Richard Allen
Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the Free African Society. He was born a slave in Philadelphia and with his family was sold to Stockley Sturgis, the owner of a plantation near Dover, Delaware.
Peter Williams, Sr.
1749 – 1823
Although he was a slave, Williams became a sexton in the Methodist Church in 1778. When his owner returned to England in 1783, the church trustees purchased Williams. Upset that churches were segregated, Williams helped establish the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, chartered in 1801. The first black church in New York, it is the forerunner of the denomination of that name today.
Fred Shuttlesworth
As pastor of Birmingham, Alabama’s First Baptist Church, Shuttlesworth organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in 1956. He served as president of the group until 1969 and spearheaded the movement to integrate Birmingham’s schools, offices, and public facilities.
Shuttlesworth worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr., establishing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1958 and organizing the protests and actions in Birmingham during the spring of 1963. He was secretary of the SCLC from 1958 to 1970. He continues his campaign for racial and social justice as a minister in Cincinnati.
Father Divine
1882 ? 1965. b. probably near Savannah, Ga. and named George Baker. After preaching in the South, he moved to Harlem (1915) in New York City, became one of the neighborhood’s biggest landlords, acquired wealth through other businesses, including restaurants and grocery stores, and began styling himself Major M. J. Divine, later Father Divine. Although once dismissed as a cult leader, he built the largest religious movement in northern ghettos during the Great Depression. His role as an early civil-rights activist?he led anti-lynching campaigns, instituted economic cooperatives, and organized political action against racial discrimination?has come to be more appreciated. The movement spread beyond New York City to other places in the United States and abroad, sometimes after the group sent whites to purchase property in segregated areas. During the 1940s, his health and influence declined, but his movement symbolized the progressive spirit in the black church and helped define the church’s active role in the civil-rights movement.
Wallace D. Fard
Also called WALLI FARRAD, FARRAD MOHAMMED, F. MOHAMMED ALI, or WALLACE FARD MUHAMMAD (b. c. 1877, Mecca–d. 1934?), Mecca-born founder of the Nation of Islam (sometimes called Black Muslim) movement in the United States.
Fard immigrated to the United States sometime before 1930. In that year, he established in Detroit the Temple of Islam as well as the University of Islam, which was the temple’s school, and the Fruit of Islam, a corps of male guards. Fard preached that blacks (who were not to be called Negroes) must prepare for an inevitable race war and that Christianity was the religion of slaveowners. Accordingly, he gave his followers Arabic names to replace those that had originated in slavery. Fard offered blacks a credo of moral and cultural superiority to their white oppressors. In 1934 he disappeared without a trace. Members of the movement believe Fard to be the incarnation of Allah, and his birthday, February 26, is observed as Saviour’s Day.
Elijah Muhammad
Elijah Muhammad’s original name was Elijah Poole. He was born on Oct. 7, 1897, in Sandersville, Ga.. He passed away on Feb. 25, 1975, in Chicago. He was the leader of the black separatist religious movement known as the Nation of Islam (sometimes called Black Muslims) in the United States.
Elijah was the son of sharecroppers and former slaves. In 1923, Muhammad moved to Detroit to find work. Around 1930 he became an assistant minister to the founder of the sect, Wallace D. Fard, at Temple No. 1. When Fard disappeared in 1934 Muhammad succeeded him as head of the movement, with the title “Minister of Islam.” Because of dissension within the Detroit temple, he moved to Chicago where he established Temple No. 2. During World War II he advised followers to avoid the draft, as a result of which he was charged with violating the Selective Service Act and was jailed (1942-46).
Muhammad slowly built up the membership of the Black Muslims through assiduous recruitment in the postwar decades. His program called for the establishment of a separate nation for black Americans and the adoption of a religion based on the worship of Allah and on the belief that blacks are his chosen people. Muhammad became known especially for his flamboyant rhetoric directed at white people, whom he called “blue-eyed devils.” In his later years, however, he moderated his antiwhite tone and stressed self-help among blacks rather than confrontation between the races. Because of Muhammad’s separatist views, his most prominent disciple, Malcolm X, broke with the group. Before his assassination in 1965, helped to lend an identity to the group (once known as the American Muslim Mission and now part of the worldwide orthodox Muslim community) that split from the Nation of Islam after Muhammad’s death in 1975.
Another group, retaining both the name and the founding principles of Elijah Muhammad’s original Nation of Islam, was established under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan, another minister of Elijah. The original Nation of Islam is now referred to as The Lost Found Nation of Islam.