Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

When, in the late 1990s, I taught college courses on religion to Chicago cops, my students would occasionally gift me their old, dog-eared copies of the glossy "Intelligence Report" magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. These sources helped shape their sense of who the "bad guys" were: extremists, terrorists, sovereign citizens, hate groups. These cops - like the cops and prison officials described in Those Who Know Don't Say-were actively seeking out and exchanging knowledge about religious movements, and, in the process, perpetuating fantasies of dehumanized villains dead set on irrationally disrupting a society predicated on "law and order."

This memory recurred, with new poignancy, as I read Garrett Felber's essential book on the Nation of Islam (NOI), one intervention of which is attention to how police and carceral officials read-and shared - C. Eric Lincoln's 1961 The Black Muslims in America. Lincoln himself volunteered to consult with police departments and cooperated with prison officials interested in his research. Following Lincoln, agents of the state could insist that the NOI was not authentically Islamic or "legitimately" religious, that it eschewed...