Founded by Wallace D. Fard in 1930s Detroit, MI, the Nation of Islam came to national prominence under Elijah Muhammad, who moved the organization’s national headquarters to Chicago, IL. Aiming at lower-class African Americans, Muhammad preached that whites were the devils and stressed both the need for self-help and a black capitalism for the whole community. The Nation was also socially conservative and very restrictive with regard to the rights of women.

Muhammad’s national spokesman, Malcolm X, helped the organization grow rapidly during the 1950s, establishing numerous temples around the country and heading Temple No. 11 in Boston and later Temple No. 7 in Harlem. The organization came to the national attention through a CBS documentary “The Hate that Hate Produced,” which focused on the Nation’s separatism and what the documentary described as the organization’s penchant for paramilitary methods of self-defense. Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam in March 1964, questioning many of Muhammad’s practices, and formed his own Islamic organization along with the Organization for African Unity He was assassinated a year later.

Following Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, his fifth son, Wallace Dean Muhammad, was chosen to succeed him. The new leader began to move the organization towards more orthodox Sunni Islam, leading to a split with Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X’s successor as national spokesman. In 1978, Farrakhan recreated the old Nation of Islam, retaining ideas of black nationalism, self-development and cultural conservatism.

Under Farrakhan, the Nation has been more actively political in this regard, following Malcolm X. It supported Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns (causing Jackson difficulties over anti-Semitism) and was linked to hostile foreign regimes like Libya. The Nation also provided the inspiration for 1996’s Million Man March.