The Nation of Islam preached racial separation rather than Black supremacy

Evidence

Frazier sounded like the ministers of Elijah Muhammad’s quickly growing Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) in the late 1950s. “They won’t let you be White and you don’t want to be Black,” the son of Garveyites, former convict, and the NOI’s new Harlem minister liked to say. “You don’t want to be African and you can’t be an American… . You in bad shape!” … Elijah Muhammad and his ministers opposed assimilationists; instead, they preached racial separation (not Black supremacy), arguing that Whites were an inferior race of devils. Ironically, Black and White assimilationists, clothed in racism and hate for everything Black, condemned the Nation of Islam for donning racism and hate for everything White. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 935

Categorization

• DEFINE: Kendi’s placement of the NOI in his three-way scheme: separatism, not supremacy — a classification useful for placing any race argument.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of placing any argument into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist — here NOI is segregationist in Kendi’s terms, and the irony is that assimilationists called it racist.