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By Root 1838 0

all the Nation’s operations. Within a year, he had carried out an orthodox Islamic revolution within the sect. Farrakhan was stripped of his Harlem ministry and sentenced to serve at a minor mosque in the Chicago suburbs. Yacub’s History, the demonization of whites, the advocacy of strict racial separatism—these were all discarded. In June 1975, the Nation of Islam announced that it would accept white followers, and a few whites actually joined. The organization’s archival heritage—its thousands of publications and newspapers, audiotaped recordings, internal records, and photographs—were largely destroyed, and a new memory, branded by orthodoxy, was imposed. Wallace later changed his name to W. Deen Mohammed, to distinguish himself from his father.

As the group’s new imam, W. Deen Mohammed opened the financial records of the Nation for the first time to its members. Its fish import enterprises alone grossed $22 million in income annually. The Nation employed more than a thousand people and owned over $6 million worth of farmland—yet it also carried a $4.5 million debt, due in part to financial mismanagement. But Imam Mohammed’s most shocking move for diehards was the restoration of Malcolm X. On February 2, 1976, Mohammed announced that Harlem Mosque No. 7 was to be renamed in honor of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and praised Malcolm as “the greatest minister the Nation of Islam ever had, except for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” As the name Nation of Islam was jettisoned in favor of World Community of Al-Islam in the West, Farrakhan had enough, and began to reconstitute the old Nation of Islam around himself. Imam Mohammed’s response, in 1977, was to excommunicate him. Fidelity to Elijah Muhammad’s teachings now meant being expelled from the Islamic faith community.

And even years after the Messenger’s death, embarrassing episodes generated by his sexual infidelities continued to surface. In 1981, for example, three individuals claiming to be Muhammad’s illegitimate children filed a $5 million lawsuit charging that Muhammad’s children, relatives, and two banks had converted millions of dollars of Muhammad’s assets for themselves. The children suing were the son and daughter of June Muhammad—Abdulla Yasin Muhammad (born December 30, 1960) and Ayesha Muhammad (born September 4, 1962), and the daughter of Evelyn Williams, Marie Muhammad (born March 30, 1960).

Larry 4X Prescott at first supported Wallace’s efforts to reform the Nation of Islam. However, when Farrakhan broke with Wallace to reestablish the old NOI, Prescott joined him. Now, as Akbar Muhammad, looking back four decades, he identifies errors of judgment that he believes were made on both sides. After the firebombing of Malcolm’s home, for instance, James 3X Shabazz was among those who had accused Malcolm of burning his own house. “And Malcolm responded, ‘Do you think that I would burn a house down with my babies in there?’ . . . And it made us look like we were really out to lunch.” But Shabazz’s rhetoric had the effect of intensifying anti-Malcolm sentiment among “the brothers in the mosque, the bean soup eaters and the black coffee drinkers, they start to say, ‘Yeah, he went so far as to burn his own house down.’ That’s the way it started going.” Prescott suggested that the MMI was too small to represent “a challenge to the Nation.” What truly motivated Malcolm, he believed, was “wanting to get in the front of the civil rights movement.” His blanket repudiations of the Nation of Islam and the revelations of Elijah Muhammad’s infidelities all advanced Malcolm’s objectives. A last-minute rapprochement between the factions was never going to be possible.

Some of those who had a hand in Malcolm’s murder began disappearing from the scene as early as the 1970s. The body of James 3X Shabazz, fifty-two and the boss of the Newark mosque, was discovered on September 4, 1973, next to his Cadillac, which was parked in his driveway. In a mob-style hit reminiscent of that of Bugsy Siegel, James had been shot just above his left eye, with another bullet wound through the