Under Muhammad's leadership the group grew from a small, local black congregation into an influential nationwide movement.

He promoted black self-sufficiency and self-reliance over integration, and he encouraged African Americans to create a separate state of their own.

Muhammad also rejected the civil rights movement for its emphasis on integration, instead promoting a separate black community.

He was succeeded as head of the NOI by his son, Wallace Muhammad, who renamed the organization as the World Community of al-Islam in the West.

Wallace Muhammad later changed his name as part of his own transition to Sunni Islam and is now known as Imam Warith Deen Mohammed.

[6] Moving his own family, parents and siblings, Elijah and the Pooles settled in the industrial north of Hamtramck, Michigan.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, he struggled to find and keep work as the economy suffered during the post World War I and Great Depression eras.

[6][7] Fard taught that black people, as original Asiatics, had a rich cultural history which was stolen from them in their enslavement.

Fard stated that African Americans could regain their freedoms through self-independence and cultivation of their own culture and civilization.

[8][better source needed] Poole, having strong consciousness of both race and class issues as a result of his struggles in the South, quickly fell in step with Fard's ideology.

The controversy led to the jailing of several University of Islam board members and Elijah Muhammad in 1934 and to violent confrontations with police.

After he was released on bail, Muhammad fled Washington, D.C., on the advice of his attorney, who feared a lynching, and returned to Chicago after a seven-year absence.

[citation needed] Muhammad was arrested there, charged with eight counts of sedition for instructing his followers to not register for the draft or serve in the armed forces.

Acquitted of sedition, but found guilty of draft evasion, Elijah Muhammad served four years in prison, from 1942 to 1946, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan, Michigan.

During that time, his wife, Clara, and trusted aides ran the organization; Muhammad transmitted his messages and directives to followers in letters.

[18] He preached that the Nation of Islam's goal was to return the stolen hegemony of the inferior whites back to blacks across America.

Elijah Muhammad's program for economic development played a large part in the growth in the Nation of Islam.

By the 1970s, the Nation of Islam owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, night-clubs, a printing plant, retail stores, numerous real estate holdings, and a fleet of tractor trailers, plus farmland in Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia.

[21] According to Muhammad, peas and sweet potatoes are forbidden by Allah and many foods white in colour are automatically bad for health.

[23] On January 30, 1975, Muhammad entered Mercy Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, suffering from a combination of heart disease, diabetes, bronchitis, and asthma.

He was survived by many children, including his two daughters and six sons by his wife, most notably future leader Warith Deen Muhammad.

[27] The letters stated blacks had been better off "from a psychological point of view" before Fard came along because it weaned them from Christianity to a fabricated form of Islam.

[27] His letters also revealed what he knew of Fard, alleging he was John Walker of Gary who had come to America at 27 from Greece, had served prison time for stealing, and raping a 17-year-old girl, and had died in Chicago, Illinois, at 78.

[28] On December 1, 1963, when asked for a comment about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X said that it was a case of "chickens coming home to roost".

The Nation of Islam, which had sent a message of condolence to the Kennedy family and ordered its ministers not to comment on the assassination, publicly censured their former shining star.

[32][33] Over a series of national TV interviews between 1964 and 1965, Malcolm X provided testimony of his investigation, corroboration, and confirmation by Elijah Muhammed himself of multiple counts of child rape.

[34] Malcolm X also spoke of an attempt made to assassinate him, by means of an explosive device discovered in his car, and of death threats he was receiving, which he believed were in response to his exposure of Elijah Muhammad.

[44] George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, once called Elijah "the Hitler of the black man.