Louis Farrakhan

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis Farrakhan has led the Nation of Islam since 1981, longer than any other leader in the organization's history. The group blends black nationalism with Islamic teaching. Over a long public life he has carried several different names, and each one marks a different stage of his story. He has also drawn sharp condemnation from civil rights watchdogs, charges he has denied. How did a gifted young violinist from Boston end up at the head of such a movement? What part did his own words play in the death of Malcolm X? And how does he answer the people who call him a bigot?

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• 2. Violin and Calypso

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  Louis Eugene Walcott was born in the Bronx, New York City, on the 11th of May 1933. He was the younger of two sons of Sarah Mae Manning, who came from Saint Kitts, and Percival Clark, who was Jamaican. The couple separated before his birth, and Walcott says he never knew his biological father. In a 1996 interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr., he speculated that Clark, a light-skinned man with straight hair, may have been Jewish.

  The surname came from Louis Walcott, a man his mother had a relationship with after leaving Clark. When his stepfather died in 1936, the family moved to Boston and settled in Roxbury, a largely African-American neighborhood.

  Walcott received his first violin at the age of five. By twelve he had toured with the Boston College Orchestra, and a year later he entered national competitions and won them. In 1946 he became one of the first black performers to appear on the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour, where he also took an award. His family were active members of the Episcopal St. Cyprian's Church in Roxbury.

  He attended Boston Latin School and graduated from English High School. He then spent three years at Winston-Salem Teachers College on a track scholarship. In 1953 he married Betsy Ross, later known as Khadijah Farrakhan. Complications in her first pregnancy led him to leave college after his junior year to care for her and their child.

  The nickname The Charmer came to him during a tour of Montreal, Quebec. By then he was earning $500 a week on the road in the northeastern and midwestern United States, and he sometimes performed as Calypso Gene. In 1953 and 1954 he recorded a dozen cheeky tunes in a mixed mento and calypso style. That was before Harry Belafonte's 1956 album Calypso. His titles included Ugly Woman, Stone Cold Man, Zombie Jamboree and Brown Skin Girl.

  When the man by then known as Farrakhan joined the Nation of Islam, its leader Elijah Muhammad asked him to put the calypso career aside. The violin then lay quiet for many years. The prominent classical musician Sylvia Olden Lee finally urged him to take it up again. On the 17th of April 1993 he made his return concert debut, playing Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor.

  Farrakhan suggested that playing a concerto by a Jewish composer was partly an effort to heal a rift with the Jewish community. Mendelssohn's own family had converted to Christianity. New York Times critic Bernard Holland found the performance somewhat flawed after years of neglect. He still wrote that the sound was that of an authentic player, "wide, deep and full of the energy that makes the violin gleam."

  In 2021, to mark 250 years since Beethoven's birth, Farrakhan played the composer's Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 61, with the New World Symphony.

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• 3. Becoming Louis X

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  In February 1955, Walcott was headlining a Chicago show called Calypso Follies when a friend from Boston, the saxophonist Rodney Smith, introduced him to the Nation of Islam. Walcott and his wife Betsy were invited to the movement's annual Saviours' Day address by Elijah Muhammad. Walcott had never heard of Elijah Muhammad. Because Minister Malcolm X was so often in the media, he assumed, like many outsiders, that Malcolm X led the organization.

  Walcott memorized the ten questions and answers of the Student Enrollment and recited them word for word. He then wrote a Saviour's Letter to the headquarters in Chicago. It had to be copied exactly, down to handwriting identical to that of the founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad. Headquarters reviewed and approved the letter in July 1955. A letter of approval confirmed his membership as a registered Muslim, also called a registered believer or registered laborer.

  Membership brought him an X. The letter stood in for the African family name that members said had been lost. They held that European surnames were slave names, assigned by slaveholders to mark ownership. Members kept the X until they received Islamic names, which came later for some of them. So Louis Walcott became Louis X.

  Elijah Muhammad later replaced the X with a holy name, Farrakhan. It is a corruption of the Arabic word furqan, which means The Criterion.

  His music changed tone as well. As Louis X he recorded two songs criticizing racism for the album A White Man's Heaven Is a Black Man's Hell. It came out in 1960 on Boston's A Moslem Sings label.

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• 4. Malcolm X

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  After nine months as a registered Muslim at Muhammad's Temple of Islam in Boston, Farrakhan became assistant to its minister, Malcolm X. Elijah Muhammad then transferred Malcolm X to Temple of Islam No. 7 on West 116th Street in Harlem. Farrakhan eventually became the Boston temple's official minister.

  The issue of the Nation's newspaper Muhammad Speaks dated the 4th of December 1964 carried words from Louis X about Malcolm X. He wrote: "The dye is set and Malcolm shall not escape. Such a man is worthy of death."

  Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Afterward Elijah Muhammad gave Farrakhan two posts that Malcolm had held before his dismissal from the movement. Farrakhan became the national spokesman for the Nation and minister of the influential Harlem mosque. He served there until 1975.

  On the day of the killing, Farrakhan was in Newark, New Jersey, on rotation, 45 minutes from the scene. Three men from a Newark mosque of the Nation were convicted: Thomas Hagan, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, also known as Norman 3X Butler, and Kahlil Islam, also known as Thomas 15X Johnson. All three served prison sentences. Only Hagan ever admitted his role.

  Farrakhan's public statements about Malcolm X fed what was called a climate of vilification. Many people, including Malcolm X's family, have accused him of involvement in the plot. For years Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, resented the Nation of Islam, and Farrakhan in particular. In a 1994 interview, Gabe Pressman asked her whether Farrakhan had anything to do with her husband's death. She answered: "Of course, yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it, yes."

  In a 1993 speech, Farrakhan seemed to confirm that the Nation was responsible. He told outsiders it was none of their business how a nation deals with a traitor.

  In a 60 Minutes interview that aired in May 2000, he said: "I may have been complicit in words that I spoke." He added that he regretted any word of his that cost a human life. A few days later he denied that he had ordered the assassination. He again acknowledged that he had created the atmosphere that ultimately led to it.

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• 5. Rebuilding the Nation

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  A day after Elijah Muhammad died, in February 1975, his seventh son Warith Deen Mohammed was declared the new leader at the annual Saviours' Day Convention. Mohammed was the son of Elijah and Clara Muhammad. Through the late 1970s he moved most members toward orthodox Islam. He renamed the group the World Community of Islam in the West, and later the American Society of Muslims.

  Mohammed rejected the belief that the founder, Wallace D. Fard, was divine. He welcomed white people, whom the old Nation had treated as devils and enemies, as equal brothers and sisters. He even gave some of them X's and reached out to Christians and Jews.

  Farrakhan joined this movement and served as a Sunni Imam under Mohammed from 1975-1978. Then he pulled away. According to The New York Times, he could not embrace the new philosophy. He especially opposed the idea of working with whites to solve the problems of black Americans.

  In 1979 his followers founded a weekly newspaper, The Final Call, meant to resemble the old Muhammad Speaks. In 1981 Farrakhan and his supporters held their first Saviours' Day convention in Chicago and took back the name Nation of Islam. In his keynote he announced an effort to restore the organization under Elijah Muhammad's teachings. Its headquarters became Mosque Maryam.

  On the 24th of October 1989, at a press conference at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C., Farrakhan described a vision he said he had on the 17th of September 1985 in Tepoztlán, Mexico. In it he was carried up to what he called a Wheel, or an unidentified flying object, like the one in the Book of Ezekiel. He heard the voice of Elijah Muhammad, and a scroll of cursive writing unrolled before his eyes, then vanished.

  The message, he said, was that President Reagan had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan a war. Farrakhan was told to announce this in Washington. He claimed the vision was later proven. In 1987, he said, newspaper headlines reported that Reagan had planned a war against Libya in early September 1985.

  Libya would soon become entangled with Farrakhan's own affairs.

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• 6. The March and After

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  In October 1995, Farrakhan convened a broad coalition in Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March. He and his supporters claimed one million men attended. The National Park Service put the number at roughly 440,000, well below the hoped-for crowd. Farrakhan threatened to sue the Park Service over the low estimate.

  Farrakhan and other speakers called on black men to renew their commitments to their families and communities. Farrakhan spoke for two hours. He quoted spirituals and both the Old and New Testaments, and he called himself a prophet sent by God to show America its evil. Many civil rights and religious organizations helped organize the event, and men came with their sons from across the country. Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King III, Cornel West, Jesse Jackson and Benjamin Chavis also addressed the crowd.

  In 2005 Farrakhan marked the tenth anniversary with a second gathering, the Millions More Movement, from the 14th to the 17th of October in Washington. He appeared alongside Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party, the activist Al Sharpton and Addis Daniel, among others. In 2015 he led the 20th anniversary event, titled Justice or Else.

  On the 11th of September 2006, Farrakhan told his staff and followers in a letter that he was seriously ill. Published in The Final Call, it said doctors in Cuba had found a peptic ulcer. Infections afterward cost him 35 pounds, or 16 kilograms. He left the hospital on the 28th of January 2007 after a five-week stay and major abdominal surgery. The surgery corrected damage from a radioactive seed implant that had successfully treated his prostate cancer years before.

  Weeks later he gave the keynote address at the Nation's annual convention in Detroit. In 2007 he reduced his responsibilities within the organization, though he kept delivering sermons. In December 2013 he disclosed that a heart attack in October had kept him out of public view for two months.

  Farrakhan has been married to Khadijah Farrakhan since 1953. They have nine children, and he is the grandfather of the basketball player Mustapha Farrakhan Jr. His eldest son, Louis Farrakhan Jr., died on the 2nd of June 2018.

  It is unknown who will lead the Nation after Farrakhan. Ishmael Muhammad has been speculated as a successor. Before 1993, Khallid Muhammad was seen as the most likely heir.

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• 7. Words and Condemnation

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  Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center regard Farrakhan as an antisemite. He has accused Jews of controlling large parts of the media, the US government and the global economy, often calling them Satanic. He has repeatedly described Adolf Hitler as a great man and has claimed Jewish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and Jim Crow laws. In 2012 the Simon Wiesenthal Center put some of his comments on its list of the ten worst antisemitic slurs.

  In June 1984, after returning from a visit to Libya, Farrakhan gave a sermon recorded by a Chicago Sun-Times reporter. A transcript published in The New York Times had him saying that Israel would never know peace because it rested on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit. Reports said he had called Judaism a gutter religion. He repeatedly denied it. In a letter dated the 18th of June 1997 to the former Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski, he said he had meant those who hide behind Judaism while using unjust political means. He wrote that he revered Abraham, Moses and the prophets sent to the children of Israel.

  Nathan Pearlmutter, then chair of the Anti-Defamation League, called Farrakhan the new Black Hitler. The Village Voice journalist Nat Hentoff used the same label on a radio show. On the 11th of March 1984, in a speech carried on Chicago radio, Farrakhan replied. He called Hitler a very great man, though not for black people, because Hitler lifted Germany up after defeat. He added that he was not proud of Hitler's evil toward Jewish people.

  At Madison Square Garden in 1985, Farrakhan told an audience: "And don't you forget, when it's God who puts you in the ovens, it's forever!" In March 1995, at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, he claimed that German Jews had financed Hitler.

  On the 23rd of March 2002, Farrakhan visited Kahal Kadosh Shaare Shalom in Kingston, Jamaica. It was his first visit to a synagogue, and he hoped to repair relations with the Jewish community. Jamaica was his father's native country. American synagogues had refused to host him, and many feared sending the wrong signal.

  His later years brought more controversy. In 2013, in Detroit, Farrakhan accused President Obama of surrounding himself with Satan, meaning members of the Jewish community. In March 2015 he accused Israelis and Zionist Jews of involvement in the September 11 attacks. In 2012 and 2017 speeches he had instead blamed the American government. In February 2018 he described the powerful Jews as his enemy.

  On the 20th of February 2019, at the annual Saviour's Day gathering, he declared: "I represent the Messiah. I represent the Jesus and I am that Jesus."

  On the 4th of July 2020, Revolt TV's YouTube channel carried a three-hour speech by Farrakhan. He called Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Satan. Greenblatt answered in a tweet that giving Farrakhan a platform always produces hatred. By the 15th of July 2020 the video had more than 1.2 million views. In the same speech Farrakhan said that anyone who thinks he hates the Jewish people does not know him.

  In October 2023, Farrakhan and the Nation sued the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for $4.8 billion. They argued that the defendants had falsely labeled them antisemitic. The case was dismissed in April 2024.

  The Anti-Defamation League also classifies Farrakhan as a racist. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the Nation of Islam a hate group with a theology of black supremacy. In Nation teaching, whites were created 6,600 years ago as a race of devils by an evil scientist named Yakub. The story began with the founder, Wallace D. Fard. It helped split the movement after 1975, because Warith Mohammed wished to reject it and Farrakhan wanted to reaffirm it.

  At an event in Milwaukee in August 2015, Farrakhan said: "White people deserve to die, and they know, so they think it's us coming to do it."

  In 1993 Farrakhan banned women from a speech he gave in a city-owned theater, and complaints of sex discrimination were filed with a New York state agency. The next year he gave a speech that only women could attend. The New York Times reported that he urged them to put husbands and children before careers, shun tight, short skirts, stay off welfare and reject abortion. Critics have also pointed to the sexist overtones of his old calypso song Female Boxer.

  Marceline Donaldson and her husband Robert Bennett sued Farrakhan and others because she could not attend his 1994 speech. In 2002 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that turning her away was legal. A mosque had leased the theater, and the state's public accommodation laws did not require women to be admitted to a men's mosque meeting.

  In June 2018, Twitter withheld full verification from Farrakhan after he said the Harvey Weinstein scandal was about Jewish power. The following October, Twitter declined to suspend him over a tweet comparing Jews to termites, saying he had broken no rules. After a rule change on hateful conduct in July 2019, the tweet was removed.

  At the start of May 2019, Facebook banned him along with other figures it considered extremists, apparently over antisemitism. A week later, at Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago, he said he did not hate Jewish people and was neither a misogynist nor a homophobe. Blase J. Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, condemned the church for letting him speak. In 2020 the Nation's official YouTube channel was removed for hate speech.

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• 8. Alliances and Theories

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  In 1985, Farrakhan obtained $5 million in working capital as an interest-free loan from Libya's Islamic Call Society. It was to be repaid within 18 months and used to start a toiletries company employing black workers. Muammar Gaddafi had also offered him guns to begin a black nation. Farrakhan said he told Gaddafi he would rather have an economic investment in black America.

  In January 1996, during another visit to Libya, Gaddafi pledged him a gift of $1 billion and a personal award of $250,000. The transfer was blocked because the US government had restricted economic activity with Libya since 1986. It was unclear whether Gaddafi could have paid in any case. A month later, on the 18th of February 1996, Farrakhan visited Turkey at the invitation of its leading Islamist politician, Necmettin Erbakan. He told Erbakan's Welfare Party officials that the Turkish people must decide between secular and Islamic government.

  At a Chicago press conference on the 31st of March 2011, Farrakhan said Obama's support for the rebels in Libya would hasten the arrival of UFOs, or divine spaceships, as punishment for black suffering. When Gaddafi was killed in October 2011, Farrakhan blamed Obama's advisors, whom he called wicked demons.

  In 2008 Farrakhan supported Barack Obama, then a candidate for president. Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the senator had not solicited the minister's support and objected to his past pronouncements. Obama "rejected and denounced" Farrakhan's backing during an NBC presidential debate. Farrakhan later told BET that he had been careful never to endorse Obama, and that the media had said otherwise.

  By the 28th of May 2011, he had turned on Obama. Speaking at the American Clergy Leadership Conference, he called the president an assassin and a murderer over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the intervention in Libya.

  During the 2016 Republican primaries, Farrakhan praised Donald Trump as the only candidate who had told the Jewish community he did not want its money. He declined to endorse him but said he liked what he was looking at. In 2018 he praised Trump again, including for destroying the enemies of black advancement. Commentators Candace Owens and Glenn Beck both noted the praise, and Beck urged reconciliation between conservatives and Farrakhan.

  The Church of Scientology came into his orbit in the late 1990s, when the musician Isaac Hayes introduced him to its teachings. On the 8th of May 2010, Farrakhan announced his embrace of Dianetics. He urged Nation members to undergo auditing, though he stressed that he was not a Scientologist. In his 2011 Saviour's Day speech he said all white people should flock to L. Ron Hubbard.

  At the third Nation of Islam Dianetics graduation, on Saviours Day 2013, nearly 8,500 members were reported to have undergone auditing. The Nation announced it had graduated 1,055 auditors and delivered 82,424 hours of auditing. The Church of Scientology certified the ceremony, which Shane Woodruff of its Celebrity Centre International attended.

  In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Farrakhan said there was a 25-foot hole under one of the levees that failed in New Orleans. He implied the levee was destroyed deliberately to wipe out the city's mostly black neighborhoods. He said Mayor Ray Nagin had told him about the crater. He also called the hurricane God's punishment of America for warmongering and racism.

  The Independent Levee Investigation Team of the University of California, Berkeley, countered his claims. It blamed floodwaters overtopping the levees, substandard materials in the repairs, and the age of the levees for the scour holes found at many of the breaks.

  That same year, a Black Entertainment Television poll voted Farrakhan its Person of the Year.

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