Freedom, Justice, and Equality: the Development of Boston's Temple # 11

African American Islam deserves serious study both as a unique reformist movement in Islam and as a vital development in African American religion. The 40-year development of African American Islam preceding the  1954 establishment of Boston’s Muhammad Temple of Islam Number Eleven had produced a markedly different movement from the Black Protestant mainstream. Primarily musicians, the founders of Temple # 11 were attracted to the Nation of Islam's mysticism, ethnic pride, and self-help programs for individual and community growth.  The 1948 to 1998 growth of Boston’s Temple Number Eleven illustrates the impact of Elijah Muhammad's religious, cultural, and economic movement on an African-American urban community in post-World War II America. With an influence dwarfing its immediate circle of believers, Temple Number Eleven catalyzed a cultural transformation in which Boston’s Negro neighborhoods became an assertive African-American community. Symbolic of this process, a  2020 plebiscite renamed Roxbury’s Dudley Square  Nubian Square, immortalizing the Dudley Square Nubian Notion business of Temple Number 11 pioneer Malik Abdal-Khallaq.

A call to serious study of African American Islam may seem misplaced given the contemporary flowering of scholarship on American Islam. However, this argument becomes clearer when Imam Waritudeen Mohammed’s 1978 call to scholars at the American Academy of Religion in New Orleans and his 2000 call to scholars at Harvard Divinity School are brought into the conversation. In both instances, the son and successor of Elijah Muhammad challenged scholars to investigate the development of the Nation of Islam as an Islamic movement rooted in the centuries-long struggle of African Americans for independent religious vision and catalyzed by a serious reform movement in the global Muslim ummah (community). My mapping of Islamic development in Boston returns to these dual analytic lenses to assess the impact of African American Islam on Boston’s religious and cultural history during the last half of the Twentieth Century.

In my research on the development of Boston’s Temple # 11,  I delve into the cultural, residential,  and economic networks that fostered the growth of African American Islam in Boston. These networks significantly influenced African American identity and community development in Boston.  I map the demographic changes that influenced the existing institutions of the Negro community, the migration patterns to and from Boston, and the cultural and economic interactions between new arrivals and established residents. Veterans, businessmen and women, migrants, and especially jazz and bebop musicians played a pivotal role in forming Boston's African-American Islamic community and establishing its social, economic, and educational institutions. The contribution of African-American musicians to this process is a significant aspect of the movement's history.

The NOI’s Temple # 11 directly introduced independent Islamic schools open to all African American children into the city during the 1960s, produced and performed plays before sold-out majority non-Muslim audiences at John Hancock Hall, and redesigned economic districts through African-American ownership. This paper shows how these pioneering activities continued to shape and mold a generation of leaders, organizations, and institutions of cultural and economic significance for African American Bostonians. The University of Islam was the forerunner to Boston’s Sister Clara Muhammad Schools and a catalyst in the development of Roxbury Medical and Technical Institute, which eventually, as an accredited community college, became the only HBCU in New England. In 1950, there was not much 'Black Nationalist' activity championed by leadership within Boston. Such direction was reintroduced and popularized by Temple# 11. During the 1950s, Black Boston emphasized employment opportunities for African Americans in stores owned by individuals outside the Black community. The Depression-generated "Don't Shop Where You Can't Buy" campaigns of Black Boston set the tone for the freedom struggle for the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, Muslims from Temple # 11 were responsible for the impetus to challenge the white-owned small businesses in the South End and Roxbury. By examining the Nation of Islam in Boston, I seek to understand and illuminate a seemingly missing link in the evolution of community development in Boston. I endeavor to answer the questions raised by Black Boston's shift from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) popular assimilation/ integration strategy to the ideological stances of the Black United Front.

In examining Temple# 11's development, I uncovered the factors that made it an engine of the Civil Rights and Black power movements in Boston. I also examined Temple # 11’s role in the development of the Black Theology movement that revitalized African American Christianity and its role in catalyzing the development of Boston’s Ahmadi and Orthodox Muslim communities.