Wallace Fard was born February 26, 1893. Appearing in Detroit after emigrating from Mecca in the 1920s (or possibly instead from California, if public records are to be believed - where, as Wallace Ford, he had completed a three-year drugs sentence in San Quentin), Fard founded the Temple of Islam in 1930. He preached that black Americans should abandon Christianity in preparation for an Armageddon in which their former white slave-masters would be overcome. Fard's successor, Elijah Muhammed, reshaped the organization into the Nation of Islam, which holds that we live at the end of a 6000-year reign of "white devils".
Fard vanished mysteriously in 1934.
