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This chapter reinterprets the rise of black radicalism as a moment of competing “voices” across competing mass medias amid rapid changes in the black freedom struggle and media landscape of the 1960s. It also reinterprets Malcolm X as a newspaper publisher, a rather underanalyzed side of Malcolm. Black publishers had long considered their papers the “voice” of the race, and Malcolm’s founding of Muhammad Speaks in 1960 to amplify the voice of Elijah Muhammad signified this. Yet, the paper’s founding also marked the beginning of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) robust media campaign to use various medias—radio, books, and albums of Muhammad’s speeches—to promote Muhammad’s vision for racial advancement over others. His vision promised to redeem black manhood by renewing their lives, a vision displayed through salesmen for Muhammad Speaks. Thus, readers could read both the paper and their bodies. Malcolm, however, made his display through television. But when he began to gain a voice through television that rivaled that of Muhammad’s in print, the NOI’s media campaign turned from promising to renew the lives of black men to promising to take it away. Malcolm became a newspaperman cut short of his full publishing potential.

This chapter investigates how, in the post-9/11 period, the U.S. security state has collapsed the figures of Black criminal and Muslim terrorist into the term “Black Muslim”. By analyzing and combining the rhetoric and logic of the “War on Crime” and the “War on Terror”, this chapter explores the collapse of the domestic and foreign realms of U.S. power and views the prison as a site of violent containment for the Muslim International, revealing the intimacies between domestic U.S. prison regimes and the emergence of imperial imprisonment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and other so-called Black sites. It also discusses how Blackness, Islam, and the Muslim Third World being front and center in the current political and popular debate within the United States of America, the U.S. continues to silence and resist the history of Black Islam and those who radically resist.

The idea of the “Black Muslims” as a hate group, or an example of the emergent falsehood of reverse racism, was facilitated and propagated by carceral officials. It was pliable enough that law enforcement could suppress Muslim practice in prisons and police local mosques by claim- ing that the NOI was a subversive political group in the guise of religion while offering civil rights organizations the language to dismiss it within the Black freedom struggle. But this suppression and surveillance often helped grow the organization, and Muslims found creative ways to practice Islam and express Black self-determination and anticolonial solidarity, even in the state’s most repressive spaces.

This chapter traces the emergence and political role of Islam in American prisons, as well as the intersections between race and religion, beginning with Noble Drew Ali's revolutionary Moorish Science doctrine. From thence arose the Nation of Islam, which spread among prison inmates when its proponents were jailed and later grew into a stabilizing force in many prisons. As Muslim identities intensified among black prisoners in the years ahead, the trend spilled over into the massive racial ghettos of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, affecting a symbiosis between prison and street culture. Meanwhile a different story was unfolding on the West Coast, one that would ultimately reverse the achievements of Islam behind bars and create a form of prison-based terrorism.

Veronica L. Womack argues that white land control, an impoverished working class, and violent race relations resulted in a distinctive form of Black Power in Alabama. African Americans purchased land despite this, but Alabama still had the second lowest rate of black landownership among black farmers in the South in 1900. Most black farmers in the state operated farms on the cash-rent system. Sharecroppers likewise farmed, and they along with agricultural laborers suffered at the hands of merciless landlords. Sharecroppers and laborers briefly allied with the Communist Party during the 1930s and challenged the capitalist system that entrapped them in exploitive monoculture through participation in sharecropper unions. White supremacists responded with violence. These competing agendas between black landowners, cash- and share-rent tenants, and laborers created fertile ground for the emergence of militant Black Power and overtly separatist goals pursued by Black Muslims through the Nation of Islam in the aftermath of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This chapter gives a brief historical tour of Muslim America to provide a context for situating the younger generations of Muslims— the second and third generations of immigrants and of convert Muslims— in both intra-community and societal dynamics. It shows the ethno-racial and class diversity of this group, then provides a detailed profile of the participants in this ethnographic study. The two study areas—Chicagoland and Phoenix-valley—are also described in regard to their Muslim residents. This chapter argues that though immigrant and convert Muslim Americas are often presented as having parallel histories, theirs is a shared history in which they have coauthored each chapter, in spite of their divergent origins and internal tensions.

This introductory chapter presents three vignettes that illustrate the four narratives that frame this book: the notion of an identity crisis among young Muslims, the purported conflict between a “pure or true” Islam and a “cultural” Islam, an alleged “Islamization of America,” and the imperative for creating an American Muslim community and culture. It also sketches the methodology employed in the book, detailing the centrality of a narrative framework from the inception of this project to its methods, the challenges encountered, the analysis, and ultimately to the production of this ethnographic narrative. This beginning chapter argues that narrative is a particularly useful way to examine identity.

This chapter explores women's encounters with the Black Muslims, women's experiences of life within the Nation of Islam (NOI), and their collective and individual contributions to building and sustaining the Nation's structures. While the chapter is not focused on the inner power struggles and leadership abuses that engulfed the Chicago and New York branches of the movement, it does consider women's responses to leadership crises within the group. The majority of the women highlighted are former members of the Nation, currently in the Warith Deen Mohammed (WDM) community, who joined the Nation in the 1960s and 1970s. Topics discussed include the women's first encounters with the NOI; life in the NOI; Nation women's dress code, diet, marriage, education, work, and activism; and NOI politics.

The author recounts the details of the burglary that struck the apartment in which he lived twice which completely shattered his sense of security. He observes that crime and violence were not uncommon in this area, but they always seemed to happen elsewhere and could be avoided. He realizes that break-ins were not a common occurrence for most families in America and that having bars on the windows was not normal. He studied karate and took lessons from a black Muslim sensei named Rahim, formerly Robert, with the express purpose of becoming tough enough to feel secure. He had moved up a rank in the karate hierarchy, his association with Rahim did not achieve the intended goal of feeling safe and secure in the neighborhood, and for a simple reason: within a year Rahim was shot and killed.