FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad

About the Author

It is unknown who actually composed the FBI’s report on Elijah Muhammad, which was likely the work of numerous agents. The compilers were certainly acting under the authority of the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, so the very existence of the report reflected Hoover’s preoccupations. Little is known about Hoover’s early life. John Edgar Hoover was born on January 1, 1885, in Washington, D.C. He attended George Washington University, where he completed a law degree in 1917. During World War I, he worked at the U.S. Justice Department, where he earned an appointment as the head of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section at a time when Americans felt deep unease about potentially subversive foreign influences and about immigration, particularly from places like Russia and eastern Europe. In 1919 he was appointed head of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division, which over the next two years arrested some ten thousand suspected political radicals. Hoover was appointed deputy director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigation in 1921. In 1924 he was appointed acting head of the bureau. On May 10, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed him director of the bureau, which changed its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.

For nearly five decades Hoover dominated federal law enforcement. Almost single-handedly, he forged the image of American “G-men” (government men) who exhibited “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity” (the FBI’s motto) in fighting crime. Beginning in 1924 until his death in 1972, he turned the bureau into a highly efficient professional organization. His reputation was perhaps greatest during the Great Depression, when many Americans came to see the nation’s financial institutions as adversaries. Accordingly, when a rash of daring bank robberies broke out in the 1930s, some Americans were almost sympathetic to the colorful, quasi-romantic outlaws who became household names, including John Dillinger, “Machine Gun” Kelly, Ma Barker, and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker—the infamous “Bonnie and Clyde.” Local authorities, helpless to stop these robberies, called in the bureau’s help. Many of its investigations, including the one that led to the gunning down of John Dillinger in Chicago, were highly publicized and captured the public’s imagination. It was largely as a result of these successes that the bureau’s powers were expanded.

During the 1930s, Hoover took advantage of the FBI’s growing reputation and influence to expand its recruitment efforts, create the FBI Laboratory to examine forensic evidence, and form the Identification Division, which assembled the world’s largest collection of fingerprints. In the years leading up to World War II and beyond, Hoover’s greatest concern was the threat of foreign subversives and saboteurs on American soil. This concern with subversion deepened during the cold war, when Hoover’s focus was on Communism and then on antiwar and revolutionary groups, including members of the civil rights movement and anyone associated with the Black Power or black nationalist movements. Hoover died on May 2, 1972.