Elijah Muhammad lived through some of the most racially turbulent times in American history. He was born in 1897-a time of Jim Crow segregation and lynchings. As a young man, he experienced the worst of southern racism and eyewitnessed two separate lynchings. Later, he would be part of the Great Migration of over a million African Americans to the northern United States to escape the racism and poverty of the rural South.
He discovered, along with the other migrants, that the North was also rife with racism. And, with the onset of the Great Depression, the North experienced poverty as well, which hit African Americans disproportionately hard. However, a new religion, Islam, would transform him and his understanding of the world. After several years of struggle with obscurity and imprisonment, his movement, the Nation of Islam, would achieve phenomenal success and transform the lives of thousands of African Americans, including Malcolm X. Yet, despite devoting himself to Islam and the "uplifting" of African Americans, he would find himself reviled by other Muslims and even some leaders of the Civil Rights movement. Only after his death in 1975 was his remarkable influence on both American Islam and the African American struggle for equality.
Paul Lawrence Guthrie's 1992 work, Making of the Whiteman: History, Tradition and the Teachings of Elijah Muhammad, analyzes the Nation of Islam's theological framework concerning the creation of the white race and the Story of Yakub. The text frames these teachings as a mechanism for psychological emancipation and spiritual self-reliance among Black Americans.