converts, effectively replicating madrasas (Islamic schools) within the four walls of confinement.
As the Nation of Islam slowly emerged into the national public sphere, prisons would transition from cautious tolerance to outright repression. In 1959 in the midst of the Cold War, U.S. News and World Report published an article entitled ‘‘‘Black Supremacy’ Cult in U.S.: How Much of a Threat?’’, which explored why its readers should be wary of the Nation and its treachery despite the lack of any connections to international communist organizations. That same year, Newsbeat aired The Hate That Hate Produced, an hour-long documentary that presented the Nation as a militia anticipating an insurrection against white America. Magazines such as Time and Newsweek fixated on the phenomenon of incarcerated African Americans converting to Islam in prisons, and shared anonymous reports from police officers and government agents who warned of an impending scourge of Black violence despite very few cases of violence among the Nation’s members. The onset of negative press attention would shift the framing of the Nation and its followers away from that of a subversive religious sect, instead being seen as a Black supremacist hate group in the eyes of the justice system. After collaboration between the prison system, law enforcement surveillance, and political actors, Muslim 'ringleaders' were identified and placed into solitary confinement or transferred to other prisons in order to sever the budding Muslim communities. Solitary confinement not only cut off Muslims from their spiritual communities, but was also a form of severe psychological torture. According to a former inmate, solitary confinement cells were sometimes "completely empty, without even a blanket. He was put there naked with a half a cup of water and one slice of bread three times a day."