Wallace Muhammad (Wallace Fard Muhammad) is widely believed to be the founder of the Nation of Islam. There is much controversy however as to whom this man actually was and where he came from. There are FBI and other law enforcement records of a Wallace Dodd Ford. According to these records, Fard was born in New Zealand or Portland, Oregon on February 25, 1891, to either Hawaiian or British, or Polynesian (Māori) parents. He had little education and a foul temperament that made it difficult for him to fit in. Fard was a petty criminal. As far back as November 1918, he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. He was again arrested for violating California’s Prohibition law On January 20, 1926, and for selling narcotics in his restaurant just a month later. He served a three-year sentence in San Quentin Prison from 1926-1929. [S. Smith] The FBI file on Wallace Dodd Ford contains photographs and fingerprints and alleges that he has used as many as 58 aliases over his lifetime. These aliases include David Ford-el, Wali Farad, Farrad Mohammed, W.D. Fard, and F. Mohammed Ali, among others. Within the Nation of Islam he is most commonly known as Master Fard Muhammad. [S. Smith] Sometime in June 1934, Master Fard disappeared mysteriously. His followers were left with no explanation. Many speculated that Fard had been murdered. There was no concrete information until 1963, when the Seattle Post Intelligencer posted a sensational article, which also appeared in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, claiming that Fard was really Wallace Ford/Dodd. The article claimed that Fard was actually a white, ex-convict who had served time in San Quentin Prison for selling drugs. The article also stated that Ford returned to Portland, Oregon, after leaving Chicago, to visit his ex-wife and child, then moved back to New Zealand. Wallace D. Fard died in Chicago in 1971 at the age of 78, as reported by Karl Evanzz an African American journalist and noted Nation of Islam authority and author of “The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad.” [S. Smith] Regardless of his real identity, most accounts assert that Wallace D. Fard first appeared in Detroit in 1930. He became known on the streets in black neighborhoods as a door to door salesman who would peddle silk clothe and hats and clothing made from silk that were supposedly from Asia, and Africa. He would tout these items as being from royal stock and that they were in fact the garb of their ancestors from Mecca, Arabia. He would go as far as to offer to clean their homes to gain access in an effort to deliver his message. That message was to turn from Christianity, which was the religion of their slave masters, and embrace his brand of Islam. He came to be known as the “Prophet.” His message eventually included claims that the world was once ruled by a black race descended from nine foot black extraterrestrial beings. An experiment gone wrong had accidentally released “white devils” that eventually took over, and that now it was time to reclaim what was right fully theirs. He claimed that he had come to “wake the Dead Nation of the West” and to prepare the black man for Armageddon; an inescapable clash with the white man. After his disappearance in 1934 he was sanctified as Allah and his birthday, February 26th, is known as Savior’s day in the Nation of Islam. [S. Smith] Before 1930 it is reported that Fard was a member of the Moorish Science Temple of America prior to starting the Nation of Islam. Another high ranking member of the Nation of Islam purported to be a former member of the Moorish Science Temple of America, was Elijah Muhammad. [S. Smith] Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole on October 7, 1897 in Sandersville, Georgia, one of thirteen children born to a Baptist preacher and former sharecropper and slave. Armed with only a fourth grade education, he left home at 16, married in 1919, and moved to Detroit in 1923. While