From the paper:
In 2015, while researching the NOI’s activities in the years following World War II, I came across an article about the group in the 1960 edition of the newspaper Chicago’s American. The author of this article explains that in 1942 his newspaper’s predecessor, the Chicago Herald-American, “exposed” the NOI and other black nationalist organizations that supposedly were aimed at uniting “the world’s dark skinned people under Japan and exterminate the white race.” For anyone familiar with the history of World War II-era alternative movements in the US, this was an obvious reference to the major FBI investigation into the various black American groups that at some point had had a connection with Satokata Takahashi, a Japanese national who in the 1930s and 1940s attempted to form and influence numerous pro-Japanese, anti-American organizations. Much in-depth research has in fact been produced on these groups—which include both the NOI and certain factions of the MSTA—as well as on the federal investigation. However, this research has largely been dependent on available FBI files, and no previous author has mentioned a role played by the Herald-American. Curious about the claim, then, I examined the 1942 issues of the Chicago newspaper and discovered that it had indeed been an important participant in the exposure of the Takahashi-influenced groups, an event that came to light in a series of articles published in late September of that year.
What made these articles so fascinating and historically important is that they revealed that at that time, the Chicago branch of the NOI taught a unique brand of Islam wherein there was an overt identification as 'Moors.' Scholars of the Nation have long been aware that the organization emerged from the remnants of the Detroit Moorish Science Temple of America--a number of the NOI's original ministers had been in the MSTA and W.D. Fard seems to have incorporated a few MSTA teachings. However, as early as 1935 the Chicago branch of the NOI seemed different. In newspaper articles that year, it was reported that several Chicago NOI members explicitly identified as 'Moors' despite the fact that this was not what had been taught by Fard, who instead preached that African Americans were from the Tribe of Shabazz, whose home between Mecca and the Nile River--not the El and Bey tribes from North Africa, as was the 'Moorish' teaching of Noble Drew Ali, the MSTA prophet. Because of these obvious contradicting views, many scholars--myself included--assumed that in 1935 the Chicago reporters, not knowing the intricacies of African American Islam, had simply confused the MSTA members with the NOI members.
However, the newly-discovered 1942 Herald-American articles show that this was not a case of confusion. Not only did the Herald-American reporters record multiple instances of Elijah Muhammad himself saying that African Americans were 'Moors,' they discovered that the Chicago NOI temple was using for its texts Noble Drew Ali's Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America and the MSTA catechism--but apparently with all references to Drew Ali and the MSTA removed. In addition, the reporters observed a practice that had been rumored in 1935 but was believed by many scholars (again, myself included) to have simply been an expression of racist newspaper sensationalism: the performance of a 'blood' initiation ritual. As will be seen in my paper, this ritual is one of several clues that give substance to additional old rumors concerning the influence of yet another movement on the Chicago NOI: black communism. The early Chicago NOI, it seems, was far different from the NOI that would become famous in the 1950s and 1960s, which showed few to no obvious MSTA or communist influences. In fact, the dramatic change in the NOI in the mid-to-late 1940s was most likely a product of the mass arrest of NOI members that the Herald-American investigation helped instigate--it was almost certainly in prison where Elijah Muhammad decided to refocus the organization and remove the overt Moorish and communistic elements.
This paper is the first of my many writings that will be appearing in 2017. Be on the lookout for new and previously unpublished essays that will be appearing in journals and edited volumes, as well as my long-in-the-works A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States Volume 2 (HCTIUS2), which focuses on African American Islam before 1975 and will contain, in addition to a synthesis of all my previous research, many new little pieces of information as well as one very big discovery that I hope will help transform the very way we think about African American Islam.
