Muhammad, Elijah

Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole, 1897; d.1975) became leader of the Nation of Islam after the founder, Wallace Fard, disappeared in 1934. Poole and others adopted African and Islamic names as a sign of their emancipation from the domination of whites and Christianity. Elijah Muhammad’s message—a combination of black nationalist separatism and teachings from the Bible and Qur’an—focused on abstinence from alcohol and drugs, strict conformity to Islamic codes of dress and conduct, and self-sufficient economic and political development by African Americans.