How Elijah Poole Muhammad’s Experience Growing up in Cordele, Georgia Shaped the Philosophy of the Most Influential Head of the Nation of Islam
By
Authur J. Nance
African and Middle Eastern Religion
Dr. Modeste Nyimi
May 1, 2014

How Elijah Poole Muhammad’s Experience Growing up in Cordele, Georgia Shaped the Philosophy of the Most Influential Head of the Nation of Islam
Elijah Muhammad, son of a sharecropper, was born into poverty in Sandersville, Georgia, on in 1887. He was one of 13 children of William and Mariah (Hall) Poole; his father was a sharecropper, and his mother was a domestic worker. He grew up in the same town I grew up in as a child and where I was appointed in 2009 as the first African American in history to serve as the Chairman of the Board of Commissioners, Cordele, Georgia. He attended school only through the fourth grade and dropped out to begin working in sawmills and brickyards. At an early age, Elijah witnessed extreme prejudice and violence toward blacks. He experienced lynchings, racist employers, marginal wages, and other social and economic maladies which all played a role in his exodus from Cordele. This essay will explore how Poole’s early life in Cordele played key role in shaping in role in the Nation of Islam, leadership, and later life and legacy. Elijah Poole Muhammad’s leadership transformed the Nation of Islam.
Elijah Poole Muhammad’s early life began when his father, William Poole, Sr. and Mariah Hall joined in holy matrimony on January 9, 1887 in Sandersville, Georgia. William’s father, Irwin was a slave and was passed down as a fourteen year old youth to be a perpetual servant to Jane Swint. Irwin married a fair-skinned mulatto woman named Peggy, who gave birth to William Poole, Sr. Mariah’s mother, Ellen, was a mulatto, fathered by a slave master who had raped her enslaved mother. Ellen was very light in complexion and she had been separated from her mother through sale during slavery. This was around the time of reconstruction in the 1870s when General Sherman’s Army raided Georgia. However, the Ku Klux Klan stumped reconstruction out of Georgia.

The Poole family grew quickly during the 1890s. First, there was Annie born in 1889, followed by William Jr. (Billie), Fornie (Tommie), Hattie, and Lula. A second male baby was born in October 1997, a child who seemed somehow different from the rest. Mariah Poole believed in dreams and, when she was seven years old, she claimed to have had a vision that one day she would give birth to a male child of preeminent stature and importance. Fate would have it that his grandfather, who pastored Bold Spring and Union Baptist Church, teasingly called the baby Elijah “the Prophet,” and decided to name him Elijah.
By 1900, the Poole family left Sandersville and arrived in Cordele, Georgia. Cordele was undergoing significant changes. The population was around three hundred. Cordele attracted both a national highway and railway. By World War I, the town highlighted a Telephone Exchange building, a well-constructed water and sewerage system, electric lights, three newspapers, and other amenities as an expanding downtown area that included two cottonseed-oil mills, an ice factory, four hotels, three fertilizer plants, and two bottling plants, which serviced and employed the city’s growing population of 8,250.
However, segregation in Cordele was very apparent. The African American community was undoubtedly the worse off. Sharecropping and renting were the typical occupations of Cordele’s black majority, but some limited opportunities in mills and factories attracted men like William Poole. The move to Cordele did not greatly improved the Poole’s economic status, but it rehabilitated the social standing of William Poole because he took to the pulpit and was reenergized amongst the black Baptists of Cordele as a preacher. Elijah was deeply impressed by his father’s orations as he was allowed to sit in the “preacher set” as his father delivered his sermons.
Elijah acquired the will to preach and often had Monday morning theological duels with his father about discrepancies he sometimes discerned in the lessons of his father and other ministers. He lost confidence in his father’s teachings and this caused him to often pour over the Bible in solitude, looking for those gems of knowledge that his father had missed the prior Sunday. Although he was unsure of his comprehension of Scripture, he made himself two promises: 1) he would never become an official member of the church before the understanding that he sought was revealed to him and 2) he would never allow those he suspected of insincerely presenting themselves as believers to continue to do so without an abrasive challenge from him.
During his youthful struggles with theology, Elijah managed to acquire some education, though incomplete and brief. He attended the public schools for blacks in Cordele, walking as far as five miles to get to the languishing facilities provided for the less fortunate of Crisp County. He left school somewhere between fourth and ninth grade. Like other African American children in Cordele, Elijah, at age ten, had to work at home to help with the family’s survival. He chopped firewood and sold it for fifty cents to customers as they travelled from the countryside into town. The work was time consuming but provided bare compensation; poverty was constant with the Pooles. One of his sisters had to teach him lessons at night so satisfy his desire to learn. In the end, Elijah was amongst the 25 percent of Cordele blacks who stood at the chasm of illiteracy.
The excursions into town not only exposed Elijah and the other children to a quasi-urban setting, but marked the beginning of their training in the harsh school of Southern race relations. Elijah had learned a lot blacks and their history in Georgia from his parents and grandparents. On several occasions, he sat and listened intently to his grandmother’s tales of beatings that her sister had received during slavery. His grandfather shared poignant details about how religion had been used to reconcile slaves with their bondage and thus make them more manageable. Elijah heard of systems of debt slavery and peonage that still existed throughout Georgia where whole families could not leave their white creditors’ farm for years due to unsettled accounts. Worse still were the horrible rumors that certain rivers, lakes, and wooded wilderness areas carried the bones and skulls of many Black slaves from these plantations in so-called freedom times. Elijah was sickened and grieved by this to the point he promised himself to do something for his people when he became a man.
Elijah and his siblings experienced racial slurs and discrimination both in town and in rural areas. Most blacks, to exist within the uneasy peace of Crisp County, learned to cope with the hostile white community that dominated here. The family’s needs necessitated that all the able-bodied Poole children work and thus face white Cordele at least periodically. Needless to say the journeys to Cordele became unsafe and outright horrifying. In an effort to intimidate them, a white man revealed to him the severed ear of a black person. There was a lot of hatred and barbarity among whites. Cordele had a special reputation for midnight kidnappings and mob violence. Just three years following the Poole’s arrival in Cordele, a black man was found hanging from a tree on a public road close to the city.
Elijah came face to face to this worse horror in the winter of 1907 when he was taking firewood to town to sale and he saw a large crowd of whites shooting and hanging an eighteen year old black youth on a willow tree for allegedly raping a white woman without the benefit of a trial. Elijah could not understand how this could happen to a young man in the midst of his own people while all our grown men right there in the section watched and dared not intervene. The murder and subdued reaction of the African American community repulsed him, and his tears flowed. He cried for the blacks of Cordele, who in his view, allowed the killing to take place. This traumatic experience stayed with Elijah for the rest of his life and certainly made him susceptible to black separatist doctrines. At age sixteen, he left Cordele and moved to Macon, Georgia. The lynchings, racist employers, marginal wages, and other social and economic maladies caused Elijah and his family to want to head north. In April of 1923, Elijah, Clara, and their two children, and his parents all migrated to Detroit Michigan. They were tired of the white man’s brutality in Georgia.
The move from Cordele to Detroit seemed to be a good move for the Poole as they found their niche in Hamtramck, an independent municipality in the Detroit area. Hamtramck, and Detroit, were similar to Southern towns such as Macon, where a man could wander around for years, from job to job, never really achieving anything. Elijah and William fell into this pattern as did thousands of other blacks who had neither the skills nor social connections necessary to avoid job-hopping. William found preaching in high supply and low demand, and therefore, settled for taking a job with the city public works department. Elijah worked many different jobs but had a dispiriting chronicle of hirings and firings, layoffs and walkouts. His struggles with joblessness in the 1920s and 1930s debilitated him emotionally and caused him to lose resolve and led to him becoming an alcoholic. Elijah could routinely be found in the gutter, incessantly inebriated with cheap liquor and disillusionment. Sometimes he drank to unconsciousness in alleyways and Clara would find him and bring him in off the streets on her shoulders.
In 1931, Elijah’s malaise began to ease when one of his fathers’ friends, Brother Abdul Muhammad, introduced him to Wallace D. Fard, a former salesman preaching a new form of Islam tailored to the needs and problems of black Americans. Poole converted to Islam and adopted Fard’s teachings, and Fard gave him a new name, Elijah Muhammad, and a new way of life. Some of Fard’s doctrines, such as a cosmology that identified blacks as the original race and white people as “devils” created later by a mad scientist named Yakub, are still difficult to interpret. Other teachings, such as self-reliance, clean living and the promise of a future in which blacks would no longer be oppressed, had obvious appeal for Muhammad and other black Muslims. When Fard mysteriously disappeared in 1934, the Nation of Islam split into several rival factions. Muhammad moved a group of followers to Chicago, where he established Temple of Islam No. 2 as the new headquarters of the religion. There he began to spread the word of the Nation of Islam, slowly but steadily attracting new members. Muhammad was imprisoned from 1942 for 1946 for evading the draft. After his release, he returned to leadership of the Nation of Islam. He declared that Fard had been an incarnation of Allah and that he himself was now Allah’s messenger. Over the next 30 years, Muhammad built the religion from a small fringe group into a large and complex organization that attracted controversy along with its new prominence. He continued to preach financial independence for black Americans, racial separation rather than integration, and a strict code of moral behavior. His writings included Message to the Black Man (1965) and How to Eat to Live (1972). When Muhammad died of congestive heart failure on February 25, 1975, he left behind a thriving religious movement with a membership as high as 250,000. Its social and political influence was matched by the success of its financial enterprises: real estate holdings, a national newspaper called Muhammad Speaks and numerous independent businesses. His most famous disciples included civil rights activists Malcolm X, who had first corresponded with Muhammad from prison, and Louis Farrakhan. Elijah Muhammad, the founding father of The Nation of Islam and the forbear to Louis Farrakhan, has now emerged as one of the most significant black leaders of this century.