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By Root 1655 0

of the Nation of Islam. Hundreds of converts were joining every month. Hundreds of letters requesting membership had to be reviewed and processed every week. The administrative burdens multiplied accordingly. Local temple secretaries had to be instructed about new applications and members. New administrative teams—ministers, secretaries, FOI and MGT captains—had to be selected, or in many cases moved from one city to another. Between 1953 and 1955, the Nation of Islam more than quadrupled, from about twelve hundred to nearly six thousand members. From 1956 until 1961, it would expand more than tenfold, to between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand members. Although many continued to be recruited from prisons, unemployment lines, and ghettos, the Nation began to capture a broader audience. Thousands now came from the middle class, or were highly paid skilled workers and trade unionists.

Part of the Nation’s newfound appeal had to do with the black reaction to Southern whites’ “massive resistance” to desegregation beginning in 1955. The growth of White Citizens’ Councils across the South and the slayings of local NAACP and civil rights workers in the late fifties convinced a minority of African Americans that the NOI was right: whites would never grant full equality to blacks. If Jim Crow was inescapable, then the Nation’s strategy of building all-black economic and social institutions in the face of implacable white hostility made sense to many.

Civil rights activity was intensifying across the country, on multiple fronts. The struggle during the bus boycott in 1955-56 unfolding in Montgomery, Alabama, put the movement, and its radiant (and then virtually unknown) young leader, in the headlines. Blacks couldn’t understand why, years after the Supreme Court had outlawed racial segregation on interstate buses, the laws weren’t being enforced. In Montgomery, thousands of working- and middle-class Negroes risked their jobs and personal safety to support a nonviolent protest, led by twenty-six-year-old minister Martin Luther King, Jr.

The goal of King and the majority of civil rights activists was integration—they had had enough of separation, which was so dramatically trapping African Americans in poverty and inequality. Malcolm was wise enough not to criticize the boycott for its integrationist goals when asked to comment on King’s efforts. Instead, he focused his criticisms on the U.S. government, “the seat of every kind of evil. . . . America is the modern Babylon where there is greater crime, persecution and injustice than in every place in the world.” Alluding to the Bandung model of Asian-African solidarity, he stated in another address that the “‘black men’ all over the planet Earth are uniting, and all have one object in mind—the destruction of the ʹdevil.ʹ ʺ

The thousands of recruits Malcolm and others were bringing into the Nation represented hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue, thanks to the group’s strict tithing requirements. All members were expected to donate at minimum one-tenth of their household income to the temple, but many gave significantly more. Under Sharrieff’s supervision, the NOI began purchasing commercial real estate on Chicago’s South Side. Muhammad’s adult children, at Malcolm’s urging, were added to the NOI’s payroll. Elijah Muhammad could not have failed to notice the growing power of his brilliant protégé. New temples required the training and supervision of new ministers, and since Malcolm was personally responsible for establishing the four new temples and for successfully reviving those in Philadelphia and New York, he directly managed or influenced the selection of personnel. No previous minister had ever been granted such authority. It is probably for this reason that, sometime in 1956, temple ministers were ordered by Chicago to audiotape their weekly sermons and mail the tapes to NOI headquarters. Either Elijah or his associates would then monitor the lectures, to ensure no deviation from official dogma. The edict coincided with a new attitude Muhammad displayed