The Princess and the Prophet: Magic, Race, Rackets, and the Secret History of Moorish Muslims in America

This poster is about my new book, The Princess and The Prophet: Magic, Race, and the Birth of the Black Muslims in America, (Beacon Press, November 5, 2019). The book is the first to expose the fact that Noble Drew Ali, in 1925 the founder of the first African American Muslim mass movement, the Moorish Science Temple of America, was secretly born Walter Brister in Kentucky in 1879 and was the first black child star on Broadway from 1893 to 1899, at which point he began performing as a “Hindoo magician” named Armmah Sotanki. He also married a fellow African American from the Kentucky side of the Cincinnati area, Eva Brister, who took the name “Princess Sotanki.” Starting in 1903 her fame eclipsed his, and we can trace her career until 1921. Together, they conspired in 1914 to fake his death and bury someone else in his place in Chicago. He then moved to Newark and began living as his brother, Thomas Drew, and operated as a conjure doctor named “Professor Drew.” He also met an African American Muslim Shriner who called himself “Abdul Hamid Suleiman,” and who taught Drew about the Islamic elements of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine’s ritual. Brister/Drew was also part of networks of African American magicians who took Islamic and Hindoo identities, including several named Drew and Ali; he had also performed in Wild West shows with Moorish acrobats named Ali. The Marcus Garvey movement spread the Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden’s idea that Islam was uniquely suited to black peoples, and closely covered the anti-imperial Riff War in Morocco from 1920 to 1927. Brister/Drew also built on earlier, not very successful attempts to convert African Americans to Islam on the part of the North Indian Ahmadiyya movement and the Sudanese cleric Rev. Sayed Sati Majid, but his key innovation was to not replicate either foreign Islam or the domestic Shrine organization, but instead to incorporate Islamic themes into familiar African American conjure practices and to stress themes popular among Black Nationalists and conservatives alike, including uplift, citizenship, cleanliness, hygiene, economic self-reliance, and militant antiracism. Unbeknownst to any historian who has written on Noble Drew Ali so far, he also managed to infiltrate the deepest levels of Chicago’s South Side political machine, involving key figures such as Aldermen Oscar DePriest and Louis Anderson in his organization. Financial rivalries led to a split between Ali and his business manager, Claude Greene, and The Chicago Defender and detective Sheridan Brousseaux alleged that it was Ali who had Greene murdered. The grisly slaying inside of Unity Hall threatened to expose one of Chicago’s best kept secrets; that public utility kingpin Samuel Insull had bought the hall and used it to funnel bribes through DePriest’s organization to African American South Siders. Within months, Prophet Noble Drew Ali was dead under suspicious circumstances, his fortune was looted, and rivals fought each other and claimed his mantle, but the Nation of Islam recruited his followers and built on his foundation.