The messenger, p.2
The Messenger, page 2
They were especially eager, though, to capture the Prophet, an elusive religious zealot who changed names faster than a chameleon changes color. The head of a sect blacklisted by the U.S. attorney general, the Prophet jumped bail in July while awaiting trial in Washington, D.C., and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was damned angry about it.4
The Prophet, known to law enforcement officials in seven states as Ghulam Bogans, Muck Muck, Mohammed Rassoull, or by one of a dozen other aliases, headed a sect called the Allah Temple of Islam. Most of his followers called him the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and referred to themselves as the Lost-Found Nation of Islam.5
At seven o’clock, three FBI agents, armed with warrants and weapons, approached the front entrance to 6026 Vernon Avenue; other agents and police officers covered the side and rear. An agent banged on the door. Awakened by the loud knocking, Nathaniel Muhammad, the fugitive’s sixteen-year-old son, went to the door and peered through the pane.
“May we come in?” an agent asked the silhouetted figure on the other side of the door. “We’d like to talk to your father.”
“Just a minute,” Nathaniel replied as he hurriedly backed away.
The agents waited for several minutes and then one of them knocked again, this time nearly hard enough to break the glass. Again, he saw a male figure peering at him through the curtain. The shadow and the silence angered him.
“This is the FBI, boy! Open this damn door or we’ll break it down!”
Nathaniel quickly complied.
“Are you Ghulam Bogans’s son?” the agent in charge asked gruffly.
The reason Elijah Muhammad used so many aliases was because other Muslim ministers who challenged his heirship of the Nation of Islam had pursued him sporadically since 1934 with the intent of killing him. Another reason was that police officers in several cities had been injured during fracases with Muslims and some were engaged in a vendetta against him. Ghulam Bogans was the alias he had used most recently, and that was the name on his arrest record when he was taken into custody in Washington on May 8, 1942, on charges of draft evasion.6
“No one lives here by that name,” Nathaniel answered.
“Well,” the agent asked angrily, “is Elijah Muhammad here?”
“No, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is not here right now.”
The white agents and several police officers pushed past the youth and began searching the house. As they reached the top of the stairway on the second floor, several women and children peered out of bedroom doorways. One woman walked toward the agents.
“I’m Clara Muhammad,” she said. “What right do you have to barge into my home at this hour of the morning?”
“We’re looking for Elijah, ma’am, alias Ghulam Bogans,” an agent answered contemptuously. “We’re the FBI.”
“Well, you can just look somewhere else because he’s not here.”
“Do you know where your husband is at this hour of the morning, ma’am?” the agent asked sardonically.
“No,” she answered, “I have no idea where he is right now.”
The agents ignored her, and proceeding as though the house belonged to them now, approached a woman standing at a bedroom door. It was Elijah Muhammad’s twenty-year-old daughter, Ethel.
“Is Ghulam Bogans or Elijah Muhammad here, ma’am?”
“My mother said he’s not here, so he must not be here,” she answered irately.
Lottie Muhammad, who was standing in the hallway, was the next occupant questioned. She, too, denied that her father was in the house. The younger children were quickly asked about their father’s whereabouts. First thirteen-year-old Herbert was questioned, then twelve-year-old Elijah Jr., then Wallace, who was nine. They even asked the toddler, Akbar, if he knew where his father was. The answers were all nearly the same. Their father wasn’t home, they said. He had left almost a week ago, and, no, they had no idea when he might return.
The agents and officers left the house after completing a cursory search but only pretended to leave the vicinity, hoping that Elijah would try to escape in the car that they recognized as his parked just in front of the Vernon Avenue address. When no one left the premises after a forty-minute stakeout, the agent in charge of the operation ordered the group to conduct another search of the house. This time, they were far more thorough. They carefully searched the first floor, and in an alcove beneath the stairwell to the second floor, they discovered sixteen cardboard boxes packed with newspaper clippings, copies of Elijah Muhammad’s sermons, personal correspondence, and organizational material. After a quick scan, the agents realized they had struck an intelligence mother lode.
The boxes were a gold mine of information about the Nation of Islam. The papers documented the history of the sect—its origins, membership, financial records, and operational techniques—dating from 1933, which was the year that Elijah Muhammad took over the sect from the mysterious founder, W. D. Fard Muhammad, also known as Master Fard. Fard, who also used more than a dozen aliases, was worshipped by Nation of Islam members as the Lord-King, or in their vernacular, as “God in human form.” For them, Fard and Allah were one and the same.
While several officers confiscated the boxes, others continued to ferret for the fugitive. Suddenly, an agent searching the upstairs hallway noticed something suspicious: an elderly woman was guarding the entrance to her bedroom. She held the doorknob tightly, and appeared anxious. The old woman was Elijah’s seventy-one-year-old mother, Marie. The agent brushed her aside and tried to open the door. Though feeble and partially blind, she struck out, hitting him repeatedly in the face and about the shoulders. Another agent subdued her.
The FBI agent in charge of the operation went into the bedroom. The first thing he noticed was that the floor had an odd look. Part of the floor near a large carpet was free of dust, as though someone had only recently moved a rug. The agent turned on his flashlight, looked under the bed, and saw a rolled-up oriental rug. He tried to pull the rug toward him but it was much too heavy. He knew immediately that the case was all wrapped up, so to speak.
“Come outta there, boy!” the agent demanded. “This is the FBI! You’re under arrest.”
As the rug rolled slowly out toward the outer edge of the bed, several of the officers drew a bead on it with the weapons they had in their hands. “Please, don’t shoot him!” Clara cried. The children rushed toward the the bedroom door, fearing calamity, but the officers blocked the way.7
“Stand back so no one gets hurt,” one of the officers warned with his weapon drawn. As the rug unrolled, the agents saw a short, frail olive-skinned man. It was, indeed, the long-sought fugitive. He crawled from underneath the bed, stared nervously at his captors, and dusted himself off. Afraid that he might be shot “accidentally,” he kept his eyes on the agents’ hands and guns. After frisking him, the agents told him to get dressed. A half hour later, as the sun rose on Chicago’s South Side, Muhammad emerged from his bedroom wearing a dark blue pinstriped suit and tie.
At seven fifty-five, he was handcuffed and advised that he was under arrest as a fugitive from justice. His family wept as he was led away. After handing temporary custody of the fugitive over to the Chicago police, FBI agents in unmarked cars trailed the cruiser taking Muhammad to the Cook County Jail.
Although Muhammad’s family feared his fate, their image of him was not tarnished by his capture. To them, he remained the Prophet Muhammad, the seal of Allah’s messengers. But to the Chicago Police Department photographer who took his mug shots that morning, he was just another Negro with a number under his neck.
After being booked and fingerprinted, Muhammad was taken into a darkened interrogation room where police and FBI men bombarded him with questions about his cult and its political activities, particularly in regard to pro-Japanese espionage.8
The semiliterate suspect endured an interrogation that lasted all morning and well into the afternoon. By the time it was over, he had been stripped of his mask of divinity, and had given the agents a wealth of information about himself, his family, and the Nation of Islam, information that undoubtedly brought him face to face with reality for the first time in ages. There were no tales of miracles in the oral autobiography, nothing that made the suspect’s life any different from the lives of a million other men. His testimony was condensed into a four-page confession, which he was asked to sign.
He refused.
“My word is my bond,” Muhammad muttered. “It is as good as my signature.”9
“Is your name Elijah Poole?” he was asked.
“My name is Elijah Muhammad. In my early life I was known as Elijah Poole. But Poole is not my real name or my father’s real name,” the suspect said slowly. “It’s the name of the slavemaster of my grandfather.”
CHAPTER ONE
BROTHER’S KEEPER
The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. The men had approached and stood behind him in a body. He overtopped the tallest by half a head. He said: “I belong to the ship.”
… He held his head up in the glare of the lamp … a head powerful and misshapen with a tormented and flattened face—a face pathetic and brutal: the tragic, the mysterious, the repulsive mask of a nigger’s soul.
—Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897)1
“Shut the doors, shut the windows, shut everything! the Invisible Man is coming!”
—H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897)2
Yes, I was a slave. And I’ll say this to the whole world: Slavery was the worst curse ever visited on the people of the United States.
—John Rudd, a former slave3
As he lay on his deathbed at the beginning of the bitter-cold winter of 1861, eighty-two-year-old Middleton Pool Jr. had no inkling that the lifestyle he had enjoyed for nearly a century was his invisible, emaciated bedfellow. A former Georgia politician—he had served one term as a justice of the peace in 1820 and was an adjunct member of the Georgia House of Representatives in 18244—the ailing master of nearly fifty slaves faced the same task as his father before him, an obligation that made politics seem as challenging as riding a carousel. In the three decades past, he had purchased, sold, and traded more than a hundred slaves, his plantation and its magnificent mansion reflecting not only his investment acumen but also the productivity of his human chattel. As his final twilight hovered, he struggled with the daunting task of dividing his land and personal property among his feeble wife Nancy, seven daughters, three sons, and the three children of his deceased daughter.5 He first sold some of his slaves to his close friends John H. Pitman and his brother Nimrod,6 which allowed him to pay off creditors and so bequeath his human and real property to his heirs without encumbrances.
The smallest share of his holdings went to Elizabeth Hood and Mary Everett, the adult children from his first marriage. Middleton Pool, who had moved from Watson County to DeKalb County before finally settling in Sandersville, still owned a modest piece of land in DeKalb, where Elizabeth and Mary resided, and he willed half of it to each of them. He also gave Elizabeth two adult slaves, a male named Simon and a female named Hannah, who had several young children. Mary received two adult slaves as well, Milly and Warren. In addition to the slaves, both daughters received $1,000 and an equivalent mix of personal property. As a final gesture of gentility, he ordered the executors of his estate to “sell my negro girl Biddy at public outcry to the highest bidder,” then to divide the net profit from the auction between his two oldest daughters.7
The bulk of his estate, which was in Washington County, was divided among the five children born of his union with Nancy and the children of Winifred Pool Rushing, their daughter who had died in 1858. Upon naming James Rushing, his daughter’s widower, trustee for Winifred’s children, he bequeathed to Joseph, Catherine, and Elizabeth Rushing two slaves (Silvy and Fanny), two cows and calves, a sow and her piglets, and some furniture. He also wrote that they would inherit additional property after his will was probated.
Pool gave his daughter Catherine H. Bateman 218 acres of farmland valued at $1,500, a male slave named Bill, and two female slaves, Sally and Rachel, along with their children. Like Winifred and his other children, Catherine received various farm animals, furniture, and other small personal items. He bequeathed his home and the surrounding acreage to his son Thomas, with the proviso that “[My] present wife Nancy Pool is to have one room in said residence to live in until her death, or as long as in their mutual discretion this would be proper and desirable.”8 Another son, William B. Pool, was to take Isaac, a twenty-three-year-old slave, as his property. Middleton ordered William to “hire out” Isaac, and to use the money thus earned to take care of eighty-year-old Nancy’s financial needs for the rest of her life. After Nancy’s death, Pool wrote, William could sell Isaac and keep the proceeds as remuneration for all the bother. He also awarded Thomas two male slaves, Warren and Reuben, along with Harriet and her brood. William Pool inherited a slave named Bob, a young female slave named Dolly, and Sally and her children. His third son, James I. Pool, received the slaves named Ben and Wright and a woman named Eliju and her children. His fifth and last child, Jane Swint, a young widow, inherited a childless slave named Easter and a “boy” named Irwin. She also became the new mistress of Lucky and her children.
Each of Middleton Pool’s children by Nancy was to receive more slaves after his will was probated, and in all, nearly fifty slaves were distributed among them. Like most slaveowners, Middleton Pool based his division of slaves on their individual market value instead of on familial ties, which were certainly considered, but only secondarily. After Washington County Probate Court certified the will on June 9, 1862, the rest of Middleton’s slaves were apportioned among his children and three grandchildren, each receiving some six slaves apiece.9
The Pool children’s days as slavemasters were short-lived, however. In September 1862—only four months after the slaves officially became the property of Middleton’s heirs—President Abraham Lincoln decreed an end to slavery in Georgia and elsewhere in the Confederacy. The preliminary proclamation became permanent on January 1, 1863, formally freeing Pool’s slaves along with three to four million other Africans in America. Two years later, slavery was banned constitutionally with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite these legislative and executive measures, and notwithstanding General Robert E. Lee’s hoisting of the white flag in April 1865 to end the Civil War, the Confederacy’s collapse and surrender to General Ulysses Grant meant little to the first generation of Africans born free in the South. Southern soldiers and businessmen with all or most of their wealth invested in the “peculiar institution” remained embittered by the pummeling they had taken in their own backyard. Many organized and connived in every conceivable way to maintain the courtly lifestyle they had known before the war.
Of all the former slaves who remained on the Pool plantation, perhaps none stood out more than a light-skinned mulatto named Irwin Pool. Unlike many slaves who changed their surnames to commemorate their freedom,10 Irwin not only kept his master’s name, but his firstborn was the namesake of his former master’s son. Though little is known about Irwin Pool’s parentage, census records indicate that his father was a Caucasian. The records don’t reveal his father’s name, but circumstances suggest that he may have been the consequence of an illicit interracial affair on the part of William B. Pool, which would explain why Irwin named his first son William. Like his father, William B. Pool served one term as a commissioner in Sandersville, followed by a single term as a justice of the peace. In fact, when Middleton Pool died in early 1861, William was one of several county commissioners who oversaw the final dispensation of the estate.11
William Pool (or Willie, as he was nicknamed by his family) was born to Irwin and Peggy Pool in 1866 on the same Sandersville plantation as his parents, who toiled there first as slaves and then as indebted sharecroppers. Since Congress passed its first major civil rights bill that year (nullifying the Black Codes)12 and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment two years later, one would surmise that the times held great promise for Willie’s generation. However, being born free in 1866 in Georgia was meager cause for celebration, as white racial antagonism robbed Willie Pool’s generation of the quality of life one normally associates with freedom and democracy. His childhood was not much better than that of his once-enslaved parents. Despite being born during the zenith of Reconstruction, the first generation of Africans born free in America were essentially steered into a state of servitude before they reached adulthood. The primary reason for the failure of Reconstruction and its affirmative-action-type programs was the contentious relationship between Congress and President Andrew Johnson, who was sworn in upon Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865.13 Johnson issued mandates without conferring with state legislatures, scholar Woodrow Wilson wrote at the denouement of Radical Reconstruction, further embittering Southern politicians and power brokers of the humiliated and defanged Confederacy. Consequently, Wilson wrote, legislative houses in the Southern states decided,
in the very same sessions in which they gave their assent to the emancipating amendment, virtually to undo the work of emancipation, substituting a slavery of legal restraints and disabilities for a slavery of private ownership.14
The social advancements produced by Reconstruction were pushed so far backward that the period is sometimes called “Deconstruction.”
Before Willie Pool reached his first birthday, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) evolved from a segregated social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, into a full-fledged white terrorist organization headed by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest of Nashville.15 Consistent with his grandiose delusion of making the Thirteenth Amendment disappear and returning blacks to slavery, Forrest bestowed upon himself the lofty title of Grand Wizard. By 1867, the Klan and a sister group known as the Knights of the White Camellia were making a mockery of liberties that the Constitution and new civil rights laws had given African Americans. These and similar racially intolerant organizations were quite successful in using extrajudicial means to create a climate of terror, fear, and hatred. By the time Willie Pool was ten years old, a visitor to Georgia would not have known that there had ever been a Reconstruction era. With the creation of the Liberal Republican Party, formed solely to hasten the dismantling of Reconstruction programs, the disfranchisement of African Americans snowballed. When federal troops assigned to the South to aid in Reconstruction were withdrawn, so too were the civil rights of blacks.
