The Black Hitler of Harlem
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The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches outside the stores of Harlem’s dwindling Jewish community.
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The cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a pioneering labor leader– but was known back then as the Black Hitler.
A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.
In his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.
He vowed an “an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites.”
Speeches like these earned him the title, ‘Black Hitler’ and intimidated local businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union.
The enterprising community organizer dubbed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid, and when he opened his mosque, he expanded his name to His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid. His press man claimed that he had been born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. In reality he had been born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts and in Chicago had briefly claimed to be Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric. Like the Nation of Islam, which was finding its feet at around the same time, his theology was a hodgepodge of Islam and anything else he picked up along the way.
It is unknown what connection Sufi Abdul Hamid had to the burgeoning Nation of Islam, which took the same mix of racism, anti-semitism, black nationalism and Islam and became a major movement, but in the year before he moved to Harlem, Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad disappeared, and his successor Elijah Muhammad moved to Chicago after conflicts with the state government and rival NOI leaders. Hamid was probably never part of the Nation of Islam, but he had almost certainly seen it in action and his New York operation was guided by similar methods.