The Ahmadiyya Movement converted thousands of African Americans to Islam in the 1920s-40s

Evidence

Religion played a vital role in the perseverance and resilience of African Americans, both during and after slavery, in the face of White supremacy. While most African Americans were Protestant, a group of newly freed slaves rediscovered Islam in their search for liberation from White supremacy. Some came into contact with Muhammad Sadiq, a spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Movement in India who traveled to the United States to proselytize Islam. Sadiq highlighted that Islam was a universal religion that treated all people equally during his frequent and dynamic public speeches about Islam’s antiracist tenets. Between 1920 and 1940, Sadiq undertook extensive missionary work, resulting in five thousand to ten thousand American converts, half of them African Americans. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 582

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading on moral panics and racialized religious identities; also complements knowledge of Noble Drew Ali and the NOI in this same chapter. — connects to: An Indian Muslim missionary converted Marcus Garvey and re-linked Islam to Black identity; Immigrant Muslim missionaries personally bridged Indian and Black American Islam movements — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 179; Black nationalist movements revived Islam among African Americans in the 1920s
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 582