THE FOUNDER AND PROPHET of the MSTA, Timothy Drew, was born in North Carolina, on January 8, 1886, by his own account. Greensboro is mentioned as his birthplace; it was a town of some 2,100 inhabitants at the time of the 1880 Census, with a long history of settlement including of the Quakers — First Lady Dolley Madison was born in present-day Greensboro in 1768 — and with its own War of Independence battle in 1781. During slavery it was a station on the Underground Railway; the abolitionist businessman Levi Coffin opened a Sunday school for slaves in 1821 which was however swiftly suppressed; during the Civil War, it was Confederate territory. Its population grew steadily; in 1910 it encompassed approximately 15,895 souls.
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| Photo: Drinking at "Colored" Water Cooler in Streetcar Terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (July 1939) By Russell Lee From Library of Congress, prob. public domain |
The south at the end of the 1800s was plagued by Jim Crow laws, segregation, and lynching,1 as it would continue to be until the 1950s. The Emancipation Proclamation had been passed in 1863, but so was the segregationalists' legal cornerstone Plessy v. Ferguson in the Supreme Court in 1889. There were serious miscarriages of justice, like the Scottsboro case in 1931. As far as voting rights were concerned, even in 1957 a Mississippi teacher — an African American — who tried to register to vote had obstacles set in his path. Then he was informed that the attention of the Ku Klux Klan had been drawn upon him, so he was under police protection for a time.2
There were continued attempts at procuring an education and establishing businesses, likewise in the north. Even before Booker T. Washington founded his National Negro Business League in 1900, there were thousands of African American businesses. Only two banks numbered amongst them, but by the end of the decade the quantity was 'nearly fifty.' A minuscule fraction of African Americans had also gone to college by 1899 (1,914 in the thirty-four black institutions and 390 in white ones, which included prestigious institutions like Bowdoin and Oberlin colleges; and women were among them). Newspapers proliferated and, in a few cases, had over a hundred thousand readers.
American culture of the turn of the century, and later, certainly facilitated the success of African Americans in the arts, if only in spotty fashion. Sidney Poitier, for instance, was only nominated for an Academy Award in 1958, after a lot of cinematic water had gone under the bridge.
Yet the real turning-points in civil rights came later — Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1967, and in fact the entire mainstream civil rights movement with Martin Luther King, Jr. and its other leading figures.
In the interim, then, millions of African Americans from the South went northwards, in what would be termed the Great Migration. Even there segregation and discrimination were in force: in Malcolm X's autobiography he mentions that New York hotels below Harlem would refuse to host black guests; in the capital city of the United States, members of the African American middle class, living alongside abysmal poverty,3 had such low expectations that Malcolm X caricatured them: "For the Negro in Washington, mail-carrying was a prestige job." In terms of health care, the infant mortality rate (out of 1000 live births) for African American was 181.2 in 1915 and 99.9 in 1930. There were race riots in Harlem (1935, 1943), in Chicago (1905, 1919), even in Ocoee, Florida (1919), and throughout the century. While there were already African American businessmen, and yet in the estimation of a panel which included W.E.B. DuBois, speaking in 1907 of "Negro Americans":
they unwittingly stand hesitating at the cross roads--one way leading to the old trodden ways of grasping fierce individualistic competition, where the shrewd, cunning, skilled and rich among them will prey upon the ignorance and simplicity of the mass of the race and get wealth at the expense of the general well being; the other way leading to co-operation in capital and labor, the massing of small savings, the wide distribution of capital and a more general equality of wealth and comfort. This latter path of co-operative effort has already been entered by many; we find a wide development of industrial and sick relief, many building and loan associations, some co-operation of artisans and considerable co-operation in retail trade. Indeed from the fact that there is among Negroes, as yet, little of that great inequality of wealth distribution which marks modern life, nearly all their economic effort tends toward true economic co-operation. But danger lurks here. The race does not recognize the parting of the ways
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| North Wabash Avenue and St. James Cathedral By C. William Brubaker, in 1976 via UIC Digital Collections - Flickr, Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 |
AT THE time there were continuing religious tensions.Christianity became, to some degree, associated with the racist social order and even violent individual outbursts. As Muhammad Shakir, an ex-secretary and captain of the Nation of Islam in Pittsburgh, put it, "the white man — as soon as he get mad, the first thing he do is come up on your lawn and put a cross there and burn his religion right in your face." There were still outright, old and new African American churches: the National Baptist Convention of America, National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc — both Baptist; the Church of God in Christ, which is Pentecostal; and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and Colored Methodist Episcopal Church — all Methodist; and the Father's Divine Peace Mission and the United House of Prayer for All People.
White Americans were in their own religious foment, within and outside of the Christian church. 'Eastern' religions, whether authentic or not, enjoyed a certain popularity, and theosophy, spiritualism and even modified Islam itself were taken up by enthusiasts. They suffered little interference from knowledge of indigenous Islam since the Muslim community in the US then was scattered and not always observant. In the 19th century, faiths like the Mormon and Christian Science churches had emerged from the Christian tradition and been met with considerable witticisms and forthright denunciation.5 Church attendance generally increased; if one compares statistics gathered by the Christian Herald with the US Census, it rose from 48.11% in 1930 to 54.09% in 1950.
Another endeavour at uplift which was not religious came from Marcus Garvey, the widely travelled Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.), in the 1910s. He was Nation of Islam-like in his faith in African American economic independence, one of a longer tradition of pan-African thinkers, and a much admired figure during his best days. Though he was an embattled figure and sabotaged by law enforcement, he undoubtedly helped inspire the Moorish Science Temple and other organizations which were to come.
*
It was in this civic landscape, specifically in Newark, where in 1913 (which is still honoured as the year of founding in Moorish temple inscriptions) Timothy Drew seems to have built his proto-Moorish Science Temple: the Canaanite Temple.
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United States Summary: 2000: Population and Housing Unit Counts. Census 2000. 44, 160. 6 Apr. 2004. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. [Link]
"Dolley Payne Todd Madison." The White House. Web. 13 Oct. 2012. [http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/first-ladies/dolleymadison]
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Gill, Tiffany M. Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry. USA: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 7. Web. [Google Books]
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GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz. A History of Islam in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 113, 116, 125, 127, 129-130. Print.
Ibid., 166, 184.
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Ibid., 72-73
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Bown, Patrick D. "Abdul Hamid Suleiman and the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple." Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 2.13 (2011): 21. Web. [http://du.academia.edu/PatrickBowen/Papers/1138024/Abdul_Hamid_Suleiman_and_the_Origins_of_the_Moorish_Science_Temple]
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GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz. A History of Islam in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 193-4. Print.
"American Experience: Marcus Garvey." PBS. Web. 10 Oct. 2012. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/filmmore/fd.html]
"Academy Awards Database." AMPAS. Web. 26 Sept. 2012. [Search for "Sidney Poitier." http://awardsdatabase.oscars.org/ampas_awards/DisplayMain.jsp;jsessionid=CACB7D29A8211373FA4BE53223124889?curTime=1348638789897]
Bundles, A'Lelia. Madam C.J. Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. 45. Web. [Google Books]
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Footnotes 14, 17 and 39. Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 262. Web. [Google Books]
Allen, Willie T. Interview by Worth Long. Civil Rights Documentation Project. University of Southern Mississippi, 2000. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. [http://www.usm.edu/crdp/html/transcripts/manuscript-allen_willie-t.shtml]
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***
N.B.: For the preservation of sanity, I have not put these preceding endnotes or following footnotes into the correct order yet, and page numbers given in the endnotes may be incomplete.
***
1 3,437 African Americans and 1,293 white Americans were killed from the years 1882 to 1951, according to the Tuskegee Institute's records; among them were some 76 African American and 16 European American women. There was apparently a general growth in disapproval and a "sharp decline" in lynchings after 1922; it
undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that early in that year the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was passed in the House of Representatives. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill provided fines and imprisonment for persons convicted of lynching in federal courts, and fines and penalties against states, counties, and towns which failed to use reasonable efforts to protect citizens from mob violence. It was killed in the Senate by the filibuster of the Southern senators who claimed that anti-lynching legislation would be unconstitutional and an infringement upon states' rights. However, the long discussion of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was of great importance to the decline.
2 Willie T. Allen. His interview is part of an online oral history archive, whose transcripts are well worth reading: [Link].
3 "I had seen a lot, but never such a dense concentration of stumblebums, pushers, hookers, public crap-shooters, even little kids running around at midnight begging for pennies [. . .]". (Autobiography of Malcolm X, p. 72)
4 Depressingly enough, by 1986 the black prison admissions rate was 18.4 times that of the white, namely 342 vs. 63 per 100,000 inhabitants.
5 E.g. Christian Science (1907) by Mark Twain.
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