"Those Who Say Don't Know and Those Who Know Don't Say": The Nation of Islam and the Politics of Black Nationalism, 1930-1975

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates the centrality of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and black nationalist politics to the modern black freedom movement. The Nation of Islam’s activism in prisons, courtrooms, and on college campuses - spaces both familiar and unfamiliar to narratives of black struggle - broadens our understanding of black politics during the postwar period. The NOI was not apolitical as some scholars have claimed. It was a religious black nationalist organization which pursued its political objectives with intentionality. While its politics and religion were sometimes in tension, they should not be seen in contradiction. Black nationalism’s importance has often been discussed only insofar as it shaped the development of Black Power in the late 1960s. However, it was a crucial stream of black political thought during the postwar period and played a significant role in shaping the discourse, aims, and objectives of these freedom struggles.

Reconsidering the place and scope of black nationalism allows us to expand the boundaries of black liberation movements in several crucial ways. First, it reveals a more contoured freedom movement in which the dominant objectives and strategies were a contested terrain within black communities themselves. Integration, direct-action protest, and nonviolence, were merely one expression of black political struggle. Secondly, this dissertation changes who we see as participants in its labor and theorization. What we see as legitimate politics also informs who we see as legible activists. The activism of the NOI highlights the role of the black working class, especially in the North during a period which has often centered professionals, educators, and the middle-class. Finally, this history of the NOI seeks to expand our spatial lens. Over the last decade, historians have urged that the movement be seen north and west of the Mason-Dixon Line. As a predominantly northern, urban phenomenon, the Nation of Islam fits within this impulse to examine the broader movement outside the South. But exploring the Nation of Islam’s activism also illuminates new sites of struggle. Reconsidering and revaluing black nationalist politics during this period moves the movement’s historical narrative beyond the mythic unity of a monolithic movement and towards a better understanding of our current struggles against police brutality, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.