Wallace D. Fard Muhammad appeared in Detroit's Black community in 1930, selling silks door to door and teaching a course of lessons that reinterpreted history, race and religion around the claim that Black people were the original human family and that Islam, not Christianity, was their natural religion, stripped of what he taught was the slaveholder's distortion. Among his earliest and most attentive students was Elijah Poole, a Georgia born migrant to Detroit, whom Fard renamed Elijah Muhammad and trained personally over roughly three years. Fard organized the Temple of Islam, later the Nation of Islam, around a body of teaching delivered partly in person and partly through written lessons that Elijah Muhammad continued to circulate for decades after Fard's disappearance.
Fard vanished from public view in 1934 under circumstances that were never fully resolved, and Elijah Muhammad spent the following years consolidating leadership of a small and factionalized movement against rival claimants. It was in this period, and increasingly in his later writings and sermons, that Elijah Muhammad systematized the claim at the center of Nation of Islam theology, that Fard had not been a teacher pointing toward God but God himself, Allah, present in human form, and that Elijah Muhammad's own role was that of Messenger, the one Fard had chosen and instructed to carry the teaching forward. Under Elijah Muhammad's leadership from 1934 until his death in 1975, the Nation of Islam grew from a marginal Detroit sect into a national organization with temples across the United States, its theology of Fard's divinity taught as settled doctrine throughout.