Read Online Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight by Max Wallace, Howard Bingham - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Max Wallace, Howard Bingham
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civilization was destined to be destroyed.
The reign of the white oppressors would come to an end when a one-and-a-half-mile-wide spaceship—the Mother of Planes—appeared in the sky eight days before Allah’s chosen day of retribution, which was alternately known as the Judgment, Armageddon, the fall of America, and the second Hell. The ship would drop pamphlets written in Arabic telling righteous people where to go to survive. Then 1,500 planes would emerge from the spaceship and drop deadly explosives, destroying the white race and restoring power to the original descendants of Shabazz.
Taking up Fard’s mantle, Elijah Muhammad traveled through America’s Northern ghettos preaching his doctrine, which demanded complete separation of the races. Since the white race was a race of devils, blacks should avoid them at all costs or they would be tricked by the whites’ evil ways. “Integration means self-destruction,” he proclaimed. “The black people throughout the earth are seeking independence for their own, not integration into white society…. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own—either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that our former slave-masters are obligated to provide such land.”
The fledgling movement had to compete for the allegiance of disenchanted young blacks with a number of other nationalist organizations. The most popular of these was the Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1916. The UNIA was a back-to-Africa movement that stressed respect for blackness and economic help while decrying “the tragedy of white injustice.” Muhammad took many of the most popular doctrines of the Garveyites and incorporated them into his own Nation of Islam.
By the beginning of World War II, the Nation could boast little success in recruiting converts and counted only a few hundred followers throughout the country. But the rhetoric being preached by Muhammad had already attracted the attention of law enforcement officials, who had infiltrated the group as early as 1941, the year Elijah Muhammad prophesied that a great conflict would erupt involving the United States. The Messenger predicted that the Japanese would cross the Pacific Ocean in the Mother Plane and “the white devils will be destroyed by dark mankind.” After Pearl Harbor, he repeatedly vowed he would not fight the white man’s war and repeatedly noted the segregation and discrimination rampant in the U.S. Armed Forces at the time. The army’s policies gave him plenty of ammunition for his attacks. Barracks, medical centers, and training centers were all designated by race. The American Red Cross even separated blood plasma designated for the troops by skin color. His message seemed to resonate in the ghettoes where many young blacks were unimpressed by government propaganda about the fight for freedom overseas. The movement’s ranks were beginning to grow.
Alarmed by Muhammad’s increasingly belligerent tone and concerned about the effect his criticism might have on black enlistment, the government decided to act. On May 8, 1942, the FBI burst into Muhammad’s Chicago home and arrested him for failing to register for the draft. The government agents were frank about their motives, the Messenger later recalled. “President Roosevelt doesn’t want you out there in public with that kind of teaching while America is prosecuting a war. That’s all we’re putting you in jail for, to keep you out of the public.”
Over the next four months, the government would raid each of the Nation’s temples and arrest thirty-eight more of Muhammad’s followers. On top of the draft evasion count, the Messenger was charged with sedition and subversion. He was convicted with dubious legal evidence to back up the charge and languished in a federal prison cell until August 1946, a
The reign of the white oppressors would come to an end when a one-and-a-half-mile-wide spaceship—the Mother of Planes—appeared in the sky eight days before Allah’s chosen day of retribution, which was alternately known as the Judgment, Armageddon, the fall of America, and the second Hell. The ship would drop pamphlets written in Arabic telling righteous people where to go to survive. Then 1,500 planes would emerge from the spaceship and drop deadly explosives, destroying the white race and restoring power to the original descendants of Shabazz.
Taking up Fard’s mantle, Elijah Muhammad traveled through America’s Northern ghettos preaching his doctrine, which demanded complete separation of the races. Since the white race was a race of devils, blacks should avoid them at all costs or they would be tricked by the whites’ evil ways. “Integration means self-destruction,” he proclaimed. “The black people throughout the earth are seeking independence for their own, not integration into white society…. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own—either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that our former slave-masters are obligated to provide such land.”
The fledgling movement had to compete for the allegiance of disenchanted young blacks with a number of other nationalist organizations. The most popular of these was the Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1916. The UNIA was a back-to-Africa movement that stressed respect for blackness and economic help while decrying “the tragedy of white injustice.” Muhammad took many of the most popular doctrines of the Garveyites and incorporated them into his own Nation of Islam.
By the beginning of World War II, the Nation could boast little success in recruiting converts and counted only a few hundred followers throughout the country. But the rhetoric being preached by Muhammad had already attracted the attention of law enforcement officials, who had infiltrated the group as early as 1941, the year Elijah Muhammad prophesied that a great conflict would erupt involving the United States. The Messenger predicted that the Japanese would cross the Pacific Ocean in the Mother Plane and “the white devils will be destroyed by dark mankind.” After Pearl Harbor, he repeatedly vowed he would not fight the white man’s war and repeatedly noted the segregation and discrimination rampant in the U.S. Armed Forces at the time. The army’s policies gave him plenty of ammunition for his attacks. Barracks, medical centers, and training centers were all designated by race. The American Red Cross even separated blood plasma designated for the troops by skin color. His message seemed to resonate in the ghettoes where many young blacks were unimpressed by government propaganda about the fight for freedom overseas. The movement’s ranks were beginning to grow.
Alarmed by Muhammad’s increasingly belligerent tone and concerned about the effect his criticism might have on black enlistment, the government decided to act. On May 8, 1942, the FBI burst into Muhammad’s Chicago home and arrested him for failing to register for the draft. The government agents were frank about their motives, the Messenger later recalled. “President Roosevelt doesn’t want you out there in public with that kind of teaching while America is prosecuting a war. That’s all we’re putting you in jail for, to keep you out of the public.”
Over the next four months, the government would raid each of the Nation’s temples and arrest thirty-eight more of Muhammad’s followers. On top of the draft evasion count, the Messenger was charged with sedition and subversion. He was convicted with dubious legal evidence to back up the charge and languished in a federal prison cell until August 1946, a
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