FBI Report on Elijah Muhammad

Impact

After J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972 and in light of abuses during the Watergate scandal that enveloped the presidency of Richard Nixon that year (leading to his resignation in 1974), historians and politicians began a reexamination of Hoover’s legacy and tactics. In 1976 the FBI’s activities were investigated by the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, usually referred to as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee’s investigation revealed that FBI investigations often relied on infiltration of suspected subversive groups and on psychological warfare, including the planting of rumors, false reports, and other “dirty tricks”; harassment through the legal system; and illegal activities, including wiretapping, break-ins, vandalism, and violence. The FBI indeed used such methods in investigating the NOI, including infiltration—one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards was an FBI plant—wiretapping, and camera surveillance. In the eyes of many historians, these extralegal activities reflected the views and personality of the FBI’s longtime director, a public hero for much of his career, whose reputation was thus irretrievably tarnished.

The NOI survived, although its form would change radically. After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, leadership of the organization passed to his son, Warith Deen Mohammad. The son, however, rejected the deification of Wallace Fard Muhammad, brought the organizations closer to mainstream Islamic thinking, admitted white people, and changed the NOI’s name several times, eventually settling on American Society of Muslims. Numerous NOI members, though, resisted these changes and broke with the organization. Notable among them was Louis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott), who in 1981 created his own organization and adopted for it the name Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has continued to lead the reconstituted NOI into the twenty-first century—and in the process has attracted considerable controversy for his allegedly anti-Semitic comments as well as for views that some observers regard as outlandish. One was that Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, did so much damage because a hole was allowed to remain in the levee around New Orleans in a deliberate effort to wipe out the city’s black population. Another was that the H1N1 (“swine flu”) vaccine was developed as part of a conspiracy to reduce the earth’s population. Mainstream Americans regard Farrakhan and his organization as something of a fringe group, but both continue to elicit admiration among dispossessed Americans.