Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole; October 7, 1897 – February 25, 1975) was a black-American religious leader, who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until his death in 1975. He was a mentor to Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali, as well as his own son, Warith Deen Mohammed.
Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Robert Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, the seventh of thirteen children of William Poole, Sr. (1868–1942), a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, and Mariah Hall (1873–1958), a homemaker and sharecropper.
Elijahs education ended at the third grade to work in sawmills and brickyards.[1] To support the family, he worked with his parents as a sharecropper. When he was sixteen years old, he left home and began working in factories and at other businesses.
Poole married Clara Evans (1899–1972) on March 7, 1917. The Poole family was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the oppressive and economically troubled South in search of safety and employment.[2] Poole later recounted that before the age of 20, he had witnessed the lynchings of three black men by white people. He said, I seen enough of the white mans brutality to last me 26,000 years.[3]
Moving his own family, parents and siblings, Elijah and the Pooles settled in Hamtramck, Michigan. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Poole struggled to find and keep work as the economy suffered during the Great Depression. During their years in Detroit, Elijah and Clara had eight children, six boys and two girls.[4] [5]
Main article: Nation of Islam
While he was in Detroit, Poole began taking part in various Black Nationalist movements within the city. In August 1931, at the urging of his wife, Elijah Poole attended a speech on Islam and black empowerment by Wallace D. Fard. Afterward, Poole said he approached Fard and asked if he was the redeemer. Fard responded that he was, but that his time had not yet come.[3] [4] Fard taught that Blacks, as original Asiatics, had a rich cultural history which
