New Essay: "Propaganda in the Early NOI"

My new book chapter "Propaganda in the Early NOI" appears in the recently-published New Perspectives on the Nation of Islam, edited by Dawn-Marie Gibson and Herbert Berg. You can check out excerpts from the book on GoogleBooks and Amazon.

Below is an abstract of my essay:

While in the scholarship on the NOI there has been much discussion about the press’s coverage of the NOI in the early 1930s, there has been almost no attempt to analyze the group’s own use of media to promote its message during this initial phase of the movement. In 1933 and 1934, NOI members wrote a number of letters and editorials that were published in both Detroit and nationally-distributed African American newspapers. And, in the late summer of 1934, the group published its first periodical, the Final Call to Islam. Although for the most part, the content of these publications simply reflects the known ideology of the NOI of the early 1930s, this chapter will argue that these pieces add depth to our understanding and appreciation of both early NOI voices and of what was important for the movement at the time. For instance, in addition to promoting Fard’s principal doctrines about the origins and destiny of African Americans, there is a strong emphasis on the current activities of Muslims around the world, which shows for us how much the early NOI identified with Muslims generally. We also see a stress on having a proper diet and good health, echoing Fard’s ideas about “how to eat to live.” Perhaps the most valuable aspect about these publications, however, is that they give us a closer look at the leaders and followers of the early NOI. We see, for example, how precisely early NOI members—including Elijah Muhammad, who wrote several of the pieces that will be examined—interpreted and put in their own words Fard’s teachings. This gives us a better glimpse at how NOI ideas were constructed and expressed by its African American members at the time. Most scholarship discussing early NOI discourse has not relied on pieces written by followers during this initial phase of the NOI—instead, there has been a reliance on the group’s official teachings written by Fard, original NOI members’ interviews and speeches that were often recorded many years after 1934, and early 1930s sensationalist newspaper reports about the NOI, which often contained quotes from members that might have been edited or taken out of context. A brief comparison will be made between these 1930s pieces and some 1950s NOI writings. Finally, these early publications also give us a few small, but reliable and important details about the group’s structure and growth at the time.