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Sociology a 1938 article entitled “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit.” Though plainly bemused by some of the sectarian peculiarities, sociologist Erdmann Beynon was impressed that “there is no known case of unemployment among these people.” He reported that new members applied to Fard for new Arabic names as a first step toward the recovery of lost culture. “They bathed at least once a day and kept their houses scrupulously clean,” wrote Beynon, “so that they might put away all marks of the slavery from which the restoration of the original name had set them free.”
    In the 1950s, when federal prosecutors denied Wallace Muhammad the military draft deferment due legitimate clergy, Chicago lawyers William Ming and Chauncey Eskridge * arranged for him to serve medical duty as a conscientious objector, but Elijah Poole (now Muhammad) unexpectedly rejected the plea bargain with white law. Much against his will, thinking that his father meant to keep him cloistered and useless, Wallace dutifully entered Sandstone, where he taught Islam to inmates in the prison laundry room or on nice days in the baseball bleachers. For the first time he felt responsible for his own thoughts, and although he attracted a large following of Muslim converts, which excited the fears of most prison authorities, the Sandstone warden became so convinced of salutary effects on inmate rehabilitation that he invited Wallace to write an article on the Islamic concept of sacrifice for the 1962 Christmas issue of the prison journal. Muhammad sent the published magazine home to his mother, Clara, who, in spite of her role as the maternal rock of the Nation of Islam, hummed hymns from her Holiness Church upbringing in Georgia. She was proud that he had gained the balance to draw upon the merit in other religions, and Wallace reluctantly thanked his father for the paradoxical, unseen wisdom to build in him the independent strength to contest Muhammad’s concocted version of Islam.
    This fight was precisely Wallace Muhammad’s purpose at the Sandstone release gate on January 10, 1963, but his brother Elijah Jr. upstaged him on the long drive home to Chicago with a shocking report on impending crises within the Nation—threats, thefts, scandals, plots, betrayals, and rampant fears that Malcolm X might usurp the entire structure if the sickly old man died soon, as appeared likely. The continuing aftermath of the Ronald Stokes violence in Los Angeles kept pushing the stakes higher in revenue, publicity, and prestige, and the family members were disappointed to hear that prison made Wallace less rather than more tolerant of material ambition. “The corrupt hypocrites high in the organization would throw people out for smoking a cigarette while they themselves were drinking champagne every night and going to orgies,” he later recorded. When it proved difficult to obtain parole permission to visit Phoenix, he wrote his father two long letters of criticism buttressed with citations from the Q’uran.
    Turmoil threw Wallace Muhammad together with Malcolm X late in February, when some four thousand Muslims gathered by bus and motorcade for the annual Savior’s Day convention in Chicago. As always, speakers chanted the words “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad” as a practiced mantra, but apprehension ran through the submissive crowd because Muhammad himself was absent for the first time, wheezing from asthma at his retreat in Phoenix. Although not a few Muslims believed Muhammad to be immortal, anxiety for him was so intense that cries went up for reassurance from the chosen son, who was observed and hailed upon his return from prison. Wallace refused to speak. Having received no response to his letters of criticism, he was half convinced that his father was avoiding or testing him. Besides, he considered Savior’s Day the embodiment of his father’s most egregious blasphemy from the