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Ali goes to war
Comments: Apologies to the members who asked me to make this thread a while back, sorry it took so long
Warning: Part 3 is pretty disturbing
Part 1: Elijah Muhammad
"You shouldn’t fear the devil when he tells you that you must go and fight in this war. You should refuse to fight. The newspapers are lying when they say the Japanese are losing. We are going to win"- Elijah Muhammad
While subverting Louis’s history the guardians of the Ali myth have also chosen to suppress certain inconvenient facts that have shaped Alis life and career. And none is more is more inconvenient than the disposition of Elijah Muhammad in the month of Alis birth and Louis enlistment, January 1942.
Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah pool, later changed to Elijah Poole, in 1897. Like Louis, he was the seventh child of a struggling but deeply Christian family in the Deep South his father in fact was a preacher like Louis he came to Detroit to seek his fortune arriving in 1923 wife his wife, Clara. Once there, he quickly found a job with a company called the American nut company.
Although the job paid more than twice what he had been making in the south, Muhammad hated it. He devoted his energy instead to Marcus garveys united Negro improvement association, a hugely popular exercise in back to Africa Black Nationalism. Alas soon after Muhammad arrived in Detroit. the feds busted Garvey on a mail fraud charge and Garvey would blame his downfall on the muddle class light coloured negroes. He felt, with some justification that they resented his popularity. In any case, as Garvey's fortunes swooned, so did Muhammad's. He took to the drink and became a burden to his own family.
To help pull himself out of his funk, Muhammad turned to the Moorish Science Temple of America, an organization that the charismatic Noble Drew Ali had founded in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913. Drew Ali described his religion as "Islam" and his followers as Muslims. And laid the groundwork for the Nation of Islam that would follow.
From the beginning, intramural violence would plague this organisation and its spin offs. Drew Ali was indicted for Murder in 1928, and not without good reason. Given his fix, he welcomed the timely arrival of a man who could sustain his mission, the enigmatic David Ford, better known as Wallace Fard. After the police roughly intervened in still another internecine squabble, the enraged Fard swore that he would bring "America to its knees in the very near future." The 1929 stock market crash followed as if by divine inspiration, and Fard took delight in having called it down. Needles to say, this prophecy impressed his followers.
Wallace Fard
A Meeting with God
It certainly impressed Muhammad’s wife Clara. She persuaded her husband to who had started to drinking again upon the demise of Drew Ali to meet with Fard "I know you think I’m white," Fard told him at the meeting "But I’m not. I’m an Asiatic black man. I have come to America to save my long lost uncle."
Fard did look Caucasian and indeed was . Best evidence his hatred of Hinduism being exhibit A pegs him as a native of what is now Pakistan among Fards stops on his way from Karachi to Detroit
Was San Quentin, where he had idled away a few years on a narcotics rap. The "uncle" he had come to save was the African American, and few among them needed saving like Elijah Muhammad. He transferred his loyalties in Fard in a Detroit minute
Much has been made about the rather adventurous creation myths that Fard shared with Muhammad, the tales of a big-headed black scientist named Yakub who had grafted the white race from the black thousands of years ago in a gene-manipulation experiment. But it was not Fard's cosmology that attracted the FBI in the 1930s. It was the company he kept.
As early as 1933, the prescient Fard was predicting a war between the United States and Japan. He was soon elaborating that a hovering "Mother Plane" would launch smaller planes, which would drop poison bombs and eliminate white America. That plane was to have been designed and built in Japan.
In that same year, 1933, to avoid legal complications, Fard changed the name of the organization to the Nation of Islam, the name by which it is still known. He also created the Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary group not unlike the SA of Adolph Hitler, who had assumed power that same year in Germany. By the time too, Fard granted his now loyal acolyte the name Elijah Muhammad and appointed him Supreme Minister.
Fard and Muhammad did more than talk about their "Asiatic bothers" They conspired with them. They got in particularly deep with Japanese agent Satohata Takahashi, who had burrowed into a variety of black nationalist organisations, and his protégé, Ashima Takis, in a 1933 In a 1933 rally transcribed by the FBI, Takis told the his black audience, "You are the most oppressed people on earth. If you join the Japanese and other coloured races, you will be in command of the whites." As Karl Evanzz notes in his courageous book on Elijah Muhammad, The Messenger,” This ideological confluence marked the beginning of the federal governments monitoring of Muslims in America."
After Fard disappeared one step ahead of the law, Muhammad assumed control of the Nation of Islam, claiming that Fard had appointed him as his successor, Throughout the decade, Muhammad peppered nearly every speech with boasts of Japanese superiority.
"The Japanese will slaughter the white man," Muhammad promised repeatedly. To prop up Muhammad’s leadership and encourage a little treason, Takahashi promised each Nation of Islam follower a single family detached house in Hawaii. All they had to do was to support Japan in a war against America. By decades end Fard's war prophecy was looking more and more inspired. The Feds certainly thought so; they listed Muhammad as a threat to national security and arrested Takashi for Immigration violations.
Were he still a drinker Muhammad would have been popping Champagne corks on December the 17, 1941. That was the day, of course, that "Allah's Asiatic Army" bombed Pearl Harbour. In the weeks that followed as Evanzz relates, "Muhammad and his followers revelled in the newspaper accounts of Japan's exploits."
As it happened Congress had extended the draft age to forty-five a year earlier. A generation later, it would lower the passing percentile on intelligent tests from 30 to 15. In each case, neither intentional, the change just barely netted a prominent member of the Nation of Islam. In each case the member refused to register. Muhammad's refusal set the precedent for Ali's. Not knowing Muhammad’s history and not particularly caring, Vietnam-era resisters would see Ali's resistance as moral and principled as their own to be. That is one of the many drawbacks of not knowing history.
To say the least, Elijah Muhammad lacked Ali's resources to fight the draft. On September 20, 1942, federal agents found the Messenger hiding ingloriously under a bed in a Washington DC house. A week later, Ashima Takis pled guilty to forging a money order and turned states evidence against the Nation of Islam. Three weeks later, a grand jury indicted Muhammad for conspiracy to commit sedition.
Among the evidence presented against Muhammad in his subsequent trial was a lecture he had delivered at the Chicago temple in August 1942.
"You shouldn’t fear the devil when he tells you that you must go and fight in this war. You should refuse to fight," he told his followers. "The newspapers are lying when they say the Japanese are losing. We are going to win"
As history records, "we"-the Japanese/Nazi/Nation of Islam axis- did not win the war. Nor did Muhammad win his legal battles. After three years in a federal prison , he was released to what he regarded as a larger prison, the "wilderness of North America," new year and one week later the Second World War came to its terrifying end.
Warning: Part 3 is pretty disturbing
Part 1: Elijah Muhammad
"You shouldn’t fear the devil when he tells you that you must go and fight in this war. You should refuse to fight. The newspapers are lying when they say the Japanese are losing. We are going to win"- Elijah Muhammad
The Prophet
While subverting Louis’s history the guardians of the Ali myth have also chosen to suppress certain inconvenient facts that have shaped Alis life and career. And none is more is more inconvenient than the disposition of Elijah Muhammad in the month of Alis birth and Louis enlistment, January 1942.
Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah pool, later changed to Elijah Poole, in 1897. Like Louis, he was the seventh child of a struggling but deeply Christian family in the Deep South his father in fact was a preacher like Louis he came to Detroit to seek his fortune arriving in 1923 wife his wife, Clara. Once there, he quickly found a job with a company called the American nut company.
Although the job paid more than twice what he had been making in the south, Muhammad hated it. He devoted his energy instead to Marcus garveys united Negro improvement association, a hugely popular exercise in back to Africa Black Nationalism. Alas soon after Muhammad arrived in Detroit. the feds busted Garvey on a mail fraud charge and Garvey would blame his downfall on the muddle class light coloured negroes. He felt, with some justification that they resented his popularity. In any case, as Garvey's fortunes swooned, so did Muhammad's. He took to the drink and became a burden to his own family.
To help pull himself out of his funk, Muhammad turned to the Moorish Science Temple of America, an organization that the charismatic Noble Drew Ali had founded in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913. Drew Ali described his religion as "Islam" and his followers as Muslims. And laid the groundwork for the Nation of Islam that would follow.
From the beginning, intramural violence would plague this organisation and its spin offs. Drew Ali was indicted for Murder in 1928, and not without good reason. Given his fix, he welcomed the timely arrival of a man who could sustain his mission, the enigmatic David Ford, better known as Wallace Fard. After the police roughly intervened in still another internecine squabble, the enraged Fard swore that he would bring "America to its knees in the very near future." The 1929 stock market crash followed as if by divine inspiration, and Fard took delight in having called it down. Needles to say, this prophecy impressed his followers.
Wallace Fard
A Meeting with God
It certainly impressed Muhammad’s wife Clara. She persuaded her husband to who had started to drinking again upon the demise of Drew Ali to meet with Fard "I know you think I’m white," Fard told him at the meeting "But I’m not. I’m an Asiatic black man. I have come to America to save my long lost uncle."
Fard did look Caucasian and indeed was . Best evidence his hatred of Hinduism being exhibit A pegs him as a native of what is now Pakistan among Fards stops on his way from Karachi to Detroit
Was San Quentin, where he had idled away a few years on a narcotics rap. The "uncle" he had come to save was the African American, and few among them needed saving like Elijah Muhammad. He transferred his loyalties in Fard in a Detroit minute
Much has been made about the rather adventurous creation myths that Fard shared with Muhammad, the tales of a big-headed black scientist named Yakub who had grafted the white race from the black thousands of years ago in a gene-manipulation experiment. But it was not Fard's cosmology that attracted the FBI in the 1930s. It was the company he kept.
As early as 1933, the prescient Fard was predicting a war between the United States and Japan. He was soon elaborating that a hovering "Mother Plane" would launch smaller planes, which would drop poison bombs and eliminate white America. That plane was to have been designed and built in Japan.
In that same year, 1933, to avoid legal complications, Fard changed the name of the organization to the Nation of Islam, the name by which it is still known. He also created the Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary group not unlike the SA of Adolph Hitler, who had assumed power that same year in Germany. By the time too, Fard granted his now loyal acolyte the name Elijah Muhammad and appointed him Supreme Minister.
The Japanese
Fard and Muhammad did more than talk about their "Asiatic bothers" They conspired with them. They got in particularly deep with Japanese agent Satohata Takahashi, who had burrowed into a variety of black nationalist organisations, and his protégé, Ashima Takis, in a 1933 In a 1933 rally transcribed by the FBI, Takis told the his black audience, "You are the most oppressed people on earth. If you join the Japanese and other coloured races, you will be in command of the whites." As Karl Evanzz notes in his courageous book on Elijah Muhammad, The Messenger,” This ideological confluence marked the beginning of the federal governments monitoring of Muslims in America."
After Fard disappeared one step ahead of the law, Muhammad assumed control of the Nation of Islam, claiming that Fard had appointed him as his successor, Throughout the decade, Muhammad peppered nearly every speech with boasts of Japanese superiority.
"The Japanese will slaughter the white man," Muhammad promised repeatedly. To prop up Muhammad’s leadership and encourage a little treason, Takahashi promised each Nation of Islam follower a single family detached house in Hawaii. All they had to do was to support Japan in a war against America. By decades end Fard's war prophecy was looking more and more inspired. The Feds certainly thought so; they listed Muhammad as a threat to national security and arrested Takashi for Immigration violations.
Were he still a drinker Muhammad would have been popping Champagne corks on December the 17, 1941. That was the day, of course, that "Allah's Asiatic Army" bombed Pearl Harbour. In the weeks that followed as Evanzz relates, "Muhammad and his followers revelled in the newspaper accounts of Japan's exploits."
As it happened Congress had extended the draft age to forty-five a year earlier. A generation later, it would lower the passing percentile on intelligent tests from 30 to 15. In each case, neither intentional, the change just barely netted a prominent member of the Nation of Islam. In each case the member refused to register. Muhammad's refusal set the precedent for Ali's. Not knowing Muhammad’s history and not particularly caring, Vietnam-era resisters would see Ali's resistance as moral and principled as their own to be. That is one of the many drawbacks of not knowing history.
To say the least, Elijah Muhammad lacked Ali's resources to fight the draft. On September 20, 1942, federal agents found the Messenger hiding ingloriously under a bed in a Washington DC house. A week later, Ashima Takis pled guilty to forging a money order and turned states evidence against the Nation of Islam. Three weeks later, a grand jury indicted Muhammad for conspiracy to commit sedition.
Among the evidence presented against Muhammad in his subsequent trial was a lecture he had delivered at the Chicago temple in August 1942.
"You shouldn’t fear the devil when he tells you that you must go and fight in this war. You should refuse to fight," he told his followers. "The newspapers are lying when they say the Japanese are losing. We are going to win"
As history records, "we"-the Japanese/Nazi/Nation of Islam axis- did not win the war. Nor did Muhammad win his legal battles. After three years in a federal prison , he was released to what he regarded as a larger prison, the "wilderness of North America," new year and one week later the Second World War came to its terrifying end.
End of part 1
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