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Do not eat the swine—do not even touch it. Just stop eating the swine flesh and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15 minute biscuits made with baking powder. Put yeast in your bread and let it sour and rise and then bake it. Eat and drink to live not to die.

Pork is haram, or forbidden, to traditional Muslims. Pork, especially the less-noble parts, was also the primary meat fed to enslaved African Americans. Pork in any form was anathema to NOI members, as were collard greens or black-eyed peas seasoned with swine. The refusal of the traditional African American diet of pig and corn was an indictment of its deleterious effects on African American health, but also a backhanded acknowledgment of the cultural resonance that it held for most blacks, albeit one rooted in slavery. Pork had become so emblematic of African American food that the forbidding of it by the Nation of Islam was radical, and the refusal to eat swine immediately differentiated members of the group from many other African Americans as much as the sober dress and bow ties of the men and the hijab-like attire of the women. Forbidding pork made a powerful political statement, but the real culinary hallmark of the Nation was the bean pie—a sweet pie, prepared from the small navy beans that Elijah Muhammad decreed digestible. It was hawked by the dark-suited, bow-tie-wearing followers of the religion along with copies of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, spreading the Nation’s gospel in both an intellectual and a gustatory manner.

Under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership and that of his ministers Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam grew into a formidable force in the 1960s and 1970s, gaining numerous members around the country.

The mid-1960s were a time of turbulence and trouble on the national and international fronts. The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy opened a Pandora’s box. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated and the Watts riots occurred. In 1967, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out all over the country. The country’s racial transformation occurred in an unprecedented clashing of blacks and whites, as blacks increasingly refused to accept what had for centuries been the status quo. A growing awareness of the history of African Americans and the race pride that was the result of the Civil Rights Movement resulted in a quest for more information about the African American experience and of blacks’ links around the world with other communities in struggle.

As a result of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, there were a small but growing number of black students enrolled at predominantly white institutions around the country. Their increasing numbers, which rose 100 percent between 1950 and 1969, led to the call for black studies, and in 1968, San Francisco State College became the first institution of higher learning in the country to establish a black studies department. The institutionalized study of the history of African Americans went hand in hand with the growth of a cultural nationalism movement that celebrated African American culture in all realms and contributed to an increasing awareness of an African world, as a greater number of African Americans began to have an international approach.

This international approach gained increasing importance as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision not only galvanized those in the United States but also served as a rallying cry to others around the world in countries where people of color were living under colonialism and imperialism. The battles won and the methods used in the United States provided a road map to independence for many. Indeed, many of those who became leaders in the independence movements in the Caribbean and on the African continent had been students in the United States. If the 1960 photograph of four young men sitting at a lunch counter sums up the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, a 1957 photograph