The First "White" Person in the Nation of Islam

For my new book, "A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States: White American Muslims Before 1975," I scoured every source I could get my hands on related to Muslims in the United States. This effort definitely proved fruitful; I discovered numerous, previously unknown stories about early white Americans who embraced Islam, and I believe the book offers a new, dramatically different view of the history of white Muslims.

Today, however, I received an item that I wasn't able to get my hands on while working on my book--a set of government documents that I've been trying to obtain for nearly 2 years.

I had no idea that these documents would tell me anything about early white Muslims, let alone a "white" woman who joined the Nation of Islam in the 1940s.

When I first looked at the documents, I, honestly, could not believe it, and assumed that there must have been some mistake made by the government workers who wrote the reports. But after examining them more closely, I saw that they indicated that NOI members believed that this woman had "Asiatic blood"--a sign that they recognized that this woman was not a full-blooded non-white person, and perhaps appeared white.

The possibility that a white person was in the NOI intrigued me so much--and made me embarrassed that I hadn't included her in my book about white Muslims--that I sought out biographical evidence to confirm her situation.

As it turns out, this woman crossed various color lines. Whether or not she did in fact have non-white ancestors, other whites saw her as white, and her parents and siblings all identified as white. However, by the early 1940s this woman had left her family, was living in a black community, and was identifying as black in census records. Interestingly, she also sometimes identified herself as Native American, and this may have been the principal identity she chose. Reports do indicate that she had black hair, black/brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a "dark" complexion, and other records suggest that her father did too. Various death records list the woman as either white or Native American.

In spite of the fact that this woman may have actually had some non-black ancestry (or was possibly a tri-racial Melungeon--since a few Melungeons have been identified in the same county where she was born), I see her early crossing of racial boundaries within the context of Islam primarily as an important clue for understanding other converts, particularly other "whites," Native Americans, and Latinos who convert after identifying with African American Muslim figures like Malcolm X. It is true too, though, that she could have actually been full or part Native American--since many Natives identified publicly as whites in the early 20th century--and this would make her the earliest recorded Native member of the NOI. These are both interesting phenomena, and I will be exploring them in the next 2 volumes of "A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States."