The New York City Council approved a plan Thursday to name a block in Harlem after National of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.
“Early on, Elijah Muhammad preached about greedy Jews and advanced the longstanding antisemitic trope that Jews turned Jesus Christ in to the authorities,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Muhammad invited American Nazi Party boss George Lincoln Rockwell to the NOI’s 1962 Saviours’ Day Convention,” where Rockwell dubbed Muhammad “the Adolf Hitler of the black man,” the center added.
Still, the council supported naming the Manhattan intersection of West 127th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard “The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad Way,” reported the New York Daily News.
“He fails every test we could possibly put forward: the test based on the values and views of today, and the values and views of the times in which he lived and worked,” David Carr, a Republican council member said at a committee hearing.
Kristin Richardson Jordan, a far-left council member who represents Harlem and who proposed the street naming, called the honor “way overdue.”
“It is actually not OK to erase black leaders who are not pleasing to white people,” she said during the vote. “I profoundly vote aye on Elijah Muhammad Way.”
“The corner is the site of the NOI-owned Mosque Temple No. 7, where Malcolm X long preached,” according to the editorial board of the New York Post, “and where an NYPD officer was slain in 1972 (three years before Mohammad’s death) by unidentified NOI radicals while responding to a false emergency call at the mosque. That is, this renaming would be a dishonor in multiple ways.”
“This renaming would be an utter obscenity,” the Post board added.
Per recent reporting, Illinois taxpayers are funding at least $500,000 for a group that is inspired by the Nation of Islam, whose leadership held official roles in the Nation of Islam and which calls itself “the archives for the Nation of Islam.”
