![]() It is widely known that the newspaper’s reporters were leaders in the Black press, exposing the horrors of the Vietnam War, genocide in Africa, and the lynching and mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States. As the scholar Khuram Hussain has shown, Muhammad Speaks was the most widely circulated, Black-operated newspaper in the United States at this time its visual contents juxtaposed religious and secular imagery important to its Black, progressive readership in highly creative ways. The NOI’s explicit Islamic imagery formed its identity, especially in its official newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, whose print run of about 800,000 to a million copies per issue circulated between 19. Beyond this American context, the NOI’s visual output - such as clothing, apparel, logos, illustrations and documentary photographs - uses symbolic motifs that strategically place the organization firmly within an Islamic register. The NOI has been studied extensively by scholars interested in the history of race, religion, and politics in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Besides Elijah Muhammad, the NOI’s most famous advocates included heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, the latter of whom served as official NOI spokesperson until roughly a year before his 1964 assassination, likely by NOI operatives. From 1960 onward, it intersected with other US liberation movements under the auspices of Elijah Muhammad, who served as NOI leader from 1934 until his death in 1975. The Nation of Islam, or NOI, was founded in 1930 as a politico-religious movement for Black empowerment in the United States. ![]() Do-For-Self: The Visual Culture of the Nation of Islam
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