History
Royall Jenkins was born in 1942 in South Carolina and grew up in eastern Maryland, later moving to New York and then Chicago, while working as a long-distance truck driver delivering publications of the Nation of Islam. He remained a member until after the death of Elijah Muhammad but split from the organization in 1978 . According to Jenkins, he spent time on a spaceship with angels, where he learned that he was the Supreme Being and how to govern the world. Public records show Jenkins working as a truck driver and living mostly with friends as he tried to recruit followers, including his daughter Maureen, who joined him in 1985 in a house in Waldorf, Maryland, that was rented for them by Joseph Kelly, one of Jenkins' first converts. The UNOI eventually grew, and was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in New Jersey in 1993.
Between 1996 and 2002, the group relocated to its current Kansas City location. The UNOI is very controversial and currently has a membership of a few hundred people.
Read more about this topic: United Nation Of Islam
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—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
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“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)