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2021 Milbauer Symposium: Reimagining the Black Past: The Futures of Black Power
April 15, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
“‘Mr. Muhammad Says All of This is Possible for You and Me’: Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Speaks, and Black Nationalism during the Space Age”
Dr. D’Weston Haywood (Hunter CUNY)
Abstract: Scholars have analyzed Elijah Muhammad and the NOI’s demands for a separate Black territory within the United States, but have missed another critical side of their separatism. In the late 1960s, Muhammad and the NOI hoped to also remove Black people from earth to another planet. At first glance, the idea seemed quixotic, truly an “imagined” community as Muhammad Speaks, the NOI’s newspaper, illustrated images of Black space travel and interplanetary colonization. But drawing on Afro-futurism, and conducting close readings of Muhammad Speaks, this paper reexamines Muhammad and the NOI’s Black Nationalism for their engagement with Cold War politics, particularly the Space Race. Amid significant changes in the Black freedom struggle and Cold War, Muhammad and the NOI imagined offering Black people far more than civil rights, and even far more than an all-Black state—they envisioned Black Power through a Black planet