Who is w d fard

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Open Access for Librarians. Open Access for Academic Societies. About us. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. This chapter examines the life and teachings of W. The Nation founder is shown to have probably drawn from a wide range of Christian millennialist and esoteric sources.

Reference Works. Fard: Unveiling the Identity of the Founder of the Nation of Islam" will prove to be of intense interest to students of the Nation of Islam and is an unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library 20th Century American Biography collections in general, and National of Islam supplemental studies lists in particular.

Fard as possible, but also to leave us the opportunity to create an image of the man ourselves, and thus take an active part in this research. Such an approach vests this book with a special importance. XIII: 2, Designed and Built by Prime Creative.

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X Contact Us Please fill in the short form below for any enquiries. By entering your information you agree to us retaining your details to send you information on our services. We will not share your details with third parties. You can request your details to be removed at any time. Here he lists his birthplace as the Sudan and both of his parents, now called Henicaba? Lehman [or sometimes Lucius C. However, there are in fact only a few pieces of information that actually conflict, and some of these, particularly dates, can easily be explained away as errors in memory or as attempts to simplify a complex background.

The Rise of Islamic Black Nationalism. The year marks the birth of modern African-American Islam. During the era of slavery, Muslims accounted for — at most — only twenty percent of all enslaved Africans in the U.

By , there were almost no traces of Islam left in the African-American community. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, only a few black Americans were known to be Muslim, the majority of which were poor African immigrants who had come to the U. In addition, we know of at least three black individuals who were probably promoting Islam to African Americans — the Sudanese Satti Majid, the self-proclaimed Sudanese-Egyptian Abdul Hamid Suleiman, and the North Carolina-born Noble Drew Ali who most likely had been a student of Suleiman — though we still lack non-oral tradition evidence for their pre Islamic activities with African Americans, and, given the lack of historical record, it is probable that their leadership produced few followers at the time.

Louis, and converted around before his departure in the fall of [li] — the year Suleiman made headlines leading a similar group in Newark. Although none of these movements shared the same Islamic doctrines, what appears to have united all of them and contributed to their success is an interest in and respect for the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association UNIA.

A highly charismatic speaker and effective organizer, Garvey, who after establishing his UNIA in New York in , by had made the UNIA the largest and perhaps the most influential mass movement in the history of African Americans. His rapid and impressive success was primarily due to his ability to, as E. In America, furthermore, whites would never allow blacks to have equality.

It was an inspiring and attractive message for African Americans, who were only now beginning to emigrate out of the Jim Crow South. It was, in fact, an attractive message to black people throughout the world. Indeed, worldwide, the UNIA gained probably over 80, official members and , non-registered believers, and its newspaper, the Negro World, had a circulation of at least 50, What is notable about the references to Islam in the Negro World, however, is that only a very small number actually endorsed the uniting of Islam to black nationalism — for the most part Islam was simply regarded as the religion of many Africans and other non-white people who were struggling against European colonialism, and it therefore was to be respected in the spirit of black and anticolonial unity.

Nevertheless, there were still some instances in which Islam and black nationalism were clearly connected. In the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, life for a black American in California was significantly better than it was in the South or even in most places in the North.

African Americans were sometimes permitted to buy property in white areas; there was a small but growing black business and professional class; and though white racism of course existed, racist violence was minimal and interracial interactions were not infrequent.

African Americans in California were now more segregated and subject to violence than ever before. At the time, San Quentin did not have a particularly large black population. What led Lucius to begin proclaiming himself to be a mullah and later, imam around is still unknown, but doing so was perfectly consistent with his many claims of high birth and education as well as his attempts to use these claims to his advantage in difficult situations.

The fact that in any one year in the s and s there were only around a half-a-dozen or so Muslims in San Quentin [lxix] suggests that if Lucius was using the titles mullah and imam as a way of gaining respect from and perhaps control over these individuals, there is little chance one of them could have known if Lucius was faking his religious knowledge. Lucius may have indeed been raised as a Muslim, but there is, outside of his own assertions, almost no evidence to support his claim of religious training or even adherence prior to coming to San Quentin.

In the end, though, whatever his reasons for using the titles, Lucius continued to do so for the rest of his time in San Quentin. By early , Lucius added a new element to his identity: that of a black nationalist. It was an eloquent and powerful call to black nationalism that does not seem to have been entirely born out of an opportunistic desire to gain influence in the small black community in San Quentin. The courts — all the judges, lawyers, and jury members he faced — were all white. Even the supposed assault and robbery he suffered in , though it was at the hands of African Americans, was indirectly the result of white racism — after going from restaurant to restaurant, looking for a place that would allow blacks to eat inside, he was finally only allowed into a black establishment, which happened to be the place his assailants found him.

While we do not currently have information about the impact of Garvey on other San Quentin inmates in , there is evidence that at least as early as Garveyism was on the rise in the prison. The guards accepted their position and the group remained in the prison yard debating race conditions and their remedies. Interestingly, San Quentin was not the sole penitentiary converting to Garveyism during that period.

There is therefore strong circumstantial evidence that not just Garveyism, but Islam-tinged black nationalism, was circulating in the San Quentin black prison population upon the arrival of the man going as Wallace D.

Ford in As for Lucius, all that can be documented about his life after San Quentin is that he returned to work as a brick maker and retired by On February 11, , he died from severe arteriosclerosis. The Call to Islam. We currently know almost nothing about how Lucius put his Islamic identity to use during his years living in Los Angeles, and we know only a little about how he used it in San Quentin.

What we do know, however, is that nearly 2, miles west of the nearest African-American Islamic community of any significant size the Ahmadi community in St.

Louis in the s , a black man was presenting himself as a learned and dignified Muslim in as early as , and by the s he was overtly supporting black nationalism. He, almost certainly, did all this without any knowledge of the Islamic movements in the eastern U. There seems to have been, at least for some who had experienced being black in America in the early twentieth century, an almost natural connection between Islam and black nationalism.