Freedom Through Religion: How the Nation of Islam Sparked the Modern Prisoners’ Rights Movement

Over four days in early September 1971, prisoners rioted in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. They demanded better living conditions and the political rights they were entitled to as human beings. This was the deadliest prison uprising in American history with forty-three dead and over ninety wounded. While the Attica Prison Riots were largely crushed by authorities, they are still considered the start of the modern prisoners’ rights movement.^[1] This, however, ignores a longer history of prisoners’ rights leading up to Attica, one led by the famed Black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam (NOI). Though studied far less, this earlier prisoners’ rights campaign occurred during the 1950s and 60s, was contemporaneous to the classical civil rights era (1954–1964/68), and was “born out of, and alongside” the wider Black Freedom Struggle.^[2] The lack of study on this earlier movement is, in part, due to the demonization of the NOI as a dangerous “cult” by White authorities; the current prisoners’ rights movement does not want their origins to be associated with the group.^[3] This rejected history includes the NOI’s involvement in prison reform from the organization’s foundation to their fade from prison reform in the mid-1960s. This rejected history reveals that the NOI, as both a political organization and a religion, provided a legal and theological foundation for the prisoners’ rights movement.

Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, the NOI recruited Black prisoners and politicized them to fight for their civil rights. As a religion, they converted Black prisoners toward active participation in the Black Freedom Struggle by uplifting and radicalizing them through theology. As a political group, they provided organizational backing to these striking prisoners and used concerns over religious freedoms to wage a legal battle for prisoners’ rights decades before these rights were guaranteed. Politicized NOI prisoners would have a significant impact on the early prisoners’ rights movement and the later Black Power movement.^[4]

The NOI appealed to Black prisoners as a religious group and, from there, empowered prisoners to fight for their civil rights as Muslims and Black men. The NOI’s Black nationalist ideology would politically tie itself and its members to the Black Freedom Struggle and give its members a unique justification and desire to combat racial norms of the twentieth century. Once this Black nationalist theology combined with a sustained focus on reforming Black prisoners starting from the late 1940s onward, the NOI would help to foster a sustained legal struggle for prisoners’ rights due to its unique status as both a religious and political group.

The Nation of Islam Before Prison Conversions (1930s to 1940s)

A common history of the NOI begins with the rather mysterious July 4th arrival of the religion’s founder, Wallace D. Fard (also known as Fard Muhammad; pronounced Fa-rod), in Detroit in 1930.^[5] Fard was a door-to-door salesman specializing in “foreign artifacts, trinkets, clothes, and fabrics” who preached to Detroit’s African American community about their “true history” as descendants of the Tribe of Shabazz and their need to abandon the “slave religion” of Christianity for their ancestors’ true religion of Islam.^[6] This rediscovery of African heritage is why Fard’s organization would take the name the Lost-Found Nation of Islam later shortened to just the Nation of Islam.^[7]

However, Fard taught his Black Detroit audience far more than a lost history of African civilization, giving his religion a political twist through its ideology that would forever put his NOI at odds with the White American state and politicize his members to join the Black Freedom Struggle.^[8] According to Fard’s successor Elijah Muhammad (who recorded most of what we know of the organization’s theology), the “spinning atom of life” at the beginning of time grew into the Original Man whom Muslims know as Allah (“God” in Arabic).^[9] Allah, according to the NOI, created Black people in His image, and “as the Original People, African Americans were not merely equal to Whites, but they were actually far superior in their very essence…Slavery was a mere aberration, an unfortunate blip in [a] long history.”^[10] This cosmogony fundamentally shaped the philosophy of the NOI toward Black nationalism. White men, called “White, blue-eyed devils” by Elijah Muhammad, were created six thousand years ago by a Black man named Yakub (or Yacub) and would enslave and separate Black people from their “majestic, ancient civilizations of the Tribe of Shabazz.”^[11] While Blacks were created by Allah in His image, Whites were man-made and not natural according to this NOI origin of the universe and were thus an inferior race.

This theology of African Americans’ glorious history appealed to many Black people in Detroit and gave them the self-confidence and justification to fight back against a society that oppressed them; by 1932, there were eight thousand members in the city alone.^[12] Fard’s message appealed to downtrodden Black men and women of the Depression-era North by explaining that they were not lesser than Whites but instead descendants of a great civilization and God’s chosen people. Fard, through his preaching of a pseudo-historical African history centered around the Tribe of Shabazz, helped reignite a self-confidence and love of Blackness sorely lacking in the racist American society of the twentieth century. Elijah Muhammad would expound on this appeal decades later stating, “one of the gravest handicaps among the so-called Negroes is that there is no love for self, nor love for his or her own kind. This not having love for self is the root cause of hate…Your Black skin is best, and never try changing color.”^[13] This boost in confidence would turn many NOI members toward the Black Freedom Struggle and outward activism; for as White people’s superiors, Black people did not deserve to be oppressed. The NOI’s proclaimed origin of the universe created by a Black Allah paired well with an activist mindset to provide hope that one day natural order would be restored and the unnatural and evil Whites would be put back in their proper place. This reversed the 1930s racial norms that were prominent across America by aligning Fard’s movement with an extremist form of the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle.

Fard, however, would not get the organization he founded involved in prisons as he disappeared in June of 1934 after only three and a half years of ministry.^[14] Shortly before he disappeared, Fard left the organization in the hands of Elijah Muhammad, originally Elijah Poole, who was the leader of the NOI’s Chicago Temple. Elijah Muhammad deified the missing Fard as Allah incarnate on earth as a Black man — a deeply appealing notion to future Black male converts — with himself as Fard’s appointed prophet and successor.^[15] It was also under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership that the NOI would begin to focus on converting and redeeming Black prisoners.

During the 1940s, Elijah Muhammad and the NOI as an organization began to be scrutinized by law enforcement for their refusal to register for the draft during World War II. Because the NOI did not believe in fighting “White wars,” one hundred prominent NOI leaders, including Elijah Muhammad himself, were arrested for draft evasion.^[16] During his incarceration, “[Elijah] Muhammad and his fellow Muslim inmates continued their proselytizing and succeeded in converting a number of other prisoners,” further growing the movement in an untapped market other Black freedom-aligned religions had failed to reach.^[17] During his four years in prison (1942–46), Elijah Muhammad was convinced “that the conversion of the ‘living dead’ inside America’s penal system was of paramount importance to the overall aim of liberating African Americans from their White oppressors.”^[18] Under Fard, the NOI had preached an ideology that put its members at odds with White-led society, but under Elijah Muhammad, the NOI had found a focus to channel Black freedom: the plight of Black prisoners.

NOI Theology Within Prisons

Elijah Muhammad proclaimed that “Black criminals were rebuked for emulating the sinful behavior of Whites,” essentially reflecting the onus for Black crime onto White society for corrupting the people made in God’s image.^[19] Pinning the blame on White society was appealing to Black prisoners of the mid-twentieth century, as many were victims of a racist legal system that targeted Black men. Elijah Muhammad’s most famous prison convert from this period, Malcolm X, would write as much in his Autobiography, stating, “here is a Black man caged behind bars…put there by the White man…how from the first landing of the first slave ship, the millions of Black men in America have been like sheep in a den of wolves.”^[20] Based on Muhammad’s political preaching, Black prisoners embraced the idea that their imprisonment was not fair; as wronged men, they believed they could reform prisons from within to fix the system as best they could.

Elijah Muhammad, a very hands-on Prophet, turned his prison converts’ hatred against the racist White system into a call to convert and fix themselves. He urged Black prisoners “to abandon their wicked behavior and undergo a spiritual and moral rebirth by following the word of Allah” for “once they discovered their identity as members of the supreme race, they would naturally desist from criminal activity.”^[21] It was through self-cultivation, a common theme of the religion, that Black prisoners would redeem themselves to their rightful superiority and regain their autonomy. Autonomy was a greatly appealing notion to those within the American prison system, a system that was ostensibly meant to reform criminals but instead took away their sense of control. Malcolm X wrote in his Autobiography that “behind bars, a man never reforms” and described bars as like being in a cage, but that “between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings…[and] my reading of books…I never had been so truly free in my life.”^[22] Through the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and his intellectual pursuits, which were encouraged by the NOI in their bid to raise Black men back to their ancestral standards of intelligent and self-confident men, Malcolm X regained his sense of autonomy and control over his life, which in turn fueled his outspoken support for Black freedom. Many other NOI prison converts would have experiences like Malcolm’s, now instilled with the idea of an unfair prison system and a feeling of self-confidence, autonomy, and a nationalist justification for fighting for their best interests.

Elijah Muhammad gave a theological justification for Black prisoners to have guaranteed rights. He politicized the prisoners to fight for these rights because Black men could redeem themselves, because they were God’s chosen people, and because the White prison system was out to get them. These are the same arguments that Enlightenment philosophers used to justify natural rights: We are intelligent, distinguished men created by God and deserve the rights given to us by Him. It was a philosophy of Black excellence and notion of God-given Black rights that led the NOI into the Black Freedom Struggle and the prisoners’ rights movement.

NOI Rituals of Elevation and Organization

However, religions are far more than just a list of beliefs and philosophies; to transition into the political actions of NOI prisoners, it is important to look at the rituals used within NOI practice that helped prisoners achieve those rights. Catherine Bell defines “ritualization” as “involv[ing] the differentiation and privileging of particular activities” from mundane (i.e., non-ritual) activities, which in practice “differentiate themselves by a variety of features…these [ritual] activities may use a delineated and structured space to which access is restricted…distinct and specialized personnel…preparations that demand particular physical or mental states…[etc.]”^[23] Simply put, ritual is a practice that the practitioner views as distinct from the everyday world (even if they practice the ritual everyday), and for that reason they “privilege” the ritual above non-ritual activities. For those in the NOI, these rituals took the form of conversion to their ancestors’ religion of Islam, name changes, strict diets, daily prayer, dress codes, and other practices with the goal of elevating the Black man back to the standards of their Shabazz ancestors.

These rituals, in turn, further organized NOI men as a political unit and helped instill activists’ self-confidence as not just Black men but Muslim men by giving them a sense of autonomy and control over their lives. Again, this fits with Bell’s theories of ritualization as she states, “the purpose of ritualization is to ritualize persons, who deploy schemes of ritualization in order to dominate (shift or nuance) other, non-ritualized situations to render them more coherent with the values of the ritualizing schemes and capable of molding perceptions.”^[24] Ritual is meant to bring about a certain result in the non-ritualized world. A Catholic, for example, prays to Saint Anthony, and he will find his missing set of keys. A baseball pitcher stops shaving for the season, and he will strike out the opposing team more consistently. An NOI prisoner converts, and he will gain the respect he deserves from society. Do the rituals, do them correctly, and a certain result will occur. For Black men in twentieth century America, gaining respect and rights in an unjust society seemed especially hopeless behind bars. The NOI provided an outlet for these hopeless Black prisoners to take back their autonomy and provided a reason to fight back as Allah was on their side.

This “elevation through ritual” gave converts the self-confidence to fight back in a well-organized manner bolstered by the “dignity, hope, civilization, self-determination, pride, peace, security, and salvation” promised by Islam.^[25] The importance of these conversion stories elevating Black men through the “power of Islam” and its moral code is attested to in the dozens of testimonies of overcoming addiction within the NOI’s official newspaper, Muhammad Speaks.^[26] Autobiographies written by members of the NOI (most famously Malcolm X) attest to members reflecting on their “evil” pasts and the redemption and religious salvation they found through Islam, as well as the “practical” salvation of escaping the cycle of prison and poverty with employment and housing provided by the NOI.^[27]

Albert Stukes, a non-prisoner NOI convert, in an article for Muhammad Speaks, writes of the profound appearance of NOI men (well dressed and morally upright) making him “proud to be a Black man” and uprooting his fear of Whites.^[28] While Stukes was not converted within prison, this attitude of awe felt by the unconverted Black man toward the intelligent and distinguished NOI man armed with a firm self-discipline is a recurring theme in conversion narratives within the NOI. Malcolm X describes something similar in his Autobiography, describing Bimbi (the nickname for the first NOI man he met while in prison) making him feel an “envy of [my] stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversation he was in, and I tried to emulate him.”^[29] In embodying the Black superiority and excellence of their Tribe of Shabazz ancestors in how they acted, spoke, and dressed, NOI men distinguished themselves from other Black prisoners. They combated the oppressive White prison system through a sort of “extreme” respectability politics seen in other civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Like these other organizations, respectability politics prompted the question of why such respectable people (in this case, respectable prisoners) did not have the rights deserving of self-disciplined, intelligent, and reformed men.

The NOI also elevated their converts within prison into a cohesive political unit, as they were not only a religious organization but one of the only organizations active within prisons. Purely political groups tended not to form within prison walls without serious backlash, and as a result, the NOI was one of the only ways for prisoners to organize against the prison system itself. In a practical sense, the NOI was the “only African American protest organization to have a presence inside the penal system before the late 1960s” because of the ways in which prisons tended to crack down on political organizations before the emergence of prisoners’ rights.^[30] Because the NOI was a religious group, they were at first able to form within prisons relatively untouched and prime their men toward political activism. The NOI acted as a mouthpiece for those politicized within the prison population to “situate their own struggles against White privilege…[and] express their frustration and anger at the White power structure.”^[31] Elijah Muhammad’s uplifting theology allowed prisoners to accept, redeem, and recreate themselves with an identity beyond just being a Black criminal and provided them a common enemy: the evil White devil and their prisons. This encouraged NOI members within prisons to physically separate themselves from other prisoners and form effective resistance groups once officials started targeting the NOI as “the Muslim Cult of Islam.”^[32]

Prisons Crackdown on the NOI

Once the NOI grew large enough to show up on the radar of prison officials, the crackdown that would eventually trigger prison reform began. While the theology that politicized NOI prisoners developed during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the NOI’s extensive action toward prison reform came to prominence in the late 1950s. Before that time, there were not enough members within the NOI for the prison system to see the group as a threat and crack down on their activities. While the organization did grow among persecuted African Americans outside of prison during the 1950s, it was not until the end of the decade that specific persecution within prisons began, and the group’s recruitment of prisoners rapidly increased. This crackdown by prison authorities triggered the NOI’s political blowback and awakened the religious organization’s army of united, self-confident, and politically active Black men uplifted and primed by Black nationalist theology to fight back. Zoe Colley, a historian focusing on race, crime, and protest within the United States, analyzed the NOI’s politicization and appeals to Black prisoners and noted a marked increase in prisoner conversions between 1959 and 1960 after the release of a documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced.^[33] Colley gives “a conservative estimate…[of] the Nation’s prison membership in the early 1960s at around 1,500 or 5 percent of overall membership believed to have been 30,000 at the very least.”^[34] Slowly gaining converts throughout the 1950s within the prison system, the NOI by 1955 was a large enough presence to be permitted to hold religious services within prisons.^[35] In that same year, the persecution of NOI members within prisons was first reported. “Muslims at Washington, DC’s Lorton Reformatory complain[ed] that prison authorities were preventing them from practicing their religion” by forcing them to eat pork and other “unclean foods,” breaking up temples, sending members to different institutions, and isolating NOI leaders via solitary confinement.^[36] From the mid-1950s into the 1960s, more of these instances of breaking up NOI temples and locking NOI leaders in solitary were reported. However, bolstered by their faith and hope in Allah, the NOI men stood resolute and bucked authority’s expectations of submissive Black men.

The release of a documentary by the decade’s end would further increase the systematic targeting of the NOI by providing language that authorities could use to denigrate the NOI as a “cult” in need of regulation. During the summer of 1959, The Hate That Hate Produced was released, increasing the notoriety – and also ironically the membership – of the NOI by bringing it into the wider public consciousness. “The serial documentary was almost singularly responsible for introducing the Nation of Islam to the broader public” and positioned it (as the name implies) as a hate group of the likes of Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.^[37] A shift is noted in media coverage of the NOI from a strange “orientalist voodoo cult” to a group of “Black racists,” a phrase invented by the documentary and still used to this day to denounce Black empowerment groups.^[38] Garrett Felber, another American historian who focuses on race, crime, and protest, notes that the terms invented for the documentary “provided a framework…[for prison and judicial officials] to understand the Nation of Islam as a hate group masquerading under the auspices of a religion” neutering their potential political activity by labeling them as a dangerous “race-cult.”^[39] This same denouncement, however, would unintentionally give the politicized NOI prisoners a legal standing to combat prison intolerance: the protection of their religious rights.^[40]

This reframing of prisoners’ rights from a political and racial issue to a religious one was a remarkable leap forward for the nascent prisoners’ rights. Ever since Virginia’s 1871 Ruffin v. Commonwealth case, prisoners had been defined as “slaves of the state” and therefore not guaranteed constitutional rights.^[41] Because of this, a dynamic emerged in which prisoners of the Ruffin v. Commonwealth era were not guaranteed constitutional rights, but religious groups (such as the NOI) were guaranteed at least some rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment. Due to the NOI’s unique status as both a religious and political prison group, they were able to jumpstart the fight for prisoners’ rights through religion. Legal cases concerning the denial of their religious rights by prisons would get the NOI’s “foot in the door,” and from there, the movement would foster legislation in support of prisoners’ civil rights.

Ostensibly, the persecution of the NOI seems to be entirely religious; however, the NOI also functioned as a racial and political group aligned with the greater Black Freedom Struggle, and these factors played a prominent role in their persecution. Felber echoes this idea, noting that Black Muslim organizations like the NOI were targeted specifically by prison authorities as they “allowed access to The Glorious Koran, translated by the White English convert Marmaduke Pickthall…but refused copies of the Arabic translation by the Indian-born Maulana Muhammad Ali” showing a clear racial bias.^[42] This filtering of the Quran would be the first action among many that aimed to differentiate between the “illegitimate” (race-conscious) Islam of the NOI and the “legitimate” (color-blind) Islam of the mainstream.^[43] By the early 1960s, not only was Muhammad Speaks banned from many prisons, but Black political newspapers that “could carry NOI editorials” such as The Pittsburgh Courier, The New York Amsterdam News, and The Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch were monitored and confiscated by prison authorities.^[44] This was not just the persecution of a religion, but a wider attempt by the White prison system to regulate Black politics.

The NOI Stages a Legal Campaign

Contemporaneously with the classical era of civil rights, the NOI would first wage a legal campaign for prisoner rights in 1959 at the Clinton State Prison in New York. Without a doubt, the NOI influenced the incarcerated men to become litigants in the Clinton campaigns. The men “arrived from a variety of different backgrounds during the mid-1950s. None were Muslim when sentenced, and unlike members of the Nation of Islam incarcerated in federal prisons during World War II for refusing [the draft]…they did not have political backgrounds or political charges that brought them to prison.”^[45] The NOI as a religion had converted and politicized them toward the Black Freedom Struggle all within prison; no outside organization turned them toward prisoners’ rights beforehand. The first two of these cases were Pierce v. LaVallee (1961) and SaMarion v. McGinnis (1962) with the Warden of Clinton Prison and the New York State Commissioner of Corrections being the defendants, respectively. These officials were sued over “access to the Qur’an, correspondence with religious counsel, separate religious services, and an end to religious persecution through solitary confinement” by these NOI prisoners.^[46] In response to filing these petitions, key organizers of the NOI in Clinton Prison, including SaMarion himself, were moved to Attica in 1960 using strategies meant to “break up gangs, separate associates in crime, and prevent disorder,” treating the NOI as one such criminal gang.^[47] In a bid to protect their civil rights as prisoners, these NOI litigants were persecuted by the state of New York, and the organization as a whole was labeled a “racist cult” to prevent further political agitation. Encouraged by NOI theology, the litigants held strong and did not drop the cases.

These actions would not be isolated to Clinton Prison, however, as NOI litigants began to sprout up nationwide. The prison system had poked the sleeping bear that was the NOI by attacking a religion that was deeply rooted in political movements like the contemporary Black Freedom Struggle through its theology. The NOI prided itself on autonomous, self-respecting, and educated members who were tightly organized and willing to fight back against a system they saw as evil; contrary to prison officials’ perception of “subservient Blacks,” NOI men did not simply stand down when punished. Inspired by the organizers in Clinton, “between 1961 and 1978, sixty-six reported federal court decisions were made on suits filed by prisoners affiliated with the Nation of Islam…Black prisoners saw the courts as political pulpits, a breach in the walls allowing them to take their claims before the world outside.”^[48] All of these cases would enter the courts as matters of religious persecution, but the trials would eventually turn to the general treatment of Black prisoners. At first, these trials advocated for protected rights for prisoners to practice their religions freely, but this turned toward more “secular” concerns over time.

While ostensibly fighting for the religious rights of Muslims within prisons, the NOI also used their public trials to preach Black liberation and the freedom struggle; a specific example of this is Malcolm X’s testimony at the aforementioned 1962 SaMarion v. McGinnis trial. Malcolm X was called in by the defense to testify to his qualifications as a Muslim minister and to the “legitimacy” of the NOI as a religious organization. To his qualifications, Malcolm openly admitted “that he had an eighth-grade education, no formal theological training, and could not speak Arabic” though countered this by citing the uneducated and untrained apostles of Jesus.^[49] Yet, religion merely got Malcolm onto the stand; he “also used the courtroom as a stage to launch into his many political riffs,” delivering something similar to what would become his most-remembered speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” one year later.^[50] This was all in a bid to change the nomenclature used at the trial from the derogatory “Negro” to the more respectful “Black,” and through his testimony, Malcolm succeeded. Judge John Henderson personally apologized to Malcolm X for using “Negro” and the prosecuting Deputy Attorney General Bresnihan “began adopting the phrase the ‘American Black Man’ in his questioning thereafter.”^[51] While Malcolm X had successfully convinced the judge of the NOI’s legitimacy as a religious organization, he also made sure that his “political views took center stage and fundamentally altered the rhetoric and discourse of the case” toward the empowerment of African Americans.^[52] Testimony through these court cases was an important nonviolent resistance tool utilized by the NOI. Because of their unique status as both a religious and political organization, they were able to use their court cases to transfer religious freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution into political and civil freedoms for prisoners. They brought forth cases concerning religious freedoms and then used testimony to enter arguments into the legal record for Black rights in prisons.

While most of the NOI-led legal challenges of the 1960s failed, the NOI did succeed in Cooper v. Pate (1964), which ruled that civil rights applied to prisoners (ending the “slave era” of Ruffin v. Commonwealth) and thus had a great impact on the prisoners’ rights campaign as a whole.^[53] Cooper v. Pate is one of the most important court cases within prison reform, likened to Brown v. Board of Education for civilian civil rights. As Brown “provided the legal groundwork for further challenges to racial segregation, so Cooper provided a constitutional basis upon which later campaigns for prisoners’ rights” could be waged.^[54] Without the NOI’s targeted campaign, “the eventual intervention of the courts into the administration of prison discipline” would never have happened for it “was a product of years of political strategies…The Nation of Islam’s litigation was part of a broader legal strategy that was as national as the carceral web that opposed it.”^[55] The NOI and its court cases also secured “freedom from punishment on account of one’s religion, the opportunity to hold religious service [in prison], and the right to wear religious medals” through Sewell v. Pegelow (1961), Fulwood v. Clemmer (1962), Banks v. Havener (1964), and Coleman v. District of Columbia Commissioners (1964), respectively, all of which provided a legal standing upon which the future prisoners’ rights movement could launch from after the Attica uprisings.^[56]

Conclusion: The Mixed Legacy of the NOI

These landmark cases prompt the question: Why are they not considered the starting point of the modern prisoners’ rights movement? Felber argues that “at best, the Nation of Islam has been depicted as a reluctant political participant, pulled toward the struggle by Malcolm X. At worst, it is portrayed as an apolitical religious sect that was marginal…to such movements,” a sign of federal officials’ success in delegitimizing the NOI as both a religious and political organization.^[57] In denoting the NOI as simply a racist cult despite the clear political orientation of their theology and their history of active political participation within the prisoners’ role in the Black Freedom Struggle, White authorities (and academia) have essentially buried the NOI from public discourse outside of Malcolm X. It took until the mid-to-late 2010s for academia to investigate the NOI’s influence on prison reform and fairly analyze it without setting it aside as simply Elijah Muhammad’s cult of personality.

Just as quickly as the NOI became involved in prisoners’ rights, they would fall out of it in the last decade of Elijah Muhammad’s life. By the mid-1960s, the split within the NOI between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X shifted Black prisoners’ support away from the NOI and over to new organizations, most notably the Black Panther Party (BPP), which was founded in 1966.^[58] This was due to the BPP’s similar strategy of forming branches within prisons and celebrating Black prisoners as soldiers in the battle against White supremacy.^[59] One of the founders of the BPP, Huey Newton, in a meeting with Elijah Muhammad’s successor Louis Farrakhan in the mid-70s, was noted as saying: “We in the Black Panther Party have always appreciated the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” accepting the influence of Elijah Muhammad on the secular Black nationalist movement.^[60] Even beyond the BPP, the legacy of the NOI continued to be felt during the 1971 Attica Uprisings with the “manifesto of demands” given by prisoners to New York State reflecting the demands of NOI prisoners during the previous decades. Demand 4 called for the end of solitary confinement as a punishment for political beliefs, which had been done to NOI leaders during the 1950s and 60s.^[61] Demand 26 explicitly demanded pork-free diets for those prisoners who wanted it, a staple characteristic of the elevated members of the NOI.^[62] Even as historians have ignored the NOI’s long shadow over prison reform, deeming the organization a historical footnote and an apolitical ‘cult’ with its connection to prison reform being solely Malcolm X’s pet project, the Attica rioters embraced the NOI and continued the fight they had started decades earlier.