This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Elijah Muhammad's refusal, on religious grounds, to register for the World War Two draft, and his direction that Nation of Islam members do the same, brought the movement he led into direct conflict with the United States government. His 1942 arrest followed; a jury cleared him of an accompanying sedition charge but convicted him of draft evasion, and he served four years in federal prison before his 1946 release, a period that tested the organization's survival under its own founder's imprisonment rather than a rival's disappearance.
He led the Nation of Islam for nearly three decades after his release, until his death in 1975, mentoring two of the movement's most publicly recognized figures: Malcolm X, who broke publicly with him in 1964 over disagreements that split the movement's most visible spokesman from its Messenger, and Muhammad Ali, whose conversion brought the Nation of Islam an international profile neither Fard's brief ministry nor Elijah Muhammad's own early Detroit years had achieved.
Elijah Muhammad was succeeded by his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, who dissolved the organization's separatist theology after his father's death and led most of its members into mainstream Sunni Islam, a succession that closed the specific doctrinal line running from Fard's founding claim through Elijah Muhammad's decades of leadership.