The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930 by W. D. Fard Muhammad and built by his successor Elijah Muhammad into a movement of temples, schools, and businesses preaching Black self-reliance and separation from a society that had proven murderous to Black people. Police pressure came almost immediately — Fard was repeatedly arrested and expelled from Detroit, and the movement's schools were raided as early as 1934, when Elijah Muhammad was first jailed over the Muslims' refusal to send children to public schools.
Hounded between Detroit and Chicago by police and by internal rivals, Elijah Muhammad spent much of the late 1930s in flight — years that hardened the Nation's understanding of itself as a community under permanent siege by the American state.