"Exploring Local Histories of African American Islam Through the Black Press"
ABSTRACT: This paper offers a new historiographic approach to African American Muslim history from both a local and a multilocal perspective. Based on an analysis of over four dozen African American newspapers from 1975 through 1989—the years corresponding to the transition of the original Nation of Islam and the rise of Louis Farrakhan’s group—it is proposed that we can gain great insight into the local and regional development of certain African American Muslim communities by looking at their coverage in the local black press. It will be shown that, in general, the amount and type of coverage of Muslim communities roughly corresponds to those communities’ growth. The paper will present several examples of this phenomenon functioning at both local and regional levels. It will be observed, for example, that local growth is highly correlated with press coverage of the local branch of a particular community, but not necessarily with coverage of national news for that community. In some cases, regional patterns can also be observed, such as the case of black newspapers along Interstate 35 showing similar patterns of coverage, which generally corresponds to local community growth in that region.
For those attending (virtually) the upcoming American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, I will be presenting in a session on Thursday, December 3 from 4 pm - 5:30 pm EST
Afro-American Religious History Unit
Theme: Mormon, Muslim, Coptic, Webb: Blackness and Identity in New Religious Movements
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