Louis Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan is a prominent figure known as the leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), a highly influential Black nationalist organization in the United States. Born Louis Eugene Walcott in New York City, Farrakhan grew up in a supportive West Indian community in Boston and initially pursued a career in music. He became involved with the NOI in 1955 and rose to leadership positions, advocating for social and economic issues affecting the African American community. However, his tenure has been marked by controversy, particularly due to his statements perceived as anti-Semitic, sexist, and racist.
Farrakhan's leadership was characterized by a return to the NOI's original separatist ideologies after a period of moderation under Elijah Muhammad's son. He organized significant events like the 1995 Million Man March, which aimed to foster solidarity among Black men and attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. Despite his efforts to uplift the Black community, Farrakhan's divisive rhetoric has drawn criticism from various groups, resulting in accusations of instigating hostility toward other ethnic communities.
Throughout the years, he has maintained a presence in public dialogue, addressing international figures and engaging in controversial discussions. Despite health challenges and bans from major social media platforms in recent years, Farrakhan continues to be an active voice within the NOI, emphasizing themes of Black pride and unity while also facing ongoing scrutiny for his views.
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Louis Farrakhan
American minister and civil rights activist
- Born: May 11, 1933
- Place of Birth: Bronx, New York
As leader of the Nation of Islam, one of the most influential Black nationalist organizations in the United States, Louis Farrakhan focused his work on the most serious social and economic issues of the African American community. He maintained a highly controversial profile in relation to other ethnic minority groups, and he has been accused of being divisive and counterproductive through anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism.
Early Life
Louis Farrakhan was born Louis Eugene Walcott in the Bronx borough of New York York City to an immigrant from the West Indies. His mother named him after his stepfather and the birth father of Farrakhan’s older brother. Farrakhan was raised by his mother in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, in a supportive West Indian community. He studied the violin privately at the age of five and regularly attended an Episcopalian church. He did well in school and was one of only a few Black students to secure entry to the city’s highly prestigious Boston Latin School. He transferred after a year to a different (but also prestigious) high school with a higher percentage of African Americans and became a popular presence on the high school track team.
Farrakhan continued with his music, singing in Boston nightclubs while keeping up with classical violin. He performed on the violin on the nationally telecast Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour and attended a small all-black college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He returned to Boston to marry a local woman and resumed a career as a club musician.
Life’s Work
Farrakhan’s major work was with the Nation of Islam (NI), originally a separatist organization of Black Muslims with a distinctly conservative orientation. He was introduced to the NI in 1955, when he heard its then-leader, Elijah Muhammad, speak in Chicago. Farrakhan joined the group and was soon appointed the minister of its mosque in Boston. He then obtained various leadership posts in New York, including that of the official spokesperson for Muhammad. When Muhammad died in 1975, his son succeeded him and introduced a strong sense of moderation into the organization. The changed NI became much more tolerant of White people and focused on various forms of outreach to all communities, not just Black.
Farrakhan vigorously disagreed with this change in the NI’s orientation and focus and so formed a new group in 1978 that was much closer to the original movement’s ideology and activities. Part of the work of Farrakhan’s newly minted NI was to reestablish a security force with a significant percentage of former criminals as its staff. Indeed, the NI received millions of dollars from the US government to provide security services for housing projects in major cities in the United States.
Farrakhan developed the NI largely by reaching out to the media, which exhibited a great deal of interest in the more controversial aspects of his leadership. He made numerous public statements that were widely viewed as hostile toward the American Jewish community. For example, he remarked that Judaism is a “gutter religion” and, according to a news report, he had praised Adolf Hitler as a “great man.” In Farrakhan’s view, those who criticized him for making inflammatory and derogatory public remarks were themselves guilty of perpetuating a racist, anti-Black system. His critics, however, alleged that incitement stirred up against Jews also spilled over to other ethnic groups, including claims that Korean businesses exploited black Americans.
Under Farrakhan, the NI took a conservative position on a number of key moral issues. For example, the group viewed interracial relationships as a remnant of slavery and as impossible until the economic and social discrepancies between the different racial groups were resolved; it was also intolerant of LGBTQ relationships. The group supported the death penalty for a variety of sexual offenses, including adultery, rape, and interracial relations.
The reconstituted organization was active in antidrug campaigns in the Black community and in the fight against urban crime. One of the highlights of Farrakhan’s leadership was his organizing of the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, aimed at strengthening a sense of solidarity among Black men. The march featured a dual message: atonement for Black Americans for failing to control their community’s destiny and resolve internal fractionalizations, and for the US government for advocating White supremacy. Actual attendance estimates for the march varied from 400,000 to more than one million marchers, heralding a major demonstration of Black unity. Whereas many in other religious and racial groups had criticized Farrakhan, the Million Man March brought him more into the mainstream of African American political and cultural activism.
Farrakhan himself, however, kept up and even nurtured his controversial profile following the Million Man March. He held dialogues with leaders of countries long regarded as terrorist states by the US, and in 1996 he conducted a World Friendship Tour to Libya, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria. In Iran he was quoted as saying that the United States was the “great Satan.”
In 1999, Farrakhan was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and in 2003 he started a foundation to fight this disease. On February 25, 2007, he told a huge gathering at the NI’s annual Saviour’s Day convention at Ford Field in Detroit that his “time is up.” This appearance was followed by his stay in a Washington, DC, hospital for the treatment of complications from prostate surgery. He struck a somewhat conciliatory tone in his message, suggesting that his adherents engage in cooperative efforts with members of other faiths. At the same time, however, he stressed the continued development of Black pride and unity. He also embraced Dianetics, the term for some of the teachings of Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, though Farrakhan stated that he had not become a Scientologist.
Despite his health issues, Farrakhan remained active, delivering weekly online sermons in 2013, for example. In 2015, he organized and spoke at a rally in Chicago, Illinois, marking the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March. Four years later, as he had remained active on social media sites and critics had accused him of continuing to make ant-Semitic comments, he was ultimately banned from both Instagram and its owner, Facebook, and his accounts were removed. This ban was part of a larger ban in which the companies aimed to rid the platforms of anyone violating principles against promoting hate. Despite these controversies as well as periods of health challenges, Farrakhan remained the leader of the NI well into the 2020s. In February 2024, Farrakhan gave a speech at the NI's Saviours' Day conference in Michigan. In his speech, “What Does Allah, the Great Mahdi and the Great Messiah Have to Say About the War in the Middle East,” he criticized President Joe Biden for giving in to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demands.
Significance
Farrakhan was a galvanizing force both for African Americans and Black Muslims, helping to build Black consciousness and self-identity. However, his statements regarding Jewish people, other White Americans, the LGBTQ community, women, and other groups also provoked controversy and led to accusations of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. Although he worked against the Nation of Islam’s potential adoption of a more moderate political course with other institutional and political entities, Farrakhan nevertheless managed to change the image of the organization from that of a radical fringe group to that of a somewhat mainstream movement for civil rights and social reform.
Bibliography
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"Farrakhan Response to Israel-Hamas War with Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories in Saviours' Day Speech." Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 27 Feb. 2024, www.adl.org/resources/blog/farrakhan-responds-israel-hamas-war-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-saviours-day. Accessed 21 aug. 2024.
Gardell, Mattias. In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Duke UP, 1996.
Gibson, Dawn-Marie. A History of the Nation of Islam: Race, Islam, and the Quest for Freedom. Praeger, 2012.
Gray, Eliza, and Hanna Trudo. "Thetans and Bowties." New Republic, vol. 243, no. 16, 2012, pp. 4–8. Academic Search Complete. Accessed 19 Dec. 2013.
K.C. "Obama, Farrakhan and the Muslim Dilemma." Ebony, vol. 66, no. 8, 2011, p. 22. Academic Search Complete. Accessed 19 Dec. 2013.
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"Louis Farrakhan." Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/louis-farrakhan. Accessed 6 Jun. 2024.
Tamblyn, George. "Louis Abdul Farrakhan (1933– )." BlackPast, 18 Jan. 2007, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/farrakhan-louis-abdul-1933/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.