In the past four months, anyone who knows me has probably heard me babble at them about Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Im thrilled to finally be able to share with you the result of all that babbling: my first cover story for the South Side Weekly and the best journalistic work I have ever done. In this story, I seek to examine the Nations place on the South Side and in the world. I try to track the ways in which they have declined since their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, during the time of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, and understand their twenty-first century appeals to the African-American communities of South Shore and Auburn Gresham. In taking up this piece I owe a lot to the encouragement and advice of Bea Malsky, Hannah Nyhart, and especially John Gamino. Luke White took the photos of Mosque Maryam and was good enough to get taken hostage with me along the way. The idea for the story originated with a conversation I had with Harry Backlund in early July after reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and since then I doubt a day has passed when I have not done research, reporting, or writing on the Nation of Islam. The end result quite long, but Im very proud of it. I hope at least some of you read it and enjoy it, and I hope especially that you join me in being fascinated by this faith and its believers.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 01:41:43 +0000
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