Do For Self: The Visual Culture of the Nation of Islam

• In Event: Islam and Black Art: A Diasporic Aesthetics

Abstract

The NOI has been studied extensively by scholars interested in the history of race, religion, and politics in the United States. But the NOI’s visual output —clothing, apparel, logos, illustrations and documentary photographs — uses symbolic motifs that strategically place the organization firmly within an Islamic register. The NOI’s explicit Islamic imagery formed its identity, especially in its official newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, the most widely circulated, Black-operated newspaper between 1960 and 1975. Its visual contents juxtaposed religious and secular imagery important to its Black, progressive readership in highly creative ways.

It is widely known that the newspaper’s reporters were leaders in the Black press, exposing the horrors of the Vietnam War, genocide in Africa, and lynching and mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States. Less known is that Muhammad Speaks served as a major vehicle to promote Islam and to visually present the NOI’s Islamic identity. The newspaper’s “Islamic images” fulfilled three major goals: first, to show Islam as a major unifying creed for self-empowerment; second, to promote Islam as superior to Christianity during the Black Power era; and third, to argue that Islam offers the only means for the Black Man, as imagined in the NOI’s conception, to ultimately unshackle himself from the chains of white supremacy and Christian enslavement.

The Islamic images at the center of this presentation count among hundreds that I gathered from over five hundred issues of Muhammad Speaks, in the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection of print media and memorabilia, produced by anticolonial and antiwar movements as well as civil and labor rights groups. It also draws on extensive conversations with John Woodford, former Editor-in-Chief of Muhammad Speaks, whose voice joins my own in this brief exploration of the Islamic visual culture produced by the NOI during the 1960s and 70s.

Author

• Christiane Gruber, University of Michigan