The controversy led to the jailing of several University of Islam board members and Elijah Muhammad in 1934 and to violent confrontations with police. Children of its members attended classes at the newly created Muhammad University of Islam, but this soon led to challenges by boards of education in Detroit and Chicago, which considered the children truants from the public school system. In 1934, the Nation of Islam published its first newspaper, Final Call to Islam, to educate and build membership. After the disappearance, Elijah Muhammad told followers that Allah had come as Wallace Fard, in the flesh, to share his teachings that are a salvation for his followers. Elijah Muhammad succeeded him in Detroit and was named "Minister of Islam". Elijah Muhammad and Wallace Fard continued to communicate until 1934, when Wallace Fard disappeared. His younger brother Kalot Muhammad became the leader of the movement's self-defense arm, the Fruit of Islam.įard turned over leadership of the growing Detroit group to Elijah Muhammad, and the Allah Temple of Islam changed its name to the Nation of Islam. He assumed leadership of the Nation's Temple No. Soon afterward, Poole was given a Muslim surname, first "Karriem", and later, at Fard's behest, "Muhammad". Poole soon became an ardent follower of Fard and joined his movement, as did his wife and several brothers. Poole, having strong consciousness of both race and class issues as a result of his struggles in the South, quickly fell in step with Fard's ideology. Fard stated that African Americans could regain their freedoms through self-independence and cultivation of their own culture and civilization. Fard taught that blacks, as original Asiatics, had a rich cultural history which was stolen from them in their enslavement.
Afterward, Poole said he approached Fard and asked if he was the "Mahdi" (redeemer), Fard responded that he was, but that his time had not yet come. In August 1931, at the urging of his wife, Elijah Poole attended a speech on Islam and black empowerment by Wallace Fard Muhammad (Wallace D. While he was in Detroit, Poole began taking part in various black nationalist movements within the city. During their years in Detroit, Elijah and Clara had eight children, six boys and two girls. Through the 1920s and 1930s, he struggled to find and keep work as the economy suffered during the post World War I and Great Depression eras.
Moving his own family, parents and siblings, Elijah and the Pooles settled in the industrial north of Hamtramck, Michigan. He said, "I seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years".
Elijah later recounted that before the age of 20, he had witnessed the lynchings of three black men by white people. In 1923, the Poole family was among hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the oppressive and economically troubled South in search of safety and employment. When he was sixteen years old, he left home and began working in factories and at other businesses.Įlijah married Clara Evans (1899–1972) on March 7, 1917. To support the family, he worked with his parents as a sharecropper.
(1868–1942), a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, and Mariah Hall (1873–1958), a homemaker and sharecropper.Įlijah's education ended at the fourth grade, after which he went to work in sawmills and brickyards. Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Robert Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, the seventh of thirteen children of William Poole Sr.
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