This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A figure of disputed background appeared in Detroit's Paradise Valley neighborhood around 1930, selling silks door to door and teaching a new religious message to the city's Black working class. Known to his followers as Wallace Fard Muhammad, he organized those followers into a new movement, the Nation of Islam, and named a recent arrival to Detroit, Elijah Poole, later Elijah Muhammad, as his chief minister.
His teaching held that Black people were the original human race and that he himself was Allah in the person of a man, a claim the Nation of Islam continues to hold about him today. That doctrine, combined with an organized structure built around temples and a defined leadership role for his chief minister, distinguished the movement he founded from other Black religious organizations active in Detroit at the time.
Fard's public ministry in Detroit lasted only a few years. He disappeared from the city in 1934, leaving behind an organization that Elijah Muhammad, the chief minister he had personally selected, would go on to build from a small Detroit following into a national movement, carrying forward the doctrine Fard had founded it on.
That short span, roughly four years between his first appearance selling silks and his unexplained disappearance, is nearly the whole of what can be documented about Fard's own activity as a founder; almost everything the Nation of Islam became afterward was built by the chief minister he left in charge.