Recruits Behind Bars

Armed guards now patrol the catwalks over the mess hall in California's maximum-security Folsom prison--the result of two riots early this month. At San Quentin, wardens and guards have new instructions not to attempt to break up any gathering of Negro convicts without assistance. At the Reformatory for Males in Breathedsville, Md., last week, three inmates had a total of 14 months added to their sentences for savagely beating a guard. In a Washington, D.C.. prison, 38 prisoners in punitive segregation became so noisy, rattling cell doors, throwing food into the corridors, and talking and praying through the night, that tear gas was threatened to restore quiet and order.

The incidents were related. In every case the troublemakers were Black Muslims, members of the brotherhood of Negro supremacists that is dedicated to the extinction of the white race (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959). While their leaders, protected by shaved-head honor guards, are preaching cold hatred to growing crowds in principal U.S. cities, lesser Muslim agents are at work in many a U.S. prison, spreading fanatical doctrines and recruiting new brethren among Negro prisoners. A California law officer estimates that Muslims do 50% of their recruiting in prisons. The Muslim movement behind prison walls, says James W. Curran, Maryland's superintendent of prisons, has become "steadily stronger and more troublesome. They are vicious fighters, quick to take offense and, in their self-sacrificial way, they don't care what happens to them."

"There Was Elijah." Since most prisons have a large Negro population, prisons are a natural breeding ground for the hate group. Some of the leaders of the Muslim movement have criminal records. Elijah Muhammad (whose "slave-master name" was Elijah Poole), high priest of the Muslims, served three years for draft dodging in World War II. Malcolm X (ne Little), leader of Harlem's Muslims, is a former pimp, who has been arrested for larceny in two states. Says Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, professor of social philosophy at Atlanta's Clark College and an authority on Muslims: "The prisons are made to order for Muhammad. Nine times out of ten, the potential convert was arrested by a white policeman, sentenced by a white judge, directed by a white prison guard under a white warden. The prison chaplain was white, and he knew when he got out that he could not go to a white church for help. The Negro church was not interested, but there was Elijah waiting."

Behind the big house walls, the Muslims attempt to proselyte in the mess halls, in the exercise areas, wherever they encounter other Negroes. Converts go through a reform of sorts, if they obey Elijah's injunction to give up tobacco, dope and alcohol and pray five times daily facing Mecca. Their demands for separate religious services are firmly denied by most prison authorities, on the ground that they are not a religious sect (the 100,000 authentic Moslems in the U.S. heatedly disavow Elijah and his followers). They must shave their goatees. When pork appears on prison menus, Muslims disdain it.* Mess-hall fighting has been touched off when they have attempted to impose their dietary laws on other prisoners. Elijah's bizarre version of the Koran is barred in all prisons.

"Cowards Don't Go to Jail." When most wardens detect prison recruiting, they clap the hard-core Muslims into solitary or transfer them to other prisons. "There was a time when they tended to congregate in the yard," says Warden George Goodman of the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, "but we quickly stopped that. We may have nipped a potentially serious problem in the bud, but I cannot be sure." Oftentimes, recruiting goes right on even when the Muslim leaders are segregated. An office worker at Breathedsville was recently exposed as a Muslim. He had managed to run off hundreds of sheets of propaganda and application blanks on a prison duplicating machine and distribute them secretly to convicts. "We've got converts in all the major prisons," brags Malcolm X. "And when those prisoners come out they'll be wonderful additions to our movement. Cowards don't go to jail. We'll rehabilitate these men and women and they will march in the ranks."

Just how many Muslims can be mustered on the outside was demonstrated last month when Elijah Muhammad stirred 4,000 of the faithful at a big rally in Chicago, celebrating the 30th annual convention. Surrounded as usual by his strapping "Fruit of Islam" bodyguards, he blasted "Negro intellectuals" as "the potential enemies of their own people. Certainly I'm not college trained, but the responsibility of my own people has been placed on my shoulders by the Lord of the Worlds. You can kill me," he cried. "I wouldn't run from death, if I saw it coming. It is impossible for us to live together. I hate that few drops of white blood that is already in me. There i= no intelligent black man who wants integration. Black man must come again into his own. He must again rule."

-- One of Elijah's more fanciful doctrines: the white man, especially the Jew, keeps the black man weakened by selling him the flesh of swine.

The pig contains 999 specific germs, is actually one-third cat, one-third rat and one-third dog.

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