Pride and Prejudice

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Louis Farrakhan is a problem.

He is a problem for the Rev. Benjamin Chavis of the N.A.A.C.P. and Abraham Foxman of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, who met last week to discuss what to do about him in a meeting so sensitive they would not even confirm he was the topic under discussion. On Saturday, the N.A.A.C.P. said it would convene a national summit of black leaders and would pointedly include Farrakhan as a gesture of support, despite expected Jewish condemnation. "We have every right to convene African-American leadership," said Chavis. "There's a deep hunger in our community."

He is a problem for the Congressional Black Caucus, whose chairman, Representative Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, has embroiled himself in controversy by pledging a "covenant" of cooperation -- since disavowed -- with both Farrakhan and mainstream black leaders.

He is a problem for a broad range of American blacks, who rightly fear that his anti-Semitic rhetoric erodes the moral authority of his appeals against racism and who are chagrined that his Nation of Islam, long an angry voice of the underclass, now enjoys a following among college students.

He is a problem for American Jews, who want to ensure that his brand of racism means automatic disqualification from national debate.

He is a problem for the vast majority of Islamic Americans, who already suffer from having their religion equated with hostage taking and terrorism and who mostly reject Farrakhan's racial isolationism and abuse of other faiths.

He is a problem for some of his adherents, who hear in his speeches black self-love and self-help and who see the Nation of Islam as a force against crime and drugs, bringing order and discipline to neighborhoods with almost none -- yet who know that many of their associates hear only hatred in his preachments.

And Farrakhan, still impetuous at 60, is a problem for himself. In private a calm, seemingly rational man yearning for a place among trusted elders of his race, he is apt in public to get carried away on a wave of rhetoric and say things so intemperate, so easily misunderstood -- and sometimes not misunderstood -- that he thwarts his ambition.

Above all, he is a problem for an America that is increasingly multiracial and multicultural and is consequently in growing need of tolerance and mutual respect. His success underscores two ugly truths of American life. A great many black Americans view their white fellow citizens with anger. And a great many white Americans view their black fellow citizens with fear. Farrakhan's call for separatism and economic "reparations" and his assertion of black racial superiority win respect from millions of blacks, even among those who wish he would stop calling Jews "bloodsuckers." While most whites are apt to think his abusive rhetoric should be ignored if not silenced, many blacks think he is saying some things America ought to hear.

Love Farrakhan or hate him, the inescapable fact is that he touches a nerve among blacks as almost no one else can. A TIME/CNN poll of 504 African Americans by Yankelovich Partners last week found 73% of those surveyed were familiar with him -- more than with any other black political figure except Jesse Jackson and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- and two-thirds of those familiar with Farrakhan viewed him favorably. Some 62% of those familiar with him said he was good for the black community; 63% said he speaks the truth; and 67% said he is an effective leader. More than half called him a good role model for black youth. Only a fifth thought him anti-Semitic. When asked to name "the most important black leader today," 9% of those polled volunteered his name -- more than for anyone except Jackson and three times as many as Nelson Mandela. To some extent, admittedly, these results reflect a lack of broad-based, high-profile black leaders. But that vacuum only makes Farrakhan more important, and his hateful words more potent.

Farrakhan's charismatic presence has a powerful allure. In Atlanta a lecture by Farrakhan outdrew a 1992 World Series game the same night. In Los Angeles last October he filled the 16,500-seat Sports Arena. In New York City a December speech by Farrakhan drew 25,000 to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. This month in Chicago, when black aldermen needed a celebrity speaker to raise funds for their legal defense in a censorship case, they did not turn to Jackson or Chavis or Mfume but to Farrakhan, the one black man they felt could fill any hall in town. Wherever he presents himself as "a voice for the voiceless," crowds throng to his orations, typically almost three hours long, for entertainment and moral uplift.

What's going on? How can so many blacks take seriously a messenger who spins bogus research into a vile theology of hatred for their fellow Americans, from Asians to Jews to whites of all variety? Plainly, black America sees a very different man from the one white America sees. This dichotomy says much about our country. And it makes trying to understand Farrakhan an urgent, if daunting, task.

Some of Farrakhan's impact is his bootstrap message of independence and self-reliance. Says Yvonne Haddad, professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst: "Some of the issues that Farrakhan is highlighting are important to the African-American community, and no one else is highlighting them." She cites his attack on welfare as "subsidizing single women to have babies," his complaint that the Federal Government spends more on prisons than on education and his charge that white-collar crime is not considered as heinous as other offenses. In meetings with the Congressional Black Caucus, Farrakhan proposed unconventional rehabilitation methods -- one member recalls a plan to transport prisoners and addicts to Africa as an alternative to the chaos of the ghetto -- and was hailed for offering creative alternatives to standard treatment. Eric Adams, president of New York City's black police organization, the Guardians, says, "Many of our leaders don't have any solutions. We'd rather march and sing. The brother is saying, 'Let's do for ourselves.' "

Another major appeal is the sect's commitment to rehabilitation. The Nation of Islam runs counseling programs for prisoners, drug addicts, alcoholics and ) street-gang members. This is partly a recruiting tactic. But it can turn around lost lives. N.A.A.C.P. president Chavis, who played a role in bringing together Farrakhan and the Congressional Black Caucus, sees substance abuse as devastating the black community, and he credits the Nation of Islam's strict code of behavior with providing effective rescue. The issue carries personal urgency for Chavis: he has an alcoholic daughter and a son who was using crack cocaine.

Much of Farrakhan's power comes from the street effectiveness of the Nation of Islam's bow-tied young soldiers. They can be contemptuous of civil liberties -- a former Washington chief of police says, "They want to operate outside the law" -- but they are undeniably effective at chasing away crime and drugs in communities where nothing else works. Charles Manso has sold ice cream and sundries for 20 years from a battered white truck on a desolate corner in northeast Washington, an area without grocery stores, barbershops, even Laundromats. "There used to be shootings all the time," he says. "Drug dealers used to surround my truck. The Muslims keep them away."

In Chicago a security firm allied with the Nation of Islam already patrols three state-funded housing projects, and has been hired by the Chicago Housing Authority for eight high-rises at Rockwell Gardens. Says Chicago Housing Authority chairman Vincent Lane: "I've seen what black Muslims have done with hardened criminals -- they go into the penal system and work with these young men, so when they come out they are no longer on drugs and respect their women and neighbors." In New York City tenants association president Janet Cole proposed having Nation of Islam members provide security for the 3,100-unit Queensbridge Houses. The plan was blocked by Jewish protest. Says Cole: "I have no desire to become a Muslim. I just want to live, and I want my son to live."

The idea of returning to Islam as the ancestral religion of black Americans dates at least to the early years of this century. Many blacks rejected Christianity as a slave religion -- although many, many more continue to practice it today -- and were looking for ethnic heritage and pride. Although the early days of the Nation of Islam are murky, the official version is that Wallace D. Fard founded it in Detroit in 1930, allegedly upon arrival from Mecca. He disappeared a few years later and was replaced by Elijah Poole, renamed Elijah Muhammad, who reigned until 1975 over a black nationalist ! business and religious empire. Among its most celebrated converts was boxer Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali.

The sect has long been riven by factionalism. The most celebrated split was the 1964 departure of Malcolm X, who turned to orthodox Islam and was murdered by three of Elijah Muhammad's followers in 1965. While Farrakhan, who joined in 1955, seems to have played no role in the killing, he gave a speech beforehand implying that Malcolm X deserved to die.

Despite its name, the Nation of Islam has never been accepted as valid by the major branches of the religion, in part because it granted its leader the status of prophet. Says Mustafa Malik, director of research of the American Muslim Council: "To be a Muslim, you have to believe that there is only one God and Muhammad is his last Prophet. The Nation of Islam people believe that Elijah Muhammad is the last Prophet. There is nothing in common except that we call ourselves Muslims and they call themselves Muslims." The Nation of Islam is not alone. Several of the 17 or more American black Muslim sects -- including one in Atlanta run by the '60s civil rights radical formerly known as H. Rap Brown -- depart from orthodoxy.

Elijah was succeeded by his son Wallace, who shifted the movement away from antiwhite anger and toward orthodox Islam. Farrakhan was one of several Nation leaders who resisted Wallace's direction and sought to reconstitute Elijah Muhammad's faith. Eventually he became not only Elijah's ideological heir but also the tenant of his castle -- Farrakhan now lives in his ornate, fortress- like home where, as in Elijah's day, Nation of Islam guards are on constant patrol outside.

That was not the career for which he seemed headed in boyhood as Louis Eugene Walcott in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, then beginning its shift from a predominantly Jewish area to a black one. A choirboy at St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, he ran relays in track and made his way to Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina, which he attended for two years. But his real gift was for music. He played the violin obsessively, retreating to the bathroom with bow in hand for three to five hours at a stretch. He also sang and played guitar and, after leaving college, appeared on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and in nightclubs as Calypso Gene or the Charmer. He has said that after hearing Elijah Muhammad speak in 1955, he had a dream in which he was expected to choose between show business and an unknown future -- and he chose the unknown.

He did not entirely give up entertaining when he joined the Nation of Islam. During his early years, he wrote and recorded A White Man's Heaven Is a Black Man's Hell, a favorite black Muslim anthem. And he still plays the violin between 1 and 3 o'clock most mornings. At his 60th birthday concert in Chicago last May, soon to be available on videotape, he played Mendelssohn.

As a soldier in the Fruit of Islam, the Nation's security force and training vehicle for young men, Farrakhan proved an apt disciple. He became head of the temple in Boston and then, after Malcolm X left, temple head in New York City. By the early 1960s he was prominent in the urban black community. White Americans did not notice him until two decades later.

In the early days of the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, Fruit of Islam guards provided security until the Secret Service took over. Farrakhan was outraged to learn that Jewish militants were shadowing Jackson, that he had received death threats and that his family had been harassed -- facts confirmed by the FBI. Until then, Farrakhan's speeches had reviled white people, not only over slavery but also over what he sees as a vast white conspiracy to conceal the glorious past of blacks as the original human race and the founders of most branches of civilization and scholarship. But he had not singled out Jews for special vilification until his Savior's Day speech that year, when he tried to intimidate Jackson's harassers: "If you harm this brother, it'll be the last one you ever harm." Heard out of context, the speech seemed to be an unprovoked threat. Once he was interpreted as anti- Semitic, Farrakhan reacted with invective that removed any doubt, labeling Judaism "a gutter religion," Israel "an outlaw state" and Hitler "a very great man" ("wickedly great," he later explained).

Since then, Farrakhan claims, he has found his path blocked by Jews in numerous and unanticipated ways. The most costly, he says, came in 1986 when Jewish distributors, angry about his slurs, effectively torpedoed his plans for Nation of Islam cosmetics and toiletries sold under the Clean & Fresh label. Major black-hair-care companies, including Johnson Products Co. in Chicago, agreed to manufacture Nation of Islam products, then backed off, Farrakhan says. Company owner George E. Johnson contends his dealers told him that any dealings with Farrakhan's firm would lead to having his own products boycotted. "When I saw that," Farrakhan says, "I recognized that the black man will never be free until we address the relationship between blacks and Jews."

As recently as last summer, however, Farrakhan seemed to be taking a softer line. According to Representative Major Owens of Brooklyn, a Congressional Black Caucus member, "Farrakhan proposed that the caucus serve as an intermediary between himself and the Jewish community. He did not indicate what he wanted to tell them, but he did insist that he wanted peace, that he had been seeking a dialogue." Yet in November when top aide Khallid Abdul Muhammad made a venom-soaked speech at New Jersey's Kean College, a state- funded school, Farrakhan rebuked him only for his "mockery" and said he could not disavow the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-gay "truths" his aide had spoken. Indeed, Farrakhan repeated some of them in an interview with TIME last week.

Perhaps because of the turbulent and occasionally violent history of his and other black Muslim sects, both Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are secretive, verging on paranoid. When correspondent Sylvester Monroe arrived at Farrakhan's Chicago mansion last week, aides searched Monroe as he came in, again when he returned from a brief trip to his car and once more as he entered a Nation of Islam school -- even though he had been accompanied from the moment he left Farrakhan's home by the same aide who had searched him before. Simply to attend a service at the Nation of Islam Temple No. 7 in New York City, reporter Sharon Epperson was frisked and her pens were examined to see whether they concealed knives. Nation of Islam women also checked her lipstick, compact and wallet. Questions about such basics as the group's size -- estimated at 30,000 to 200,000 members -- and budget are routinely deflected, as are questions about the family life and background of Farrakhan and his aides.

He is so protected that it is hard to be sure, but he seems scrupulous about following dictates of conventional Islam -- no pork, no alcohol -- plus his sect's own rule of only one meal a day, an extension of the daytime fasting during conventional Islam's month of Ramadan. He speaks fluent Arabic, as he demonstrated by performing an Islamic prayer call in Syria while accompanying Jackson on a mission to secure the release of downed U.S. airman Robert Goodman in 1984. His mansion mingles massive concrete panels with delicate stained glass, marble floors, crystal chandeliers and a fountain between the living and dining rooms. But he shares it with several aides as well as his wife of 36 years, Khadijah (formerly Betsy), and some of their nine children.

The sect has mosques or temples in 120 cities. All ministers are appointed by Farrakhan. Male recruits earn their way up in the Fruit of Islam, where they are given military-style stripes and ranks but do not carry weapons. In contrast to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Christian invocation to turn the other cheek, however, Nation of Islam leaders favor vigorous self-defense.

In addition to "manhood training" classes to learn the history of the black man, the code of discipline of the Nation of Islam and rules about how to behave and dress (coat and bow tie at virtually all times), men must prove themselves by selling the sect's newspaper, the Final Call, on street corners. Their sales totals directly affect their standing. In some cities, recruits still sell the group's trademark bean pies.

Fruit of Islam members often appear mild-mannered, yet they simmer with antiwhite rage. Sharod Baker, a Columbia sophomore involved with the Nation since he was 14, is a diligent student and former volunteer tutor. His mother remembers his adolescent anger when he first joined the sect, but she believes he outgrew it. Friends remark on how he differs from the hostile image of the Fruit of Islam. But when his mother and friends are not around, Baker admits his fury at whites is unrelenting. "I don't think there's anything wrong with saying I hate them. They have caused me harm over and over, and I wish they were dead." Farrakhan's preaching, Baker says, reinforces his resentments. "His point is to make you angry so maybe you'll be motivated to change things."

Nation of Islam women are expected to emphasize housework and child rearing and to dress "modestly." (Whereas they must be covered even in August, pants are sometimes permitted.) When religious services are crowded, it is not unknown for women to be asked to give up seats to men and listen via loudspeaker in another room.

The Nation of Islam operates restaurants, bakeries and fish markets. Members tithe, and some have donated for decades to buy farmland, a scheme Farrakhan pledges to finally put into action this summer. He vows to open a $3 million restaurant-and-bakery complex on Chicago's South Side, reopen a Nation of Islam supermarket and build a printing plant for the Final Call big enough to rent space. He recently bought a Chicago "business center" to house management and media operations as he expands into TV. He already has Nation of Islam bookstores that do a brisk business in tapes of his speeches and books on black topics.

In Chicago the Nation operates the Muhammad University of Islam, actually an elementary and secondary school run by Shelby Muhammad, a former Chicago public-school teacher who converted in the early '80s. Along with religious training, the school emphasizes math, science -- and discipline. Children are searched on arrival, not only for weapons but for candy and gum as well. This rigor is so popular, Muhammad says, that she has had to stop accepting applications from non-Muslim parents.

To white America, these operations are virtually invisible. What whites know about Farrakhan is the hate he spews or, in the case of Khallid Abdul Muhammad, endorses. Some critics thought Muhammad was a stalking-horse for Farrakhan himself. TIME's Monroe, who has known Farrakhan for a decade, believes his professed anger at Muhammad was genuine. But Farrakhan wouldn't back down from his argument that Jews must acknowledge a historical role as slave traders, slave owners and ghetto employers and landlords. Far from their being another oppressed group, he says, when it comes to black America, Jews were oppressors. This leaves Jews, who played a major role in the black civil rights movement, feeling betrayed. And as a matter of logic, points out Farrakhan adversary Henry Louis Gates, chairman of Harvard's department of African-American studies, it is dubious. To blame Jews today for acts centuries ago, Gates says, carries "the tacit conviction that culpability is heritable."

Despite the protest, Khallid Abdul Muhammad is to appear on a New Jersey campus again, at Trenton State College next week. Governor Christine Whitman will counter with free screenings for college students of the Holocaust film Schindler's List to show "in a very, very graphic way what happens if the kind of attitudes expressed at Kean College are left unchecked."

Farrakhan himself offered to come to Kean College this week as a gesture of "healing" and to waive his customary fee of $15,000 to $20,000. College officials expressed surprise when told of the offer and said it would violate their rule of ensuring administrators two weeks' notice of such appearances. He will have two broader opportunities to redeem himself, however, on Arsenio Hall's syndicated TV talk show Friday and in his annual Savior's Day speech in Chicago on Feb. 27. Many moderate black leaders hope, like Chavis, that Farrakhan will edge toward them, partly because of the good the Nation of Islam does and partly because no one but Farrakhan so effectively addresses the anger of young black men.

In his interview last week, Farrakhan acknowledged his isolation: "I don't have a personal relationship with any black civil rights leader. Rev. Jackson is the only person I have socialized with, been in his home, sat at his table. Every other civil rights leader I have had occasion to meet, I have an acquaintance with. I don't pick up the phone and call any one of them."

To get closer to them, Farrakhan must abandon his racist doctrine. But can he? Apart from his historical beliefs about Jews and business frustrations he believes were caused by them, he may feel a compulsion to voice slurs. The more cynical view is that he engages in bigotry because it brings him attention.

The pivotal question is whether the appeal of the Nation of Islam -- and of Farrakhan -- is separable from his invective of hate. Leaders throughout history have found it is often easier to succumb to demagoguery, to define a single scapegoat and offer a single solution to life's ills, especially when proposing self-restraint and sacrifice. Would young people choose the hard way of Islam without the zealotry of separatism and resentment? Could Farrakhan fill the seats of big-city convention centers if he stopped offering the allure of the outrageous, the unpredictable, the unspeakable spoken out loud? Perhaps the answer to both questions is yes. Perhaps even if the answer is no, the Nation of Islam would have a brighter future if it stepped away from hatred. "Farrakhan faces a choice," says Harvard's Gates. "Does he want to be remembered as a great leader, someone who underwent transformation, like Malcolm X? Or does he want to be remembered as one more demagogue?"

The path of reform and reconciliation takes courage -- and the more power is at stake, the more courage it takes. If his moves in recent months mean anything more than tactical maneuvering, Farrakhan has his chances this week for healing. But his courage for change has already been tested once in recent weeks. And he flinched.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 503 African Americans taken for TIME/CNN on ^ Feb 16-17 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4.5%.

CAPTION: How African Americans See It

Which of these descriptions apply to Louis Farrakhan?

What is the main problem facing the country today?

Do you think Farrakhan's opinions and behavior improve relations between blacks and whites in this country?

Do these groups have too much power?

Have relations between blacks and Jews got better or worse?

With reporting by Ann Blackman and Julie Johnson/Washington, Sharon E. Epperson/New York and Sylvester Monroe/Chicago