In the blue-collar, West Indian enclave here, where Louis Farrakhan grew up, black children were taught to pray, study hard and take pride in their heritage.
“These were mostly poor, working people who were proud and taught us that we were as good as anybody else, and we accepted that challenge,” said Kenneth Guscott, 69, a real estate broker who grew up next door to Farrakhan’s family.
“America was not in chaos then, and children went to piano lessons and elocution lessons and afternoon jobs,” said Elma Lewis, 73, who still lives nearby. “My family particularly loved Gene (the nickname by which Farrakhan was then known) because he was a warm, smiling, obedient, well-directed young man.
“This was never a boy who needed correcting. This was a right boy.”
An earnest, bright-eyed youth, Louis carried the cross at St. Cyprian’s church. At English High School, he made the honor role his first two years and ran track in the shadow of his quicker and more streetwise brother.
But along the way for Farrakhan, the notion of black advancement became racial separatism, and black pride spawned racial hatred.
And over the years, through the dark betrayals and Byzantine palace intrigues that marked his rise through the Nation of Islam, Farrakhan became something larger than life: a leader of the masses and an empire builder.
Today, he is chauffeured to appointments in a 28-foot stretch limousine that is “fit for a head of state,” according to his newspaper, The Final Call.
Farrakhan favors mustard, mauve and raspberry silk suits, thin Italian shoes and gold that glitters from his fingers, cuffs and sunglasses.
“He wears the colors of life,” said his Philadelphia tailor Ron Wilch. “Nothing dreadful, nothing dark.”
The 61-year-old grandfather can bench press 400 pounds and outrun a teenager, according to his aides.
Black business people who have been entertained in his Hyde Park mansion say that Farrakhan often ends the evening with contrite comments about Jews and whites and then cradles a violin against his neck and draws from it the plaintive melodies of Felix Mendelssohn.
Across America, he packs stadiums and civic meeting halls with fans who chant the three syllables of his name, and for hours at a stretch he holds them bolted to their seats, enraptured as he rocks on his heels and improvises long, incantory riffs that blend the Bible with black pride, race-baiting with admonitions to live clean.
At recent appearances, he has begun to compare himself to Christ. He says he is being crucified by federal officials who fear his ability to mobilize black people.
“The first stage is persecution in the media, the second stage is to bring me before the courts,” he said at the Chicago mosque on Easter Sunday 1994.
“They want to hold me in prison-at least a year or more, so they can work on me. Put stuff in your food. They don’t want me dead, they want me discombobulated mentally.”
He said, “I love the thought of dying for you.”
Facets of the man who so fascinates and frightens America are revealed in court records, the hours of his taped speeches and the recollections of those who knew him at various stages of his life.
But the particulars of his biography do not add up to the whole of Louis Farrakhan, because he has reinvented himself.
“My family didn’t produce me; I produced them,” he told an audience last year. “The people . . . called me into existence.”
He was born in New York in the spring of 1933 and named Louis Eugene Walcott, after his father, who left Louis’ mother unmarried and raising two sons on welfare.
Sarah Mae Clarke moved to Boston and rented a flat in a brick rowhouse on Shawmut Avenue. Born in 1900 on St. Kitts Island, she sewed the jackets that Louis and his older brother Alvan wore, gave them books that inspired their belief in the nobility of the black race and worked as a maid to finance their violin and piano lessons.
Alvan aspired to be a jazz pianist, and Louis wrote in the 1950 yearbook that he was going to the Juilliard School of Music to study violin.
Instead, he spent two years at the predominantly black Winston-Salem State Teachers College in North Carolina and then dropped out to sing in clubs.
In 1953, smoking “a reefer or two or three or four” as he put it in a later interview, Louis Walcott pressed a Calypso single, “Belly to Belly, Back to Back,” and took a stage name “The Charmer.”
It was Malcolm X who brought the “right boy” back to church.
Hardened by his encounters with cocaine and prison, and burning with a bright, fast faith, Malcolm had been preaching in Boston since 1952, building a following as he spread the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the Georgia preacher’s son who claimed to have met God in the person of a Detroit silk seller.
Elijah, to Farrakhan, was a distant, distrustful patriarch.
“Minister Farrakhan learned from the messenger, but he learned it at a distance,” said Minister Abdul Akbar Muhammad, one of Farrakhan’s closest aides, in a series of lectures that form the Nation’s official history. Elijah taught Farrakhan “when everybody was there at the same time and he didn’t give him any special teaching,” Akbar said.
Still, when Elijah made Farrakhan Boston’s minister in 1957, after Malcolm moved to Harlem, Farrakhan preached with an unrestrained exuberance.
“He would sing on the spur of the moment-not popular tunes but something that was a compliment to Elijah Muhammad or a put-down of Caucasians,” said Abdul Karim Hasan, a former New Haven, Conn., Nation of Islam minister who now heads an orthodox Islamic mosque in Los Angeles.
In 1960, Farrakhan set Elijah Muhammad’s stern philosophy to a Calypso beat, producing “White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell.”
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He wrote a play called “Orgena,” which is “a Negro” spelled backward. It concerned God’s judgment of white people and usually featured its author in a starring role.
But while Minister Louis X, as he was called during the 1950s and ’60s, was expanding his talents, Malcolm X was plumbing the corruption that lay hidden at the heart of Elijah Muhammad’s empire.
Forced tithes and conscripted newspaper sales provided an extravagant lifestyle for Elijah and his family, Malcolm learned, and he blamed “the criminal operation of the black Muslim movement” for violence against its members. Also, he discovered that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children by several of his teenage secretaries and then cast those women out of the mosque.
When Malcolm told Farrakhan of Muhammad’s philandering, Farrakhan immediately told Muhammad.
“Of course I mentioned it to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, which I told Malcolm I was going to do,” Farrakhan said in a 1985 interview with the National Alliance newspaper. “Now some may call that opportunistic, I don’t know, but I am a loyal man to my father.”
In 1964, Malcolm broke with the Nation completely, making a pilgrimage to Jedda, helping two former secretaries file paternity suits in Los Angeles County Superior Court and starting his own Organization for Afro-American Unity.
Farrakhan filled five pages of the Nation’s newspaper with attacks on his former mentor, saying in an editorial that “such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.”
At the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965, after calling out the Arabic greeting of peace, “As salaam alaikum,” Malcolm X was slain in a barrage of gunfire.
Three Nation followers were convicted of the killing, but none of the many journalists and historians who have studied the murder calls it solved.
In recent books and films, the circle of culpability has extended to include the New York City police who were so sanguine about the threats to Malcolm’s life; federal authorities who infiltrated Malcolm’s breakaway black power group and exacerbated the tensions between him and the Nation; and Elijah Muhammad himself, who said five days after the killing, “Malcolm X just got what he preached.”
While denying any direct involvement in the plot, Farrakhan conceded in a 1994 Chicago speech that he helped create an “atmosphere in which our brother was assassinated.”
But he offered no apologies: “Elijah Muhammad had fierce men with him, and women, who loved him, and if we saw you doing evil to him, it inspired in us a desire to do evil to you.”
Malcolm’s death cleared the way for Farrakhan’s ascent, but Farrakhan has struggled since to clear his name.
“Because (Malcolm) died, I have a chance to live and do the work that he wanted to do, but it wasn’t for him to do,” Farrakhan said in a 1980 speech. But “the very people I worked for and in behalf of hated me and now want to take my life.”
That hatred re-emerged in January, when Malcolm’s 34-year-old daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, was charged in Minnesota with hiring a federal informant to murder Farrakhan. Shabazz feared that Farrakhan would seek vengeance on her mother, Betty Shabazz, who has publicly accused Farrakhan of responsibility for Malcolm’s death.
In a taped conversation that was released by federal prosecutors, Shabazz told the informant, “I do think that eventually he’s going to, in a very slick way, have her killed, OK, so it’s either him or my mother.”
Like Shabazz’s lawyers, Farrakhan says she was set up by the government. She awaits trial.
After Malcolm X’s death, the trajectory of Farrakhan’s public career followed the bright path of his slain mentor. Elijah Muhammad made Farrakhan head minister of the Harlem mosque in May 1965 and the Nation’s national representative in 1967, but nothing Farrakhan did could convince Elijah of his loyalty.
“The messenger said, never again will I teach another minister like I taught Malcolm,” Akbar said.
In long, late-night phone calls to Wallace Muhammad, Elijah’s son and heir apparent, Farrakhan tried to fathom his place in the new Nation, and he poured out his desire for the access and intimacy that Malcolm had.
Two of his children married Elijah’s relatives, but a cloud hung over the weddings.
“My father told me to keep an eye on him because he was trying to use the family,” said Elijah Muhammad Jr., who oversaw the security of the Nation during the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1968, Elijah Muhammad made Farrakhan his radio spokesman, and Elijah’s inner circle gave a him a new nickname. “He was called Velvet Mouth,” Elijah Jr. said in a recent interview.
In September 1974, his lungs racked with infections and his heart failing, Elijah checked into Mercy Hospital under the name Charles Evans, and within weeks, Wallace Muhammad told the ministers that he would lead the Nation.
Farrakhan had late-night meetings in the Harlem mosque with men he thought were loyal to him, but they sent back secret tapes to Elijah Jr. in Chicago.
“He spoke to 12, 1 o’clock at night, trying to convince them that he would be the leader. It was obvious that he knew he was losing ground,” Elijah Jr. said.
On the eve of the Nation’s annual Savior’s Day convention in 1975, Elijah died of congestive heart failure. At the convention, Farrakhan wept and called himself Wallace Muhammad’s most loyal disciple.
Educated in the orthodox Muslim universities of Cairo, Wallace dismantled the empire Elijah had created, dissolving its centralized financial operation and turning his followers toward orthodox Islam.
In June 1975, he transferred Farrakhan from the Harlem mosque to the Nation’s Chicago headquarters so he could be more closely watched.
Farrakhan, then 41, chafed silently in the twice-weekly classes Wallace created for ministers to study the Koran and learn the Arabic language of its prayers.
“He was in a daze,” said Shampsud-Din Ali, a former Nation minister who now heads an orthodox mosque in Philadelphia. “He appeared to be like a terrified individual. I kept thinking, here is a spokesman without anybody to tell him what to say.”
In November 1975, Wallace gave Farrakhan $50,000 “for the many years of sacrifice and hard work rendered to the Nation,” according to a court report Wallace filed pertaining to his father’s estate. A few weeks later, Farrakhan bought a rambling brick house in the Beverly neighborhood, a gray stone estate that would later be his new headquarters.
In the summer of 1977, Wallace offered Farrakhan the position of minister in New York, but according to his old friend, Abdul Karim Hasan, Farrakhan said he would not “be a prostitute for anybody anymore.”
“Those were his words as God is my witness,” Hasan said. “He said, `Why should I do it for anybody else when I can do it for myself?’ “
Farrakhan returned to Chicago and turned the job down.
As Farrakhan recounted their meeting in a 1980 speech, “I said the only way I could go back to New York is if all of the lies that were spoken against me (about Malcolm’s slaying) were cleared up.”
Wallace Muhammad also remembers their talk.
Farrakhan “went into a trance with me and said he was destined to lead his people,” Wallace said. “He’s a dramatist.”
In the fall of 1977, Farrakhan announced he was re-creating the Nation of Islam.
“We who are the disciples of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad should bring that program back-stand on it, don’t alter it, don’t change it, don’t corrupt it,” he told a crowd of about 1,000 at his “First National Message to an Oppressed People” at Martin Luther King High School in Chicago in 1978.
Wallace Muhammad, who is now called Warith Mohammed, continued to lead his followers into the Muslim mainstream.
On any Friday, an estimated 750,000 regular members attend services at some 200 mosques affiliated with his ministry, making it the second-largest Muslim organization in North America, according to a 1994 study by the Islamic Resource Institute in Fountain Valley, Calif.
The Nation of Islam was not included in that study because its teachings are heretical to mainstream Muslims. Estimates of the Nation’s membership generally have centered on about 20,000 regularly mosque-attending members, but range from 10,000 to 200,000 members.
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In 1980, Farrakhan returned to New York City and gave what his newspaper calls “his first major address.” In a seminal City Colleges speech that marked his emergence as the populist leader, he spelled out the foundation of his new Nation of Islam.
“The white man is our mortal enemy, and we cannot accept him,” he said. “I will fight to see that that vicious beast goes down into the lake of fire prepared for him from the beginning, that he never rise again to give any innocent black man, woman or child the hell that he has delighted in pouring upon us for 400 years. And I’m home to stay!”
Since then, Farrakhan has continued to predict that America is nearing a holy race war.
Farrakhan says that a giant spacecraft called the Mother Wheel is floating 40 miles above the Earth, waiting to rain down bombs on a divinely ordained day when white people will be destroyed and blacks who have embraced Nation will be lifted to majesty.
In 1985 Farrakhan said he was seized by a vision in which he was taken aboard a small spacecraft and transported through a beam of light to the Mother Wheel.
Once docked there, he says, he heard the voice of Elijah Muhammad.
“As he spoke, a scroll full of cursive writing rolled down in front of my eyes, but it was a projection of what was being written in my mind,” Farrakhan said in a 1989 speech.
Then last year, he told a Nation convention: “I’m telling white folk, you (are) standing right now at the door of divine judgment.”
In that speech, as he often does, Farrakhan mocked orthodox Muslims and added that Catholics “subject black people to a white kind of theology that strips us of ourselves.”
He told Jews, “Don’t say you haven’t sucked our blood.”
Arabs “took over from the Jews and you own the stores in our community now, and you sucked the life from us,” he said. And “Koreans, you come, sucking our blood.”
As the speech ended a woman cried from the crowd, “I love you, Farrakhan!”
“I love you too,” he called back, “but remember that disorganized love is not as effective as organized hate.”