Clay already knew from experience that merely talking about the Muslims could jeopardize his future. During his senior year of high school, he had written a paper about the Nation for his English class. At night, he and his brother Rudy sometimes listened to Elijah Muhammad’s national radio address. On the streets of Louisville, Cassius noticed black men dressed in dark suits, similar to the men he had seen in Atlanta and Chicago, selling copies of Muhammad Speaks. Yet when he wrote his paper, his teacher was so alarmed that she threatened to fail him, though the principal ultimately overruled her.32
Clay continued his education about the Nation in Miami. His most important teacher was Ishmael Sabakhan, minister of the local temple. Nearly once a week, he visited with his spiritual mentor. At their meetings, he listened more than he talked. Sabakhan taught him the basic tenets of the Nation, an esoteric religious movement fabricated from Black Nationalism, Christianity, Islam, and cosmology. He explained that God was a black man—a real man on earth—and that the devil was a white man, who also inhabited the earth. Blacks and whites must separate because there could be no peace between God and the devil.33
The Muslims’ views about God and the devil, heaven and hell, helped Cassius understand the cruel world his father had described. Clay Sr. had told him how whites had segregated, abused, and tortured his people, and the history lessons Cassius learned from the Muslims offered further proof of the white man’s wicked ways. The devil, they said, had kidnapped, shackled, and enslaved his ancestors. When the slaves arrived from Africa, whites forced them to abandon their native culture. Being black, the whites preached, was a curse; they convinced the slaves to hate everything that was black, including themselves. The devil imposed Christianity onto their slaves, manipulating them into worshiping the white man and the white man’s God—a “God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster.”34
It all made sense to Cassius. Growing up he never understood why everything associated with blackness was considered bad. “When I was a little kid, I always knew something was wrong,” he said. “Everything good was supposed to be white. And I’d ask my mom, why is Santa Claus white? Why is Jesus white?” He continued, “Miss America was white. The good cowboy always rode on a white horse. Angel food cake is white and devil’s food cake is black . . . even the President lived in a white house.”35
Listening to Muhammad’s radio addresses, Cassius heard something that he had never heard before, a message that he would begin repeating over the course of his career: blacks were the strongest, most intelligent people in the world. The black man, Muhammad proclaimed, was the greatest. “The Black people in America have for many years been made to feel that they were something of a Divine Curse,” he preached. “You must not think that about yourself anymore. We the Black Nation of the Earth are the NUMBER ONE owners of it, the best of all human beings. You are the Most Powerful, the Most Beautiful, and the Wisest.”36
THE SON OF A poor sharecropper turned Baptist preacher, Elijah Poole was born in 1897 in south-central Georgia. Raised on his father’s fiery sermons, he became enraptured with scripture, though he struggled to read the Bible after dropping out of school around the fourth grade. Laboring on farms, at a sawmill, and as a bricklayer, he matured into a frustrated young man, disillusioned by meager wages, harsh employers, and the humiliation of Jim Crow. Seeking relief from discrimination and poverty, in 1923 Elijah followed the Great Migration north, settling in Detroit with his wife, Clara, and dreaming of a better life.37
Failing to find work in Detroit’s auto factories, he found himself living on the dole, drinking away his misery. A tiny, light-skinned man with a pinched face and sad, almond-shaped eyes, Elijah found salvation in 1931 when he heard Wallace D. Fard (pronounced FA-rod) deliver a lecture at an old lodging hall. A year earlier, Fard, an ex-convict turned door-to-door silk salesmen, had founded the Nation of Islam. He claimed that he was a Muslim from the Holy City of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and began using a variety of names: Wali Farrad, Professor Ford, Farrad Muhammad, and Wallace Fard Muhammad. He lectured on the history of the black man, biblical prophecy, and an unorthodox doctrine of Islam. Preaching out of basements and rented halls, he emphasized self-help and racial pride. Gradually, with Poole becoming his most devoted apostle, he built a sect with a few thousand members. Fard rewarded Poole by appointing him “supreme minister” and bestowing upon him a new name: “Elijah Muhammad.” But in 1933, Fard vanished amid accusations that he had ordered a human sacrifice. Shortly afterward, Muhammad proclaimed Fard’s deification as Allah incarnate.38