Separation.

In the early part of the decade the news media paid increasing attention to what they called the Black Muslims, members of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, headed by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad insisted that early in the century he had come into contact with a mysterious W. D. Fard, who was later identified as Allah himself. When Fard disappeared in 1933, Muhammad took control of his organization and its Detroit mosque. Muhammad's ideas rested on a foundation of black separatism with trappings of Islam. Blacks were the original people. Whites were devils who became the oppressors of blacks. Islam was the true religion and the natural religion of blacks. They should leave the slave religion of Christianity and separate themselves from the larger white culture.

Malcolm X.

Muhammad served a brief prison sentence for encouraging his followers to refuse the draft in...