My book manuscript, tentatively entitled “A Religion for Black Men in America”: The Nation of Islam Against Jim Crow’s Empire, illuminates how questions of racial separation and de-colonization lay at the heart of the Black freedom movement in the twentieth century—and that integration was not the only option for Black freedom fighters.

My research interrogates how race and masculinity functioned for a religious group that fought for racial justice but not integration, examining how the Nation of Islam grew from its working-class origins in Great Depression Detroit to international recognition for its activism through the group’s reorganization under Louis Farrakhan. I analyze how the Nation of Islam’s teachings introduced a religio-racial sense of Black masculinity — a  definition of masculinity wherein ideas about religion, race, and masculinity mutually support one another — in response to Black middle-class social norms and the failure of the New Deal state to eliminate poverty and racism. Doing so created a template for Black success built upon individual excellence, masculine discipline, racial separation, and community uplift.

I unpack how and why this conception of Black male citizenship appealed to so many Black men from the 1930s to the 1990s and how their conceptions of citizenship in a pro-Black Islamic nation, rather than a white supremacist Christian country, shifted the grounds on which the Black freedom movement was shaped and reshaped by Black people across the United States. Critically, I examine how the Nation of Islam defined itself as separate from the white, Christian United States as an autonomous Black, Islamic nation-state from the Great Depression to Obama’s America.