Life, legacy and leadership of luis farrakhan - Essay Example

In February 1955, while attending a musical concert in Chicago, Louis was invited to attend the Nation of Islam Saviour Day Convention. In this convention, he discovered a different calling and following encouragement Malcolm X, he joined the Nation of Islam, an organization established in the 1930s by Elijah Muhammad. Louis rose through the hierarchy and was later bestowed the holy name, Farrakhan by the movement’s leader Muhammad. When Elijah Muhammad the founder died in 1975, the Nation of Islam went into organizational chaos and eventually fragmented.

One of Muhammad’s sons brought the movement to the formal tenets and practices of Orthodox Islam. Farrakhan withdrew from this Islamic organization and re-established the old Nation of Islam in which he remained loyal to the precepts and practices of its former patriarch. Louis stepped into Muhammad’s leadership mantle where he remained fiery and outspoken on social, political, racial and religious issues. In my view, he carved himself into an image of a militant spokesman for the conservative black nationals.

In 1979 through the Nation of Islam movement, Farrakhan founded the Final Call, a weekly newspaper similar to the original Muhammad Speaks started by Malcolm X in which Farrakhan ran a weekly column (Kippenberger, 31). American politics are viewed as being free from threats of tyranny, dictatorship and a solid commitment to civil rights liberties and rights of individual citizens and minority groups as enshrined in the U.S constitution. On the contrary, Farrakhan through his speeches and views raises racial disharmony.

He is an influential participant in the national black American politics and history. He continues to fight oppression in the U.S educational system, government and urban communities, the suffering endured by African-Americans, other ethnicities and racial groups. Many diverse local and global organizations hail Farrakhan as a champion in the struggle for freedom from oppressive treatment, justice and equality especially in uplifting and reforming the black community. With some scientific inclination, Farrakhan claims that blacks were the original human species and often quotes scientific findings of the oldest human being as being black (Kayyali, 173).

He is well known for leading the Nation of Islam, an African-American movement that has practiced elements of Islam and Black Nationalism. The most significant accomplishment in civic rights activism was the 1995 Million Man March in Washington D.C. The march took a healing message and was inspired by concerns over the negative image of black men propagated by the media and film industry linking the black community to drugs, illicit sex and gang violence. He harnessed dialogue among gangs in the ghettos in major cities in America to reduce the level of social violence (Singh, 265).

He set up an economic channel as a base for blacks to excel in business through education and training. He sought to bring solutions to the challenges of war, poverty, discrimination and the right to an education. In 2000 he convened the Million Family March to unite the human family, presided many weddings and re-commitment of vows. In 2005, upon the 10th anniversary of the