Black nationalist Islamic movements rejected Christian slave identity as a liberation strategy

Evidence

As more African Americans were targets of racial violence and experienced racism in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations, the newly founded Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple drew from parts of Islamic doctrine to advocate for Black nationalism. Noble Drew Ali, born Timothy Drew, established the first Moorish Temple in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913. Drew Ali proclaimed that African Americans were “an olive-skinned Asiatic people who were the descendants of Moroccans.” He called on African Americans to abandon their Christian slave identities, claiming they were ancestrally Muslim Moors, not Negroes. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 587

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘Moorish’ identity meant to Drew Ali — a rejection of the Christian ‘Negro’ slave designation in favor of ancestral Moroccan Muslim heritage.
• STORYSTEM: The idea of renaming an entire oppressed community’s ancestral identity as a political act could seed a contemporary story about identity reclamation.
• XREF: connects to: Black Islam’s theology refused non-violence and made equality a prerequisite for reconciliation — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 194