In most histories of Black Power, as the Black Nationalist, anticolonial, and anticarceral frameworks developed by the Nation of Islam throughout the civil rights period shifted from margin to center, the Nation of Islam itself inexplicably recedes from view. This chapter highlights the continuity between these ideas, formations, and strategies and the period in which they flourished and spread belies state narratives of nihilism, rupture, and disorder, which served to justify further carceral buildup. From the creation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, to Watts, to the mysteries surrounding the assassination of Malcolm X, the chapter looks to the longer history of activism and anti-carceral thought launched by the Nation of Islam during the 1960s and afterward.
