The Moorish Presence in the

Early Nation of Islam: Notes on the

Chicago Herald-American’s 1942 Exposé

Printed for the Moorish Men’s Brotherhood Summit

Linthicum, Maryland
November 4-6, 2016

By Patrick D. Bowen

Email: pbowen303@gmail.com
Website: https://independent.academia.edu/PatrickDBowen
I. Introduction

In 1938, the Nation of Islam was on the brink of organizational death.1 Government repression,
public outcry, and internal divisions had all but destroyed a group that in as late as 1932
reportedly had over eight thousand members. Now, six years later, at most there were probably
only two hundred active ‘Temple People,’ followers of the NOI’s largest remaining faction.
But the Temple People refused to wither away, and under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership
the movement was reborn. By the early 1940s Muhammad had established a new temple in
Washington, DC; small pockets of NOI believers had begun springing up in New York City,
Newark, and possibly Cleveland; and the group’s three older temples—in Detroit, Chicago, and
Milwaukee—started seeing new growth. As 1942 began, Muhammad’s faction possessed
somewhere between three hundred and fifty and five hundred members,2 and it was with this
core that the organization was able to make its impressive resurgence that would peak with it
gaining perhaps up to twenty-five thousand registered members in the early 1960s.3
Unfortunately, because of the paucity of records and testimonies from individuals who were
members of the Nation during its important late 1930s revival, how exactly the group was able to
reemerge after its near-collapse has not previously been examined in great detail. Due to this,
most of the discussions of the NOI’s second rise appear to take it as an assumption that members
of the group were simply putting more effort into spreading the teachings of W.D. Fard, the NOI
founder.
New evidence, however, suggests that there may have been additional dynamics at work
in the infusion of life into the moribund Nation. 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.4 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

1
The key major studies of the pre-1950 NOI are Erdmann Doane Beynon, "The Voodoo Cult among Negro
Migrants in Detroit," American Journal of Sociology 43 (May 1938): 894-907; Hatim A. Sahib, "The Nation of
Islam" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1951); C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3rd ed. (Grand
Rapids: W.B. Eerdsmans; Trenton: Africa World Press, [1961] 1994); Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and
Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999); Claude A. Clegg, III, An Original Man: The Life
and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Wakeel Allah, A History of the NOI Vol.
1 (Atlanta: A Team Publishing, [2014]). Additional information about the early NOI will be presented in my
forthcoming A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 2: The African American Islamic
Renaissance, 1920-1975 (hereafter, HCTIUS 2) (Boston: Brill, [2017]).
2
The Chicago group had 150-300 members (Clegg, Original Man, 81); Detroit probably had around fifty (FBI file
on Elijah Muhammad, Report, 8/6/1942, file 100-5549, [31?]); Washington had around one hundred (“Moslem,
Tried as Draft Evader, Says Allah Didn’t Declare War,” Washington Post, November 25, 1942, 22; “‘Moslem’
Sect’s Membership Declining Under Prosecution,” undated [November 26, 1942] newspaper clipping, in Elijah
Muhammad FBI file Subsection A); Milwaukee still had around twenty-two; and Newark and New York probably
had fewer than a dozen.
3
There is no known full set of membership records for the NOI at that time; this number is offered based on my
analysis of numerous clues and claims, which will be discussed in detail in HCTIUS 2.
4
Les Brownlee, “Cult Head Vows Negro World Rule,” Chicago’s American, February 22, 1960, 1, 4.

1
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.5 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.6
The NOI was first stumbled upon by the Herald-American the previous June while it was
conducting a sweep for “subversive” activities, which the paper prided itself on exposing during
the war years. After informing the local police and the FBI—the latter of which, the Herald-
American learned, was already investigating the Nation in other cities—all three institutions
coordinated an investigation that involved sending undercover reporters, police officers, and
agents into the Chicago temple’s meetings. There, they confirmed that Nation Muslims were
hearing anti-US and anti-white rhetoric and were anticipating the imminent coming of a great
war in which all whites would be killed—teachings that are well-known to anyone who has
studied the history of the NOI and the Takahashi movement. However, one set of claims in the
Herald-American pieces is not discussed in the widely available FBI files or in the vast majority
of other known documents related to the movements. According to the newspaper, members of
the Chicago NOI temple, including Elijah Muhammad himself, were repeatedly claiming to be
“Moorish” and even used Noble Drew Ali’s Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of
America (HKMSTA) as their holy book, which they called, simply, “Koran,” leaving out any
explicit reference to Drew Ali or his Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA). In none of
the Herald-American reports, moreover, is there a mention of the NOI founder W.D. Fard,
Fard’s recorded teachings known later as the “120 Lessons,” or the notion that African
Americans are members of an ancient ‘Tribe of Shabazz’—all basic elements in what is almost
universally recognized as the core NOI doctrine.
What, therefore, should we make of the newspaper’s claims? It is a well-known fact that
several early NOI members in Detroit had previously been in the MSTA and at least one Nation
faction leader had emphasized MSTA teachings over Fard’s; some evidence has even suggested
that there was also a Moorish presence in the Chicago NOI temple in the mid-1930s. However,
although for these and several other reasons the Herald-American’s assertions seem credible, we
might question whether they should be accepted at face value, especially considering that there
may be a history of Chicago newspapers confusing the NOI and MSTA. Furthermore, how can
we account for the apparent lack of any such Moorish references in the available FBI files on the

5
See esp. Evanzz’s Messenger and Ernest Allen, Jr.’s “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata
Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar 24, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 23-46
and “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932-1943,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1995): 38-
55.
6
“U.S. Seizes 84 Here in Big Jap Plot,” Chicago Herald-American, September 22, 1942, 1, 2; “How Japan’s Net
Spread over U.S.,” Chicago Herald-American, September 22, 1942, 1, 2; Robey Parks, “Blanket U.S. in Spy Hunt,”
Chicago Herald-American, September 23, 1942, 1, 5; “Enemy Plotters’ ‘Bible,’” Chicago Herald-American,
September 23, 1942, 5; “How the American Traced Jap Plotters,” Chicago Herald-American, September 23, 1942,
5; Robey Parks, “Bare Human Sacrifices of Jap-Directed Spy Ring,” Chicago Herald-American, September 24,
1942, 4. These articles had, as far as I can tell, only a single brief follow-up: “Prison for 32 in Jap Plot,” Chicago
Herald-American, October 6, 1942, 1.

2
NOI for that period? There are also no references to Moorish elements in either, on the one hand,
other newspaper accounts of the Nation from that time or, on the other, the available material
produced by the African American writers who visited the Chicago NOI temple between 1938
and 1941 as part of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) research on black American
life. So, is it possible to reconcile all of this lack of contemporary evidence with the Herald-
American’s unique claims? We might ask, too, if the MSTA influences were so prominent in the
early 1940s, why was there virtually no trace of them in the Chicago temple by the early 1950s
when the group was studied and described in detail by a graduate student from the University of
Chicago?
The present essay attempts to address these numerous issues. By examining and
discussing A) the previously-known evidence concerning the connections or lack thereof
between the MSTA and the NOI, B) the Herald-American’s reports, and C) the non-Herald-
American primary sources that were used by previous scholars, I will offer my assessment of the
validity of the newspaper’s claims. It is my opinion that the Herald-American assertions are
mostly accurate, although I temper this by also insisting that the newspaper’s findings should not
be considered applicable to all temples of the NOI at the time, let alone the entire pre-1950s
character of the larger NOI movement. These Moorish elements were probably most strongly
concentrated in the Nation’s Chicago temple in the early 1940s, and they were largely wiped out
by the early 1950s after the Nation underwent a dramatic transformation—a transformation that
occurred as a direct result of the various 1942 investigations. In this paper’s conclusion, I discuss
the potential implications of the Herald-American’s discoveries for not only understanding NOI
history, but also for interpreting the role of the MSTA in the broader history of African
American Islam.

II. Early MSTA-NOI Connections

The single most convincing piece of evidence concerning the presence of a Moorish influence in
the early NOI are the words of Elijah Muhammad that were recorded by the University of
Chicago graduate student in 1951. Muhammad explained that Fard’s first two ministers, Abdul
Mohammed and Othman Ali, were former Moors and that Fard was upset with them “because
they were trying to follow the Moorish” as opposed to Fard’s own teachings.7 However, it is very
likely that the Moorish emphasis of Mohammed and Ali was initially cultivated by Fard himself,
who may have been attempting to appeal directly to the Moors in Detroit, where a schism had
recently fractured the MSTA community.8 Although followers of Elijah Muhammad would later
insist that Saudi Arabia was Fard’s birthplace and various researchers over the past twenty years
have proposed that he may have actually been from South or Central Asia, in a newspaper article
from 1932 an NOI member is quoted as saying that Fard claimed to be from Morocco, and a
1943 FBI report on Detroit Muslims records a similar rumor, that Fard was from Algeria—both
of which are locations classically associated with the homeland of the historical Muslim Moors.9

7
Sahib, "Nation of Islam," 91, 96.
8
On the schism, see my “Notes on the MSTA Schisms in Detroit and Pittsburgh, 1928-29,” Printed for the East
Coast Moorish Men’s Brotherhood Summit, Baltimore, MD, March 29-31, 2013, available at
https://www.academia.edu/3672537/Notes_on_the_MSTA_Schisms_in_Detroit_and_Pittsburgh_1928-29.
9
“Killer Shows Detectives How He Slew,” Detroit Evening Times, November 22, 1932, 2; MSTA FBI file, Report,
3/16/1943, Detroit file 100-6603, 4.

3
 A number of elements of the NOI’s teachings, practices, and symbols further support this
notion that a link with the MSTA was intentionally cultivated:

A) Early NOI Muslims, like MSTA members, wore red fezzes. It should be pointed out,
though, that whereas the MSTA fezzes were plain red, the NOI fezzes—at least in the
Temple People faction—had a crescent and star symbol on the front.
B) The color red was emphasized in both movements, particularly for their flags and
clothing; and early NOI women, like MSTA women, often wore red robes.10 After the
NOI removed overt Moorish elements and standardized its women’s robes to be
white, the group retained the use of red ties for men.
C) Fard gave most of his followers Arabic names, but he also allowed many to have the
surnames Bey and Ali, which had been used in the MSTA.
D) Fard taught that the original homeland of black people was Mecca, and that, despite it
being located within a desert, the city was the “best part of the planet Earth”—a
notion that is consistent with Noble Drew Ali’s teaching that Moors were from
Mecca, and that Mecca was the site of the Garden of Eden.11
E) One of the NOI’s famous teachings thought to be exclusive to the group—that white
people are all ‘devils’—was in fact also used by the John Givens-El MSTA faction
based in Chicago.12

There are, in addition, several other more general NOI doctrines that are similar enough with
those of the MSTA that they lend this theory more credibility. These include, most notably, the
shared notions that African Americans are ‘Asiatic’ Muslims who lost their memory of this
heritage when their people were enslaved, and that they would find prosperity in life by returning
to the religion of their ancestors. It is perhaps largely due to these numerous similarities between
the groups’ religious elements that there are multiple rumors—for which there exists no
convincing documentable evidence—that Fard had at one point been a member of the MSTA
and, at least in some versions of the tale, that he had initially gained a following by claiming to
be the reincarnated Noble Drew Ali after the original passed away in July 1929.13
But besides the doctrinal connections and the unsubstantiated rumors about Fard,
additional rumors have reported that the NOI organization itself grew out of the MSTA in some
way. In the early 1940s, for example, members of the Givens-El Moorish faction insisted that the
emergence of the NOI was the result of a “split in the organization.”14 Although this claim might
have been referring to only Givens-El’s Chicago-based group specifically, it is probable that
“organization” here refers to the larger MSTA movement, as other sources made claims that
would suggest the latter interpretation. Jack Conroy, who studied the NOI in the late 1930s and
early 1940s for the WPA, reported that the Nation was a secessionist group from the Detroit
MSTA temple, which almost certainly did not have a Givens-El faction in 1930, the year the

10
See Susan Nance, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2009), 249; “Islam Hearing Delayed; Hunt More Cultists,” Chicago Daily News, October 14,
1942.
11
See Fard’s “Lessons,” part I, question and answer 1 and Noble Drew Ali, Koran Questions for Moorish Children
(n.p.: n.p., n.d.), questions 53 and 54.
12
MSTA FBI file, Report, 9/21/1943, Chicago file 14-39, 29. This subject will be discussed in detail in HCTIUS 2.
13
Elijah Muhammad reportedly denied that Fard had ever met Drew Ali; see Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Any
Place but Here (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 217.
14
MST FBI file, Report, 9/21/1943, Chicago file 14-39, 29.

4
NOI was started.15 Other rumors have also suggested that Elijah Muhammad himself was former
Moor, and there has circulated a copy of what is said to be a Detroit MSTA report from 1928 that
contains the pre-NOI names of Elijah Muhammad and his wife, Clara.16 Nevertheless,
Muhammad throughout his life repeatedly and consistently denied this claim, and several
Moorish-American historians have contested the authenticity of the document due to its
appearance not being consistent with other preserved MSTA documents from that period.17 In
any case, since the Detroit MSTA probably had no more than two thousand members at its peak
in 1929,18 ex-MSTA members almost certainly did not make up the majority of the four to eight
thousand Muslims who had joined the NOI by late 1932. In fact, in the late 1930s a researcher
heard from the Detroit Temple People members that only “a few” ex-MSTA Muslims joined the
original NOI, and they made no mention of Muhammad’s supposed Moorish membership.19
Given all of this, it remains unclear as to exactly what extent ex-MSTA members played a role in
the development of the Nation’s first temple.
Still, it is likely that the NOI’s second temple—which was formally established in
Chicago in August 1933 after a year or two of proselytization efforts—possessed its own
significant Moorish presence.20 The primary evidence of this comes from several 1935
newspaper articles concerning the city’s NOI community, which in late winter that year was
involved in a courtroom riot. Reports from numerous newspapers describe the NOI members as
“Moors,” their religious practices as “Moorish,” and the local group’s beginnings as being an
“offshoot” of Noble Drew Ali’s MSTA.21 Although one might suspect that the labeling of NOI
members as “Moors” was possibly due to confusion on the part of the reporters, the fact that
these references to Moors appeared in news stories written by different authors for several
different newspapers suggests that the information the reports had obtained did legitimately
indicate a strong Moorish element in the local NOI temple—one that seems to have been
stronger than the Moorish influence in the Detroit NOI. Two additional pieces of information in
the newspapers further suggest that the Chicago temple was indeed distinct from the Detroit
community: Muhammad was discussed in a way suggesting that he claimed to be Fard himself,
and initiates in the group reportedly had to take what was described as a “flesh and blood
ritual”—neither of which were practices known in the Detroit community.22 Taking into account
not only this evidence, but also the claims of Conroy and the Givens-El group and the fact that
Chicago was host to both a large Moorish population and a myriad of competing Moorish

15
Jack Conroy, “Memories of Arna Bontemps Friend and Collaborator,” American Libraries 5, no. 11 (1974): 603.
16
A copy of the document can be found in Sheik Way-El, Noble Drew Ali & the Moorish Science Temple of
America: “The Movement that Started it All” ([Washington, DC]: Moorish Science Temple of America, 2011), 153.
17
I was informed of ALI’S MEN’s contestation of this document’s authenticity by Sharif Anael-Bey in 2012.
18
For a discussion, see Bowen, “Notes on the MSTA,” 1n2.
19
Beynon, “Voodoo Cult,” 898.
20
On the early years of the NOI in Chicago, see John X. Lawler, “Sees New Day Rise in Islam,” Muhammad
Speaks, September 27, 1963, 5; Nathaniel 10X, “Muslim Pioneers Remember the Early Years of Islam,”
Muhammad Speaks, March 16, 1973, 4. Karriem Allah, “The Early Days of the Messenger’s Mission: ‘The Glorious
Past,’” Muhammad Speaks, August 10, 1973, 15; Donald Mosby, “Muslim Wages 20-Year Struggle for ‘Justice,’”
Muhammad Speaks, July 5, 1974, 21; Sahib, “Nation of Islam,” 78-81; Fard FBI file, Memorandum, Correlation
Clerk to SAC (100-33683), 7/3/1957, 7.
21
“Cultists Riot in Court; One Death, 41 Hurt,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 6, 1935, 1, 10; “Riot Discloses
‘Moorish’ Cult’s Growth in U.S.,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 7, 1935, 13; “Cult Members Run Amuck during
Court Trial,” Atlanta Daily World, March 7, 1935, 1, 2; “Cult Riots in Court,” New Journal and Guide, March 9,
1935, 1, 10; “Moors Battle in Court; 40 Hurt,” Chicago Defender (Ntl. ed.), March 9, 1935, 1, 2.
22
“Riot Discloses”; “Cultists Riot in Court.”

5
factions, it is not unreasonable to think that, at least in that city, ex-MSTA members composed a
significant proportion of Muhammad’s followers.
There is little available information concerning the connections between the NOI and the
MSTA between 1936 and 1941. Information collected by previous researchers has suggested that
the primary contact between the two groups at this time was through Muhammad visiting various
MSTA communities. Having settled in Washington, DC by 1936, Muhammad apparently
traveled primarily to East Coast Moorish temples, where he seems to have been inspired by those
communities’ efforts at building up businesses and farms.23 Interestingly, Benjamin X Mitchell,
the NOI Muslim who was hosting Muhammad in Washington during this period, once stated that
Muhammad had actually visited not just other Moors, but Noble Drew Ali specifically.24
Although it is possible that, since the person commonly recognized simply as ‘Noble Drew Ali’
had died in 1929, Mitchell was referring to one of the individuals who claimed to be Noble Drew
Ali Reincarnated, Mitchell’s statement does not clarify this, so it therefore may be evidence that
Muhammad had indeed encountered the Moorish prophet prior to his embracing Fard’s
teachings. In any event, it seems that in the years leading up to 1942 Muhammad was attempting
to study and incorporate even more elements of the MSTA. It may have been partly for this
reason, then, that the Nation was able to experience some new growth after reaching its nadir
around 1938.

III. Analysis of the Moorish References in the Herald-American Exposé

With the majority of the known pre-1942 MSTA-NOI links identified,25 we can now turn to the
Moorish-connected claims made in the Herald-American’s exposé of the Takahashi-influenced
groups in 1942. The following list arranges the claims in a semi-chronological order, wherein
claims about the 1930s are for the most part, but not always, listed before claims about 1942
activities. The exceptions to the rule occur in cases where there are clear parallels between the
1930s and 1942 activities; in those instances, the claims are placed one after the other.

1) During the 1930s, Pearl Sherrod—the African American woman whom scholars
previously knew as Takahashi’s wife and the creator of a break-off faction of the NOI-
populated, Takahashi-led, Detroit-based group called the Development of Our Own—
identified herself as a Moor and helped Takahashi “bore” himself “into numerous
‘Moorish’ groups.”26

23
Clegg, Original Man, 80; Clifton E. Marsh, “The World Community of Islam in the West: From Black Muslims
to Muslims (1931-1977)” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1971), 92-93; Fard FBI file, Report, 9/30/1942, Chicago
file 100-9129, 12.
24
Marsh, “World Community,” 92-93.
25
I have not documented all of the reported claims of MSTA links. One interesting claim that deserves more
research is Karl Evanzz’s assertion in his book Messenger that William Gravitt—a well-respected Newark MSTA
official and the father of the notorious NOI member Captain Joseph (Yusuf Shah)—had been in the early Detroit
NOI and that he had known Muhammad from the MSTA in the 1920s. Evanzz has informed me that he learned of
this in Muhammad’s FBI file, but he unfortunately neither cites nor recalls which exact report contained this
information. Upon learning this, I attempted to have an archivist at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center, which houses Evanzz’s papers, look for the specific report, but that person was unable to find it. I
hope that future researchers will attempt to locate it in Muhammad’s full FBI file.
26
“How Japan’s Net.”

6
 2) As Takahashi’s influence spread, “meeting halls sprang up in a dozen states. These
displayed the red and green Moorish flag with its five-pointed star of Islam. Many bore
signs stating ‘Down with the Paleface!’”27
3) In 1942, members of the Chicago NOI (then known as the Allah Temple of Islam)
“claimed to be Moors, and the red and yellow Moorish flag was displayed at all
meetings.”28 This “flag of Islam” is “of solid red with a star and a crescent of bright
yellow. In the upper left hand corner is an F for freedom; in the upper right corner is a J
for justice, and in the lower right corner is an E for equality. On the bottom in yellow, as
are all the other letters, is ISLAM.”29
4) During the 1930s, members of Takahashi’s groups “began reading a strange, especially-
written ‘Koran’ that extolled the divine mission of Japan.”30
5) In the Chicago NOI temple in 1942, “members were taught from a strange, specially-
written ‘Koran,’ extolling the divine mission of Japan.”31 Excerpts from this “Koran”
included the following quotes:

Excerpt 1:
Come all ye Asiatics of America and hear the truth about your nationality and
birthrights, because you are not Negroes, but Asiatics. Learn the ancient and
divine Islamic creed of your forefathers.

Excerpt 2:
Chapter XLV.
The Divine Origin of the Asiatic Nations
1. The fallen sons and daughters of the Asiatic Nation of North America need to
learn to love instead of hate: and to know of his higher self and lower self. This is
the uniting of the Holy Koran of Mecca for teaching and instructing all Moorish
Americans, etc.
2. The key of civilization was and is in the hands of the Asiatic nations. The
Moorish who were the ancient Moabites, and the founders of the Holy City of
Mecca.

Excerpt 3:
57. Who were Adam and Eve? They are the mothers and fathers of the human
family—Asiatics and Moslems.
60. Who is guarding the Holy City of MECCA to keep the unbelievers away?
Angels.
61. What is the modern name for those Angels? Asiatics.
63. Are we Moorish-Americans any relation to those Angles? Yes, we all have the
same father and mother.32

27
“How Japan’s Net.”
28
“U.S. Seizes 84.”
29
“How the American.”
30
“How Japan’s Net.”
31
“U.S. Seizes 84.”
32
Parks, “Bare Human Sacrifices”; Parks, “Blanket U.S.”; “Enemy Plotters’.”

7
 6) In 1942, Elijah Muhammad—also known in Chicago as “W.F. Muck Muhd,” “Saviour
Muck Muhd,” or, simply, “Muck Muck”—explicitly told his followers that African
Americans and the dark-skinned people of Central and South America and the Caribbean
were actually “Moorish-Americans”—that is, “descendants of the Moors.”33
7) Muhammad said the following quote in 1942: “If you are called [to report for military
service], object to going to camp. Tell them you are of the Moorish religion.”34
8) Women at the Chicago temple wore “flowing red satin gowns with veils of the same
color and material.”35
9) “Some of the [NOI] initiation ceremonies included weird blood rituals, where wrists were
slashed and the oaths given, while blood flowed.”36 These “strange blood rites” were also
described in the following way: “Wrists of inductees were first slashed with razor-sharp
blades. Arms were then raised. As the blood ran down their wrists, and the fingers were
extended to symbolize the mystical ‘7’ of Islam, the temple’s pledge was administered.
One investigator’s report said:

This pledge was prepared by Maj. Takahashi. The initiate swore under Allah to
obey without reservation the orders of the Japanese leaders and those holding high
offices in the temple under Takahashi. […] In this pledge the initiate recognized
the supremacy of the Asiatic race, which was understood by everybody to mean
the Japanese, and to do everything within his power to eliminate the white race.
This was understood by all members to mean physical extermination of the white
race.”37

There are several comments that can be made regarding these claims, but what stands out
as the three most significant sets of assertions are 5, 6, and 7, wherein the Chicago NOI’s
“Koran” is excerpted and Elijah Muhammad is supposedly being quoted verbatim. The excerpts,
first of all, unquestionably come from Noble Drew Ali’s Holy Koran of the Moorish Science
Temple and his Koran Questions for Moorish Children, which had been published in one form or
another as early as 1927 and 1928, respectively. Given that in the Herald-American reports there
is no mention of Noble Drew Ali or any explicit reference to the MSTA, both of which are
names that appear on the cover of nearly all official MSTA versions of these documents, it is
extremely likely that the versions used by the Chicago NOI did not contain either name. A
related clue in the exposé is that Fard’s “Lessons”—what scholars and most NOI members have
traditionally identified with the central teachings of the NOI—are never once mentioned. In fact,
Fard himself is not even noted, and Muhammad seems to have partially taken on Fard’s identity
by using the name ‘W.F. Muck Muhd’—‘W.F.’ being W.D. Fard’s own first and last initials, and
(given that ‘Muck Muhd’ was almost certainly a rendering of the dialectical pronunciation of
‘Muhammad’) ‘W.F. Muhammad’ was a name Fard himself had supposedly used at one point.
This all suggests that the Chicago NOI had reappropriated Drew Ali’s teachings as its own holy
doctrine, and in the process wiped out both Drew Ali’s key role in preparing these texts and

33
“U.S. Seizes 84”; Parks, “Blanket U.S.”; “How the American.”
34
“How the American.”
35
“How the American.”
36
“U.S. Seizes 84.”
37
Parks, “Bare Human Sacrifices.”

8
Fard’s important role in organizing and teaching the Detroit NOI. Since Muhammad himself was
apparently claiming to be the ‘Saviour’ and was explicitly identifying his followers as ‘Moorish’
while also using Fard-inspired elements such as the NOI flag and refusing military service, he
seems to have been greatly responsible for the perpetuation of this particular brand of mixed
Moorish-NOI identity.
Claim 9 is also interesting for multiple reasons, starting with the fact that it is a
description of a gruesome practice that has—except for in a brief comment in a single newspaper
article from several years earlier—never been identified as being an element of either the NOI or
the MSTA. Fascinatingly, though, a similar practice was known to have been used by members
of a different African American organization in Chicago in the early 1920s: the black nationalist
and communist African Blood Brotherhood. Founded by Caribbean émigré Cyril Briggs in New
York in 1919, the ABB was modeled on secret societies and had incorporated a blood-letting
ritual for induction, which, according to its members, connected the group with “the blood
brotherhood ceremony performed by many tribes in Black Africa.”38 Although it is true that the
ABB had all but died by 1925 and that in what might be the only extant description of the
ritual—that which was given by Harry Haywood, who had joined the Chicago ABB branch in
the early 1920s—the ABB practice was described as involving blood being let by the pricking of
fingers with a needle, not by the cutting of wrists,39 we cannot outright dismiss an ABB
influence. The primary reason for this is that we know that many former members of the ABB
joined different groups, especially other communist organizations, after the Brotherhood
dissolved, and some early NOI members have attested to communists trying to take over the
Muslim movement as early as 1932.40 Therefore, it is possible that ex-members of the ABB had
in fact left their mark on the NOI. A communist influence might also explain why in claim 3 the
Nation’s “Moorish” flag’s colors were said to be red and yellow, not red and white as they
appeared from the 1950s on. With its yellow crescent and star, the Chicago temple’s flag was
highly suggestive of the flag of the Soviet Union, which was at that time regarded as the flag of
the global communist movement.
The Herald-American’s description of the blood ritual also suggests a Moorish influence.
The rite’s requirement of having initiates make the sign of seven with their fingers recalls an
MSTA practice that was recorded in the late 1920s. At that time, Moors made this sign by having
the left hand extend all four fingers and the thumb and the right hand extend only the index and
middle finger (similar to the ‘peace sign’), and this was reportedly used as the “mystic sign” of
the MSTA.41 In addition, the Arabic numeral ‘7’ adorned the cover of the HKMSTA and the
number is mentioned several times in the book—a fact that indicates the number was highly
important for the organization. The NOI, meanwhile, seems to have had a subtle fascination with
seven as well. In NOI teachings, the number was said to represent African Americans, whereas
whites were represented by the number six. A late 1940s notebook belonging to a member of the
NOI’s temple No. 7 in New York indicates, furthermore, that its members were taught that

38
Quoted in Robert A. Hill, “Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, The Crusader Magazine, and the African Blood
Brotherhood, 1918–1922,” introduction to The Crusader: September 1918-August 1919, vol. 1, ed. Robert A. Hill
(New York: Garland, 1987), xxix. For more on the ABB, see Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical
Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
39
Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press,
1978), 122.
40
Beynon, “Voodoo Cult,” 904.
41
“Mystic Cult Sign Given,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 28, 1929, 20.

9
“History says that there will be some wise man coming out Temple No. 7.”42 Malcolm X
himself—whom many Muslims surely believed was the very wise man that had been
prophesized—would later say that seven was his favorite number.43 Although there are probably
multiple reasons for the Nation’s emphasis on this particular number,44 given the similarity
between the hand signs reportedly used by members of both the NOI and MSTA, it is very likely
the latter had at least influenced the former in regards to this set of teachings.
Despite all of these connections, though, one might still suspect that claims of “blood
rites” was pure sensationalism used to make the NOI seem more savage than it was. Yet, as
noted above, a very similar claim was made about the Chicago NOI temple back in 1935, and
this was accompanied by another rare clue that was also suggested in 1942: that Muhammad was
merging his identity with that of Fard’s. Indeed, the 1942 evidence of a strong Moorish presence
in the Chicago NOI is highly consistent with the similar claims from 1935, which not only, on
the one hand, lends the 1942 claims greater credibility and weakens the argument that the
Chicago newspaper reporters sloppily confused the MSTA and NOI, but also, on the other,
suggests that this blended Moorish-NOI identity had largely defined the Chicago NOI temple
practically since its inception.
The failure of this strong Moorish presence to be reported on in widely accessible FBI
documents, non-Herald-American newspapers, the extant WPA writings, and modern
scholarship on the Nation is likely due to a few different factors. First is that few people have
had access to the whole FBI file from the period. The 1940s-era FBI documents regarding the
NOI that are available online are but a small portion of the whole file; only those individuals
who obtain the much longer version housed at the National Archives can thoroughly examine the
majority of the file, and even then it is not at all certain that every single report made by the FBI
is included in the National Archives collection. Second, since most newspapers reporting about
the 1942 investigation into the NOI did not give near the coverage that the Herald-American did,
it is likely that they, even if they had used the Herald-American as a source, would have
excluded the references to Moorish elements, since these were not the primary topics of interest
to the papers’ general readership and, moreover, those newspapers could not claim them as
exclusive discoveries. At the same time, given that most previous scholars studying the Chicago
NOI were more likely to focus their energies on obtaining relevant newspaper articles from the
city’s top white and black newspapers—the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Defender,
respectively—there was little chance they would have put in the extra effort to go through the
un-indexed issues of second- and third-tier papers like the Herald-American. Of course,
researchers did still look into newspaper archives concerning the NOI temples in other cities, but
even in places where the NOI case was followed somewhat closely by the local press, such as in
Washington, DC, the Moorish presence was not as significant in those temples. As we have seen,
by the late 1930s, Muhammad’s followers in Detroit were primarily made up of individuals who
had not been in the MSTA, and it is very unlikely that many early Washington NOI Muslims had
been Moors, since there is no known pre-1940 MSTA presence in that location.
Perhaps a more difficult issue to explain is the fact that the WPA writers who visited the
Chicago temple numerous times between 1938 and 1941 never mentioned these Moorish
elements in their official extant reports, which served as the basis for the 1945 book They Seek a
City and its revised and reissued 1966 version entitled Any Place but Here, both of which

42
Elijah Muhammad FBI file, Report, 4/12/1951, Baltimore file 25-12085, 4, notebook page 14.
43
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 286.
44
These will be discussed in detail in HCTIUS 2.

10
became important resources for scholars studying the group.45 However, the majority of the
available WPA material comes from two writers, Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, and their
report seems to rely more heavily on a previous study of the Detroit community than it does on
their Chicago findings,46 and Conroy later admitted that not all of their Chicago findings were
included in their publications.47 In addition, the research of another writer on the project,
Katherine Dunham, who was the person who was responsible for starting the WPA’s
investigating into the Muslim groups, was confiscated by the FBI during its 1942 investigation of
the NOI.48 Dunham possessed additional materials on the Chicago MSTA as well, and, according
to the famed African American scholar St. Clair Drake, in the late 1930s Dunham, with the help
of “a Japanese graduate student,” published an article on the organization "in one of the
academic journals"; so far this purported article has not been identified.49 It is worth mentioning,
too, that Conroy himself had reported the rumor that the NOI had emerged out of the MSTA, but
this appeared not in his popular books but in a passing comment in a 1974 piece about
Bontemps, immediately before his mentioning that not all of his research was released.50 The
available WPA materials, then, should be considered incomplete and therefore almost certainly
do not completely and accurately reflect all of the dimensions of the NOI during that period,
particularly those dimensions having to do with its links with the MSTA. With these and the
other above issues in mind, it is easy to see how this topic of a strong Moorish presence in the
early Chicago NOI could have been missed by many later researchers.

IV. Conclusion

By 1951, most of the obvious Moorish elements in the Chicago NOI had been eliminated and
replaced by what might be called a more purely ‘Fardian’ set of doctrines and practices. It is
almost certain that this transformation was primarily the result of the federal government-led
conviction and incarceration of a large proportion of the Nation’s male membership starting in
1942. During the FBI’s investigation into the NOI, the agency discovered that many followers of
Muhammad were refusing to register for the draft and it was believed that Muhammad’s own
preaching against whites verged on sedition. As a result perhaps over a hundred members of the
group, including virtually all of its male leadership, served time in federal prisons, in some cases
up to five years. It was this experience—which confirmed for the Muslims that an Armageddon
was near—that inspired Muhammad to reform his movement to both give it a broader appeal and
prepare its followers for the post-apocalyptic world in which they expected to live. To this end,
one of Muhammad’s reforms was removing overt signs of Moorish influence. He ended the
practice of men wearing fezzes (except for himself) and women wearing red or green robes—

45
The available official WPA material has been published in Brian Dolinar, ed., The Negro in Illinois: The WPA
Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). The books citations are as follows: Arna Bontemps and Jack
Conroy, They Seek a City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945) and idem., Any Place but Here (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1966).
46
The previous study was Beynon’s 1938 article.
47
Conroy, “Memories of Arna,” 603.
48
Joyce Aschenbrenner, Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 112;
Conroy, “Memories of Arna,” 602.
49
St. Clair Drake, “Honoring Katherine Dunham, 26 May 1976,” in Kaiso!: Writings by and about Katherine
Dunham, eds. Vèvè A. Clark and Sarah East Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 575.
50
Conroy, “Memories of Arna,” 603.

11
they would now mostly use all-white robes that were highly reminiscent of the robes worn in the
UNIA’s Black Star Nurses auxiliary.51 If the “blood rites” had indeed been practiced in the
organization, they were eliminated, as were any teachings based directly on Noble Drew Ali’s
texts. Some accounts of various temples during the early 1950s—particularly New York’s—
suggest that a few of the older Moorish-leaning Muslims were slow to abandon the old doctrines,
but when new ministers were sent out to the temples they stopped at least the open discussion of
the mixed Moorish-NOI concepts. Moors were still being attracted to the NOI, possibly partly
due to its new emphasis on MSTA-like programs encouraging the creation of Muslim-owned
businesses and farms, and in the late 1950s ex-MSTA members could be found in several
temples across the country, but they were not being taught the “Koran.”52 These reforms seem to
have greatly helped the NOI’s expansion, as it was during this era that the Nation began to see its
first major wave of conversions and temple growth since the early 1930s.
This all, then, begs the following question: If the Nation’s major success came only after
eliminating most of its overt Moorish references, what is the significance of the discovery of
prominent Moorish elements in the pre-1942 NOI?
Without more data concerning the history of the Nation both before and after 1942, any
answer to this question should be at most tentative and admit that it is based upon informed
speculation, not absolute knowledge. Such an answer should also readily admit that although we
can now say with confidence that at least the pre-1942 Chicago temple was probably strongly
Moorish-oriented, and that, more than at any other temple, its members saw the NOI as the true
continuation of Noble Drew Ali’s teachings, we cannot be absolutely certain about these issues.53
Still, even after taking this precaution into account, it can be said that the existing evidence
suggests that the pre-1942 NOI, at least in Chicago, was indeed strongly Moorish-leaning, and
that, even if it did not develop as a schism in the local MSTA, it probably appealed to many who
had been exposed to that group. Furthermore, because the Chicago temple effectively became the
NOI headquarters upon Muhammad’s departure from the Midwest in late 1935/early 1936, we
can say that between 1935 and 1942 the central NOI community was significantly assisted in its
slow process of regeneration by its employing a heavy Moorish emphasis, which surely had a
relatively broad appeal in that city at that time. Moorish elements, furthermore, would never be
completely wiped out of the group, and things like the identification of African Americans as
Muslim ‘Asiatics,’ the emphasis on the number seven, the preference for the color red for its flag
and for certain pieces of clothing, and even the NOI’s post-World War II stress on business and
farm building became some of the core components of the NOI’s identity; Muhammad himself
would sometimes even publicly praise Noble Drew Ali for his accomplishments. Therefore, had
it not been for Noble Drew Ali, the HKMSTA, and the MSTA itself, the NOI—if it could have
even been created at all—more than likely would not have been revived in the late 1930s and
1940s to go on to become a true mass movement. Without the MSTA, then, the larger world
most likely would have had little-to-no knowledge of either the NOI itself or the millions of
people the organization and its leaders influenced over the last eighty-six years.

51
Clegg, Original Man, 81.
52
Sahib, “Nation of Islam,” 104-06; Lincoln, Black Muslims, 23.
53
It must be admitted that there is the possibility that the NOI Muslims were aware that undercover agents had
infiltrated their group and that the emphasis on ‘Moorish’ elements was intended to throw the agents off the
investigative course. However, I find this to be an unconvincing scenario, as it would have required an
extraordinarily elaborate and well-coordinated plan that involved using edited and newly printed versions of the
HKMSTA and the secret agreement of virtually all of the members. This possibility is also weakened by all of the
other earlier evidence about Moorish elements in the NOI.

12