Race and the Aliites

At the height of the Jim Crow era in Chicago, Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple of America. Using the language of Islam, he articulated a new religio-racial identity that subverted the racially oppressive lens of “negro” that had been used for decades as a powerful legal tool to subvert the rights of people of color after the Civil War. Ali and his followers fought the legacy of Dredd Scott and other cases with their own legal premise: those descended from Africans would be better served by self-identifying as “Moorish.” In this interview with Spencer Dew about his book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali, Dew presents such identity formation as the part of larger strategies of legal maneuvering that worked to give Black persons the full rights that had been denied to them as American citizens on the basis of race. “Citizenship as salvation” was the movement’s motto, and the union of the legal and racial was an opportunity to reimagine themselves through new frameworks that worked to change the circumstances and the categories that had been thrust upon them.