(RNS) — Ninety-seven years ago, Carter G. Woodson began his campaign to initiate Negro History Week, which would later become Black History Month, to celebrate the rich history of African Americans’ contribution to this country. But even then, the legacy of Black Muslim Americans was at times intentionally left out.
Islam was largely introduced to the United States during the trans-Atlantic slave trade as West African captives were brought to the shores of the Carolinas and Virginia to be sold as chattel for free labor. As their feet, shackled, settled in the dirt of an unknown land, they struggled not only to keep their human dignity intact in a slavery system that was developed to destroy it, they struggled to hold onto their layered identities. Their tribal identity, their language, their traditions — and, for many, their worship and their practice of Islam — was taken away in order to make them docile and obedient to inhumane treatment.
