When running for the US House of Representatives in 2006, then Minnesota House Rep. Keith Ellison was embroiled in a bitter fight against his own past. Ellison had once been an organizer of the Nation of Islam, a large black nationalist religious organization founded by Elijah Muhammad in the 1930s and then restored in the late 1970s by Louis Farrakhan, formerly known as Louis X. It is his continued struggle to conceal his past affiliations with the NOI that have kept him on the defensive since rising to the national stage as a surrogate for US Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign and later a candidate for Democratic National Committee chairperson to succeed the disastrous predecessors Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
But whereas among progressives Ellison possessed all of the makings of a person that could reform the party and redress the grievances of the pro-Bernie youth, with the establishment wing of the party as well as the mainstream media his vulnerabilities were easily exposed.
From activist to lawyer to politician
Ellison's involvement in the militant NOI had served him well in climbing the ranks in the small but politically active African American community in Minneapolis-St. Paul and on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. In his home town of Detroit, Michigan Ellison would have likely blended in among a landscape of the different militant black quasi-religious political activists in a city where family connections are the key to getting ahead in black politics. Successful careers in the Detroit black political community are often made through blood and marriage ties. Examples:
*Detroit area Democratic politician Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick served from 1979-96 in the Michigan House of Representatives, and from 1997-2011 as a US congresswoman for the 13th District. She was married to Wayne County commissioner Bernard Kilpatric, later chief of staff to County Executive Edward N. McNamara. Their son became the notoriously corrupt "Hip-Hop Mayor" Kwame Kilpatrick.
*Kilpatrick's immediate successor was Ken Cockrel, Jr. who was the son of city councilman Ken, Sr.
Long-time Rep. John Conyers, Jr. was originally an aide to the even older white Rep. John Dingell, Jr. Conyers served from 1965 until 2017 when the #MeToo feminist movement against sexual harassment unearthed several claims against him by female staffers in Congress that had led to the chamber paying out settlements to accusers. Conyers' wife Monica was also a Detroit City Council member from 2005 until 2010. Her tenure was roiled with controversy over aggressive conduct towards other members of council and ended in a 2010 bribery conviction.
Of course by 2008 Detroit had gone bust, and Mayor Kilpatrick would end up being convicted in a series of corruption scandals.
The NOI, plagiarism for paradise
Detroit was also the original home of the Nation of Islam, and was founded in 1930 as an offshoot of the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA). The MSTA was founded by Timothy Drew AKA Noble Drew Ali, who founded the group in Newark, New Jersey in 1913 and spread it around the country by teaching a syncretic religion that blended belief in Egyptian magic, Christianity, Buddhism, and of course Islam.
Of course the majority of black Americans have origins from sub-Saharan Africa -- in particular West Africa -- not the Maghreb which is where the peoples considered to be "Moors" are considered to be from. A Moor, or Moro as they are known in Spanish, is a Muslim inhabitant of North Africa especially Morocco. The only likely reason that Drew began to call himself and his followers "Moors" is that at that time this was the most prominent African civilization mentioned in European and American white literature. The MSTA would give rise to one of the most enduring myths of black American history: The origins of black Americans in a great Muslim civilization in Africa. The Moorish mythology has been blended in almost self-parodying dizziness and spawned a number of offshoots of both the MSTA and the NOI:
*Pseudoegyptology - Belief that the ancestors of slaves were descendants of the ancient civilizations of Egypt. Subscribers to this theory often use the pre-Roman name for Egypt "Kemet" and choose to blend this with Arabic phraseology, even though the Arabic language only arrived in Egypt with the Islamic conquest of 642 and in that language it is called Masr. Examples: Universal Zulu Kemetic Muurs, Hotep Nation, Nuwaubian Nation.
*Claimed Native American heritage - The MSTA, NOI, and numerous other groups have used pretensions to American Indian lineage to make claims of sovereignty and therefore avoid legal troubles in the USA. The most egregious case was Malachi Z. York, the leader of the Nuwaubian Nation and a former associate of several Black Hebrew groups. The Nuwaubians at various times claimed to be Moors, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Yamasee Indians.
Scientology - Since 2010 Farrakhan has publicly preached in favour of practicing Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard's emotional auditing practice, and one of the basic elements of what would later develop into the Church of Scientology.
*Black Nationalism - When the MSTA was formed in the early 20th century it coincided with a movement of "back to Africa" nationalists among descendants of the African slave diaspora led by United Negro Improvement Association and its founder Marcus Garvey. A Jamaican born activist and believer in self-reliance and separatism, Garvey's UNIA attempted to achieve its goals by supporting black-owned business alternatives and helped mobilize blacks in the USA as an answer to Jim Crow laws. Garvey's black separatism was a key element that future similar movements would embrace.
Leaving the NOI for traditional Islam
The Nation of Islam can therefore be defined as a syncretic group that blends elements of several different religious groups with black nationalism. Therefore many of its adherents discover after a certain point that his several glaring differences with traditional Islam, whether Sunni or Shia. To start with Islam does not believe that its saviour (the Mahdi) arrived in 1930 in the form of Wallace D. Fard, Elijah Muhammad's mentor and the Qur'an never says that black people were the original race of human beings.
During his break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X began to study traditional Islam and then converted taking the name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, thereafter abandoning any belief in the NOI's vision of creation. Others that abandoned the NOI for traditional Islam were Ernest 2X McGhee, Elijah Muhammad's son Warith Deen. . . and Keith Ellison.
It is entirely possible that Ellison departed the NOI for sincere reasons. The movement was prone to infighting, generated radical offshoots like the Nation of Gods and Earths, and has always depended heavily on the personality of its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. The group's lifestyle that eschews alcohol, pop music and pork is often feels puritanical.
The idea that Ellison remains an NOI adherent is on its face false, and no one is disputing the statement on his part that he has left the organization. The true nature of Ellison's recent controversy regarding the NOI has been his outright lying abut his past with them. In his March 18 post for Medium Ellison started off with the title "I Have Fought Against Hate My Entire Career". He goes on to deny his relationship with the group:
Excerpt from Keith Ellison's Medium statement where he denies his ties to the Nation of Islam.
Ellison's denials do not ring true even among the progressive press. Mother Jones wrote in a 2016 piece during the time of his DNC Chair race that his role with the NOI continued much later than he's admitted:
"But his break from Farrakhan was not quite as clean as he portrayed it. Under the byline Keith X Ellison, months after the march that he described as an epiphany, he penned an op-ed in the Twin Cities black weekly Insight News, pushing back against charges of anti-Semitism directed at Farrakhan. In 1997, nearly two years later, he endorsed a statement again defending Farrakhan. When Ellison ran (unsuccessfully) for state representative in 1998, Insight News described him as affiliated with the Nation of Islam. Two organizers who worked with him at the time told me they believed Ellison had been a member of the Nation. At community meetings, he was even known to show up in a bow tie, accompanied by dark-suited members of the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s security wing."
NOI Minneapolis official Minister James Muhammad also says in the same article that Ellison did have a liaison role for the group during the early 1990s, and according to him was at times the substitute leader of their study group when he was not present.
The Reinvention Game
By 2006 while running for Congress, Ellison was forced to write a letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council and make an appearance at a synagogue in order to smooth over relations with them due to Farrakhan's past remarks and sentiment towards Jews. Since then he has portrayed his association with the NOI to be an 18-month flirtation that was mainly centered around supporting Farrakhan's Million Man March. The truth is however that Ellison's assertions of having only a brief dalliance with Farrakhan are transparently false, a conclusion shared not only by Mother Jones but also the establishment liberals at the Washington Post regarding his recent meetings with Farrakhan ("Four Pinnochios") and naturally the conservatives at The Daily Caller.
The reason that Ellison's statement in Medium is so difficult to believe is that as early as 1989 he had written pieces as "Keith Hakim" in the Minnesota Daily college paper in defense of Farrakhan, and many of former his associates in the NOI and elsewhere would go on the record in Mother Jones to refute his denials.
Excerpt from Ellison's Minnesota Daily op-ed where he defended having Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad and Min. Louis Farrakhan as guests in 1989. Notice how at the time he called him "Minister".
Ellison can continue to posture and obfuscate about his role in the NOI in Minnesota but both Ron Edwards, his former co-host on a Minneapolis radio show, and local civil rights figure and radical activist Spike Moss have contradicted his statements. Both of these former associates already in 2006 renounced Ellison as a result of his denials of association with Farrakhan that even then were seen as an opportunistic betrayal in order to pursue his personal political ambitions. Edwards and Moss also were willing to speak in the Mother Jones article against Ellison's denials.
The next stage
The debate over Keith Ellison's past with the NOI should never have happened, but instead of being forthright and saying that he once was a believer of the group's and eventually left for Sunni Islam he insists on maintaining the charade that his only affiliation with the group was a brief collaboration during the Million Man March. In previous entries in the #FarrakhanFeminism series, his more recent lies about meeting Farrakhan since 2012 have also been laid bare.
The reason that Ellison never could come clear about this is because if he were to have been honest in 2006, he would have lost his Democratic primary. The party has since drifted further and further into racial identity politics, with 2016 president candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton each dealing with pressure groups that were feminists or racial identity activists. The Democratic Party establishment and its donors would not be comfortable having an ex-NOI leader as the standard bearer of the party, but in 2017 after fixing the DNC Chair election and delivering it to current incumbent Tom Perez they decided to throw a bone to Ellison and his supporters when they gave him the Deputy Chair position and hoped it would mend fences with Bernie Sanders supporters. If that was their game plan it has failed, as Sanders' true support base has never embraced the Ellison-Perez alliance and sees them both now as pawns of the corporate Democrats as explained by The Intercept's Ryan Grim in October 2017 after a purge of pro-Ellison DNC members.
Until now Ellison has been able to avoid greater scrutiny of his lying record, because unfortunately the Farrakhan association is only viewed through the prism of his anti-Jewish statements as opposed to his bigoted opinions towards women, Catholicism, Arabs, Koreans and others. The only people that seem to care are conservatives and mainstream Democrats that have any credibility or values common to the progressive movement anyway like Alan Dershowitz. They have no cachet with the progressives, because other than their social-cultural values the corporate Democrats have no convictions when it comes to progressive economic policies like raising the minimum wage and establishing universal healthcare or opposing fracking and climate change. Thanks to the stupidity of the corporate Democrats like Dershowitz in supporting Perez, and the unwillingness of progressive opponents to back a true representative like Sam Ronan in the race for DNC chair, progressives are just as powerless within the Democratic Party as they have always been.
If economically progressive voters were to become conscious of the true beliefs of the NOI and how they inherently contradict the principles of their movement with regards to race, gender, class, and religion it is likely that many of them would at least acknowledge this contradiction and address. As it is now, they remain completely obscured by the Women's March, the March for Our Lives, and other throw-away causes that keep the Perez-Ellison alliance in power.