Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975 split the movement's future in two directions. His son Warith Deen Mohammed inherited formal leadership and moved the majority of the existing membership toward mainstream Sunni Islamic practice, abandoning the earlier theology of racial divinity and Black separatism in favor of orthodox Sunni doctrine and eventually renaming the organization entirely. Minister Louis Farrakhan, dissatisfied with that direction, rebuilt a separate organization under the original name, Nation of Islam, and the original doctrine in 1978, and he continued to lead it into the twenty first century, most visibly by organizing the 1995 Million Man March on Washington, one of the largest gatherings of Black Americans in the country's history.
The movement's teachings on race and history, including claims about the origins of white people and other doctrines specific to Fard and Elijah Muhammad's theology, have drawn sustained academic and public criticism, and the organization and its leadership, particularly Farrakhan, have also faced repeated and well documented accusations of antisemitic statements from civil rights organizations, Jewish advocacy groups and mainstream press coverage over several decades.
This atlas records that critical history alongside the movement's founding, leadership and institutional development, following Lincoln's methodological example of documenting the movement as a genuine and consequential religious and social phenomenon in American history without either endorsing its contested doctrines or minimizing the criticism they have drawn.