AMERICA'S EARLY EXPERIENCE WITH THE MUSLIM FAITH: THE NATION OF ISLAM

Middle East Policy, Fall 2008 by Talhami, Ghada Hashem

The end of the enemy truly has come, and at this time they should (be) able to see it. All praise is due to Allah; it [Armageddon] truly has come, my Loving and most Faithful Apostle. Oh, how happy am I to see what I am seeing! If I only could speak like I desire to speak. 10

Like any oppressed group, the NOI saw in a victorious Japan an imminent release from their oppression. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was moved to take a closer look at the NOI as rumors began to circulate about secret shipments of weapons from the Japanese to black nationalist groups. These reports by FBI field offices insisted that weapons were stockpiled in black neighborhoods of major American cities. Elijah Muhammad was also on the run at the time, changing residences and aliases with dizzying frequency in order to avoid the draft. He was finally caught, due to reports by moles in the local mosque who saw him enter the place of worship but could not testify to his departure. He was charged for failure to register for the draft. When large amounts of money were seized from members of the NOI days later, the FBI concluded that these came from mysterious Japanese sources. No effort was spared to link black dissidents, particularly the NOI, with secret Japanese agents in order to accuse them of conspiracy.11 In the process of gathering intelligence on communists and domestic fascists just before World War II, the FBI created a special category of "Negroes," who were lumped together with Germans, Italians and Japanese after Pearl Harbor.12

Additionally, the FBI will always be linked in the minds of A fro-Americans to surveillance, subversion and a peculiar way of enforcing civil-rights legislation. It would not be possible to comprehend the impact of the organized civil-rights movement in the 1960s without coming to grips with the nature of the FBI's role in pushing and interfering with its growth. Hoover, who apparently found multiple ways of neglecting the enforcement of civil-rights legislation and procrastinating in the pursuit of the obstacles to the realization of these laws, was primarily concerned with the communist threat within the United States. This may be in itself justifiable, were it not for the fact that he defined the communist threat broadly in order to include under this rubric anyone who fought for racial equality. This allowed him to spy on blacks and infiltrate their groups under the excuse of chasing communist infiltrators. The commitment to non-violence evinced by the civil-rights movement made no difference to Hoover and his men, who were present at every civil-rights demonstration or organized activity, no matter how peaceful. Malcolm X became a target of the FBI simply due to his rhetoric of violence, not his actions. Throughout the civil-rights period, the FBI established a record of pursuing communists and ordinary criminals, rather than racist enemies of the civilrights movement itself.13

At times, Hoover regarded the NAACP with exceptional tolerance, but this did not last, especially after 1941, when the FBI created a COMINFIL (communist infiltration) case to investigate discrimination suits against the Navy by 15 Afro-American mess-hall attendants. While engaging in this sweep, the FBI maintained cooperative ties with some friendly elements within the NAACP. This organization continued to placate the intelligence agency in the hope of persuading its officials to appoint black FBI agents, a goal that was not achieved. Harmonious relations between the FBI and the civil-rights organization continued until the first years of the Eisenhower administration. Even during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, when the latter succeeded in gaining the passage of an ambitious civil-rights bill, Hoover remained focused on seditious groups rather than on attacks on civil-rights figures by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).