Overview

Beyond the customary narratives of Gilded Age America lies a world of circuses, Wild West shows, and midways populated by Arabian acrobats and equestrians, Hindoo magicians, Muslim fakirs, Oriental hootchie-cootchie dancers, and the African Americans who took on these exotic identities. The Princess and the Prophet tells the story of the man who, amidst the cultural ferment of this little-known world, discovered a greater measure of freedom and dignity and a rebuttal to the racism and parochialism of white America in Islam. He renamed himself Prophet Noble Drew Ali, and founded the predecessor of the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, in 1925. Overturning the received wisdom that the prophet was born on the east coast, Jacob S. Dorman has discovered that Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister in Kentucky. Brister was a prominent child coronet player and bandleader, in fact the first Black child star on Broadway. After outgrowing that role, he renamed himself Armmah Sotanki, and performed as a Hindoo magician, while his wife, Princess Sotanki, was a famous dancer and entertainer in her own right who captivated audiences as the biggest act in colored vaudeville, first as a lion tamer, and then as a snake-handling Oriental dancer and magician. With an array of profitable businesses, their Moors built a nationwide following of at least 7,000 dues-paying members, swung Chicago elections, and embedded themselves in Chicago's dominant Republican political machine at the height of Prohibition racketeering, only to see their sect descend into infighting in 1929 that likely claimed the prophet's life.

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9781690585138

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Jacob S. Dorman is a professor of History and Core Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Chosen People, which won the Wesley-Logan Prize in African-American History from the American Historical Association, the Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, and the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize. Dorman has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and many others.

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