By 1965, when Message to the Blackman in America appeared, Elijah Muhammad had led the Nation of Islam for three decades, and the book gathered into a single volume teaching he had been delivering in sermons, newspaper columns and smaller pamphlets since the 1930s. It sets out, in his own often plain and repetitive prose, the core claims that distinguish Nation of Islam theology from both mainstream Islam and the Christianity most of his early followers had been raised in, that Wallace Fard Muhammad, who taught in Detroit from 1930 to 1934, was Allah in person, that Elijah Muhammad himself was Fard's Messenger, commissioned to carry the teaching to Black America, and that Black people were the original human family, from whom, in the movement's own account of history, white people were a later and deliberately inferior creation.
The book also lays out the practical program built on that theology, economic self reliance, strict moral discipline, a distinct dietary code, and racial separation as a political and religious goal rather than a temporary strategy, material that made the book as much a manifesto for organizing a movement as a statement of belief. It was published through the Nation of Islam's own institutions rather than a mainstream press, circulated heavily within temples and among the movement's newspaper readership, and remains in print through Nation of Islam affiliated publishers, still presented by the organization as Elijah Muhammad's authoritative statement of its faith.