Colonial Williamsburg Spotlights Elijah Muhammad
(Times of Israel) – It is a small thing, only a few inches tall. But it carries a big toxic message.
The thing is a statuette representing Elijah Muhammad, carved by the noted folk artist Ulysses Davis. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at Colonial Williamsburg spotlights the carving in one of its galleries.
Colonial Williamsburg, a living American history museum, is a national treasure. A presentation of Muhammad in that context, especially a fraudulent one, cannot be defended.
Muhammad long led the anti-white, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish Lost-Found Nation of Islam. The group was known also as the Black Muslims, a faction of which carries on today as Louis Farrakhan’s black supremacist, Jew-hating Nation of Islam.
Raymond Scalettar and I were stunned at seeing the statuette while visiting the museum with our wives late in 2024. Ray is a former chairman of the American Medical Association. I served on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 2022 Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism.
We wrote Colonial Williamsburg Chair Carly Fiorina (former head of Hewlett-Packard and a 2016 Republican presidential primary hopeful) and President and Chief Executive Officer Cliff Fleet. We urged that they replace the figurine of the bigoted Muhammad with one of Davis’ many other carvings. These include representations of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Teddy Roosevelt, Bob Hope and Martin Luther King, Jr. Silence punctuated by obfuscation followed.
Elijah Muhammad was a racial supremacist but the placard accompanying the carving by Davis, a widely-praised black American folk artist, strains to imply Muhammad contributed to black civil rights. The notation couples his advocacy of “racial separatism” with promotion of “economic independence and hard work” that “gave many Black Americans a sense of pride and solidarity.” It also mentions Davis’ “deep interest in the civil rights movement.”
Visitors might never know that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, Elijah Muhammad:
*Promoted the belief that white people were created by an evil black scientist;
*Blacks are the superior race;
*Whites are “blue-eyed devils”; and
*Allah (God) made blacks His chosen people.
*During World War II, Muhammad spent four years in prison for violating the Selective Service Act by advising followers to avoid the draft.
*And that according to Eunice G. Pollack, author of Racializing Antisemitism: Black Militants, Jews and Israel, 1950 – Present, Muhammed met with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1959, after which he and his lieutenants, “distributed anti-Israel literature obtained from Egyptian consulates” and incorporated Cairo’s propaganda in their talks. The Black Muslim newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, reprinted the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization’s warnings about the “Zionist enemy” that was “menacing the entire world.”
Not to mention that in 1961 Muhammad reportedly sent Malcolm X to meet Ku Klux Klan leaders in Atlanta to explore possible cooperation in purchasing land on which to establish a blacks-only territory.
Scalettar and I sent Fiorina and Fleet several letters criticizing Colonial Williamsburg’s failure in attempting to justify the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum’s continued display of the Elijah Muhammad carving. In reply, Fleet wrote that “the evidence suggests he [Davis] carved Elijah Muhammed because he promoted equal rights for Black Americans, not because of his antisemitic statements.” He added that “as an educational institution, we believe it is our duty to ensure that we tell the accurate and complete history of our nation.” We pointed out that Muhammad did not work for racial equality and the exhibit was anything but accurate or complete.
My wife and I returned to Colonial Williamsburg and the Folk Art museum at the end of last December. Whether in response to Scalettar and my complaints or for another reason, the placard next to the Muhammad display, after mentioning that the Black Muslim leader “gave many Black Americans a sense of pride and solidarity,” adds this: “Yet some of his views were aggressively antisemitic.”
That makes the exhibit “accurate and complete”? So, a sculpture of former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest with an explanatory note that he co-founded the KKK, which brutally repressed Southern blacks post-Civil War, but “gave many former Confederates a sense of pride and solidarity” would be okay?
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has granted Colonial Williamsburg $4.25 million for preservation work.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in Israel, the United States has experienced an eruption of antisemitic incidents. Many have been violent; some of them deadly like the murders of two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington, D.C. The historical whitewash of Elijah Muhammad by Colonial Williamsburg remains intolerable. Some or all of the DHR grant should be withheld until Williamsburg corrects itself.
