Louis Farrakhan

An influential and often controversial Black religious leader, Louis Farrakhan has since 1978 been the leader of the Nation of Islam, an African American movement that combines elements of Islam with Black nationalism.

Early life

Born Louis Eugene Walcott on May 11, 1933, in the Bronx, New York, he was raised in Boston by his mother, Sarah Mae Manning, an immigrant from St. Kitts and Nevis. His biological father was Jamaican-born Percival Clark. However, he was named after a man with whom his mother was involved after a separation from Clark.

Deeply religious as a boy, the young Louis Walcott became active in the St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church in his Roxbury neighborhood, where he was influenced by the resident priest, Black liberation writer Nathan Wright. He graduated with honors from the prestigious Boston English High School, where he played the violin and was a member of the track team.

Walcott attended the Winston-Salem Teachers College (now Winston-Salem State University) in North Carolina from 1951 to 1953 but dropped out to pursue a career in music. Known as “The Charmer,” he performed professionally on the Boston nightclub circuit as a singer of calypso and country songs. In 1953 Farrakhan married his high-school sweetheart Khadijah (née Betsy Ross), with whom he had nine children.

Involvement in the Nation of Islam

In 1955 Walcott joined the Nation of Islam. He replaced his surname with an “X,” following a custom among Nation of Islam followers who considered their family names to have originated with white slaveholders. Louis X first proved himself at Temple No. 7 in Harlem, where he emerged as the protégé of Malcolm X, the minister of the temple and one of the most prominent members of the Nation of Islam. Louis X was given his Muslim name, Abdul Haleem Farrakhan, by Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan was appointed head minister of Boston Temple No. 11, which Malcolm X had established earlier.

After Malcolm X’s break with the Nation in 1964 over political and personal differences with Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan replaced Malcolm X as head minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 and as the national representative of the Nation, the organization’s second-in-command. Like his predecessor, Farrakhan was a dynamic, charismatic leader and a powerful speaker with the ability to appeal to a broad swath of the African American public.

When Elijah Muhammad died in February 1975, the Nation of Islam fragmented. The Nation’s leadership chose Wallace Muhammad (now known as Warith Deen Mohammed), the fifth of Elijah Muhammad’s six sons, as the new supreme minister. Disappointed that he was not named Elijah Muhammad’s successor, Farrakhan led a breakaway group in 1978, which he also called the Nation of Islam and which preserved the original teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan disagreed with Wallace Muhammad’s attempts to move the Nation to orthodox Sunni Islam and to rid it of Elijah Muhammad’s radical Black nationalism and separatist teachings, which stressed the inherent wickedness of whites. Beginning his new iteration of the Nation of Islam in Chicago with only a few thousand adherents, Farrakhan soon reestablished a national movement with tens of thousands of followers. In 1979 he began publishing the periodical The Final Call, which remains the primary media outlet within the Nation of Islam. In 1988 he purchased Elijah Muhammad’s former mosque in Chicago and refurbished it as the new headquarters of the Nation of Islam.

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As the movement grew foreign branches of the Nation were formed in Ghana, London, Paris, and the Caribbean islands. In order to strengthen the international influence of the Nation, Farrakhan established relations with Muslim countries, and in the 1980s he cultivated a relationship with the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi.

In 1995 the Nation of Islam sponsored the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and family values. In his speech there, Farrakhan asserted that “The real evil in America is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western world, and that idea is called white supremacy.” Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, making it, at the time, the largest gathering of its kind in American history. Under Farrakhan’s leadership, the Nation of Islam established a clinic for AIDS patients in Washington, D.C., and helped to force drug dealers out of public housing developments and private apartment buildings in the city. It also spoke to gang members in Los Angeles and across the country to curb violence and “stop the killing” within Black communities. Meanwhile, the Nation has continued to promote social reform in African American communities in accordance with its traditional goals of self-reliance and economic independence.

Controversies

Farrakhan became known to the wider American public through a series of controversies that began during the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, whom Farrakhan supported. Farrakhan withdrew his support after Jewish voters protested his praise on national television of Adolf Hitler as a “very great man.” Farrakhan has continued to be embroiled in an ongoing conflict with the American Jewish community because of his allegedly anti-Semitic statements, such as his statement in a 2018 speech to the Nation of Islam community: “When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.” Farrakhan, however, has long denied being an anti-Semite, and later in 2018 he acerbically quipped, in both a speech and a tweet, that he is instead “anti-Termite.” (Twitter [now X] deleted the tweet 2019 for violating its policy against dehumanizing language.) In other speeches he has blamed the U.S. government for what he alleges is a conspiracy to destroy Black people with AIDS and addictive drugs. He has espoused in his speeches conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks as a false flag operation led by Zionists and has characterized homosexuality as a “filth of Hollywood” promoted by “wicked Jews, the false Jews.” In other speeches, he has mentioned an unidentified flying object (UFO), first described by Elijah Muhammad in the 1930s, and which Farrakhan has called “the Mother Wheel.” Farrakhan has said that he was once abducted by the UFO and that it floats in space over the United States and will eventually annihilate the country.

Later life

After a near-death experience in 2000 resulting from complications from prostate cancer (he was diagnosed in 1991), Farrakhan toned down his racial rhetoric and attempted to strengthen relations with other minority communities, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Farrakhan also moved his group closer to orthodox Sunni Islam in 2000, when he and Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, the leading American orthodox Muslim, recognized each other as fellow Muslims. In the early 21st century the core membership of Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam was estimated to be between 10,000 and 50,000.

Ongoing health issues forced Farrakhan to reduce his role in the Nation of Islam in the early 21st century. He nevertheless maintained a fairly high profile, giving online sermons in addition to his public speeches. In 2010 he publicly embraced Dianetics, a practice of Scientology in which the mind is cleared of “engrams,” mental images of past experiences that produce negative emotional effects in one’s life. Farrakhan also said that he wanted all Nation of Islam members to become “auditors,” practitioners of Scientology’s one-on-one counseling process that is meant to facilitate individuals’ handling of their engrams. In 2019 Facebook banned Farrakhan from its site, citing his “dangerous” views; however, he maintained a following on other social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter). In 2023 he filed lawsuits against the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for describing him as anti-Semitic.