Sultan Knish
The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New
York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple
turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches
outside the stores of Harlem's dwindling Jewish community.
The
cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and
jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a
pioneering labor leader-- but was known back then as the Black Hitler.
A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.
In
his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man
who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease,
and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.
He vowed an "an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites."
Speeches
like these earned him the title, 'Black Hitler' and intimidated local
businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union.
The
enterprising community organizer dubbed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid, and
when he opened his mosque, he expanded his name to His Holiness Bishop
Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid. His press man claimed that he had been
born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. In reality he had been
born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts and in Chicago had briefly
claimed to be Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric. Like the Nation of
Islam, which was finding its feet at around the same time, his theology
was a hodgepodge of Islam and anything else he picked up along the way.
It
is unknown what connection Sufi Abdul Hamid had to the burgeoning
Nation of Islam, which took the same mix of racism, anti-semitism, black
nationalism and Islam and became a major movement, but in the year
before he moved to Harlem, Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad
disappeared, and his successor Elijah Muhammad moved to Chicago after
conflicts with the state government and rival NOI leaders. Hamid was
probably never part of the Nation of Islam, but he had almost certainly
seen it in action and his New York operation was guided by similar
methods.
The year was 1932. In Germany, the actual Hitler was
running for president. In New York City, Mayor Jimmy Walker was still
reigning as the corrupt but entertaining figurehead of Tammany Hall's
Democratic party apparatus, but in a few months the Seabury Commission's
investigation into the city's horrifyingly corrupt justice system would
send the Tin Pan Alley singing mayor fleeing off to Europe along with
his showgirl wife.
The Great Depression had hit New York's
prosperous commercial sector like a sledgehammer. The city that never
slept had not gone quiet, but it had slowed down. New York's black
population had exploded in its boom days drawn by the lure of jobs, but
now that the bust had come the streets of Harlem were full of unemployed
men.
The time was ripe for a messiah or a violent explosion. And Sufi Abdul Hamid offered them both.
Hamid
was not the only one working the streets of Harlem. The Young Communist
League and the Young Liberators had been there first looking for cannon
fodder for the revolution. The Japanese were dreaming of a black army
that would serve as their fifth column in the conquest of the United
States. Both were to be disappointed. The Black Communist, once
commonplace among Harlem intellectuals, would become an endangered
species beginning with the Hitler-Stalin pact and ending with the
liberal takeover of civil rights. But for now black intellectuals would
visit Japan and even endorse its brutal invasion of China.
Imperial
Japan's simultaneous cultivation of Muslims in order to subvert the
British Empire, also led to ties between Japanese officials and the
Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad. The Moorish Science Temple, a more
explicit fusion of Islam, Asiatic exoticism and Black Nationalism,
another pseudo-Islamic cult operating out of Chicago. would eventually
be investigated by the FBI for ties to Japan. These days, its members
are more likely to be investigated for squatting empty mansions on the
grounds that they are descendants of the ancient Moabites of Africa and
represent a sovereign nation.
The Temple was a probable influence
on Hamid's Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility. The People's Voice, a
left wing black newspaper, would even claim that Hamid's temple had been
funded by Japan.
Sufi Abdul Hamid was not limited to Japanese
money. He had something better. For all his theatrics, under the slick
mustache, the gold lined cape and gleaming dagger, beat the heart of a
community organizer.
What Hamid came up with was a combination
labor union, employment agency, protection racket, Islamic cult and
protest movement. With black unemployment in Harlem running as high as
50 percent, he offered to find jobs for black men who paid him a dollar.
And to make sure they got hired, his men picketed businesses demanding
that they be put on the payroll. Businesses which didn't have a proper
proportion of black employees were accused of racism and exploitation.
Businesses which did were harassed anyway until they fired their black
employees and hired Hamid's men instead.
Hamid's 125th street
stepladder harangues intimidated Jewish store owners and customers, and
many black customers as well. Whenever he succeeded, he picked up more
recruits who might not believe in his religious message, but liked the
idea of getting a job. Businesses that paid up didn't have to worry that
the cape wearing hatemonger would show up in front of their store
screaming violent threats.
Hamid's following grew. As did his bank account.
By
1938, Hamid had his own private plane and a white secretary. His union
had gone through many names, from the Negro Industrial and Clerical
Alliance to the Afro-American Federation of Labor. Adam Clayton Powell
briefly joined forces with Sufi Abdul Hamid in labor protests and store
boycotts, but Hamid was too power hungry to work with anyone for long.
Black
Hitler's rhetoric moved beyond anti-white and anti-Jewish racism to
targeting light skinned blacks. Violent clashes with rival black unions
led to Hamid's arrest for stabbing Hammie Snipes, a former follower of
Marcus Garvey turned Communist labor union organizer. Finally the courts
barred Hamid from his picketing and forced him to focus his energies on
his mosque. But before that the Black Hitler would play a role in
Harlem's first race riot.
The Harlem riot of 1935 had many of the
characteristics of what would become the typical race riot. False
information about police brutality circulated by radicals looking to
stir up a mob. Looting misrepresented as a civil rights protest. And a
swelling undercurrent of bigotry portrayed as outrage. As Congresswoman
Maxine Waters would call the LA riots, "a revolution" and a "a
spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice"; Nannie H. Burroughs
compared the Harlem riot to the Boston Tea Party and claimed that it was
the duty of the oppressed to revolt.
The tactic was an old one,
unleash violence and then claim to be the only ones who could bottle it
up. Hamid had begun by intimidating storeowners with the threat of
racial violence, but the race riot of 1935 would intimidate the entire
neighborhood and eventually the entire city. Once unleashed and
legitimized, the violence could no longer be bottled up again.
A
race riot before 1935 had been an unusual phenomenon in Harlem. After
1935, it became far less so. Next year when Joe Louis lost his first
fight against Max Schmeling, Harlem rioters attacked white men in the
street and dropped bricks from buildings on passing cars.
The
1935 riot would destroy as many black businesses as white ones. But the
Communists who had played a major role in organizing the riot, did not
want to see black men reach the middle class, and Sufi Abdul Hamid
wanted to increase the scope of his protection racket. The courts had
taken a dim view of his labor organizing tactics, but a race riot
allowed stores to be hit up in a whole new way.
The riots and
arsons went on for three days. Two hundred stores were destroyed and
many more were looted. Fires were set to cries of "Let it burn". Entire
businesses were wiped out. Some never recovered. The damage to Harlem's
business district was estimated at one million dollars. Bodies went to
hospitals and morgues.
In what would also become a commonplace
feature of race riots, afterward, in a bid to gain mainstream political
influence, the Black Hitler debuted a more moderate image.
In an interview with The Nation magazine,
he disavowed bigotry and claimed to be a champion of the
underprivileged. Liberal newspapers and magazines were all too eager to
embrace the myth that the riot was caused by oppression rather than
radical manipulation. The New York Times championed an aid package for Harlem. While some Jewish newspapers called the attacks a 'Pogrom', the socialist Forward insisted on whitewashing the attacks as a protest against the authorities.
The
judicial crackdown on Hamid's labor extortion racket refocused his
attention on his mosque, the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, where
he dubbed himself a Bishop. His nickname migrated from the Black Hitler
to the Black Mufti. He married Queenie St. Clair, who ran Harlem's
numbers racket, but their marriage ended badly when Queenie shot him,
but failed to kill him. Hamid married again and bought a private plane,
an obscene luxury at a time when many of those he claimed to help didn't
have enough to eat. But Hamid frugally kept it low on gas. The plane
ran out of fuel over Long Island and crashed. Hamid died, survived by
his white secretary who suffered only a broken elbow.
His new
wife, a candle shop owner and fortune teller named Dorothy Hamid, who
styled herself Madame Fu Futtam, and improbably claimed to be Asian,
attempted to keep Hamid's mosque going with visits that he reportedly
made to her nightly from beyond the grave. Her prediction that Hamid
would return from the grave in sixty days did not come true.
Not
long after the mosque became a dance hall featuring a one legged dancer.
Today the site at 103 Morningside Avenue is the home of St. Luke's
Baptist Church.
But though Sufi Abdul Hamid is mostly forgotten today, his legacy lives on.
60
years later, back on 125th street where the Black Hitler had delivered
his stepladder harangues, the smashed windows and burning stores would
make a comeback.
In the winter of 1995,Al Sharpton and his
National Action Network went to Harlem to lead a protest against
another Jewish store, Freddie's Fashion Mart. Sharpton denounced
Freddie's owner as a "White Interloper" in Harlem, protesters mimed
tossing matches into the store, and one of them threatened to "Burn the Jew Store Down".
Finally
one of the protesters pulled out a gun, ordered the black customers to
leave and set the store on fire. Seven of the store's mostly Hispanic
employees died in the blaze.
Sharpton's prominence is a
testament to how mainstream Sufi Abdul Hamid's form of community
organizing had become. When Obama visited Sharpton to celebrate the
20th anniversary of his National Action Network, he was commemorating
not just the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, but an
organization which had ominous similarities to Hamid's own.
The
Freddie's protests had been led by Morris Powell who ran the National
Action Network's Buy Black Committee, which echoed Hamid's Don't Buy
campaign. Powell's tactic of standing
outside and screaming hatefilled slurs at passerby would have been
entirely familiar to Hamid. "Keep going right on past Freddy’s, he’s one
of the greedy Jew bastards killing our people. Don’t give the Jew a
dime."
Powell's record goes back to 1984
when he broke the head of a Korean woman during one of his pickets.
There is no doubt that Sharpton knew exactly whom he was bringing on
board.
Sharpton too had plenty in common with the Black Hitler.
Like Hamid, Sharpton started out with a flamboyant personality, playing
on bigotry while terrorizing storeowners and entire communities, fueling
the perception that he was the man who could unleash or tamp down
racial violence, and then toned down his rhetoric in exchange for
political influence. Hamid never lived long enough to see the president
come down to pay homage to him, but Al Sharpton did.
The Black
Hitler demonstrated that racial violence is profitable. Today Hamid is
remembered as a pioneering union organizer. And Sharpton has been to the
White House more often than any black leader. Sharpton's gold medallion
and Hamid's turban and cape were showpieces. Their bigoted rhetoric and
mob pickets a way of playing on violent populism. Self-interested
protests whose goal is to boost the profile of a leader and the bank
accounts of his organization have become the bread and butter of more
mainstream leaders like Jesse Jackson. Their occasional outbursts of
bigotry are forgiven for the power, protection and influence that they
bring to the table.
Even after the fire, Powell returned to
Freddie's screaming, "Freddie Ain't Dead Yet". The Black Hitler ain't
dead yet either. Not until his tactics are disavowed for good.
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