A Religion for Black Men in America: The Nation of Islam and America’s Jim Crow Empire reinterprets the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a sovereign Black nation, imagined, constructed, and defended within the borders of a white supremacist state. Rather than viewing the NOI as a religious movement defined by its opposition to integration, this book presents it as a decolonial project of state-building that rejected the legitimacy of U.S. citizenship and developed its own systems of belonging, governance, and masculine citizenship.

Spanning from the aftermath of Reconstruction to the COVID-19 pandemic, the book traces how the NOI offered an enduring alternative to American racial liberalism. Its members did not seek inclusion within the U.S. polity but instead claimed citizenship in a separate Black Islamic nation. This nation rejected the moral authority of Christianity, the promises of the Constitution, and the assimilationist goals of the civil rights mainstream. The NOI’s vision of sovereignty was not symbolic. It was institutional, embodied, and deeply gendered in ways that granted power and privilege to Black men and their families that were consistently denied by broader white American cultures. The NOI wrote its own laws, formed a military structure through the Fruit of Islam, and policed the behavior for Black male leadership and protection.

By foregrounding the NOI’s rejection of U.S. jurisdiction and its construction of a religio-racial state, A Religion for Black Men in America reframes the group as a central actor in the Black freedom struggle. It reveals how Black Muslims imagined liberation not through reform or revolution within the American system, but through complete separation from it. This book contributes to African American history, religious studies, and decolonization studies by showing how the NOI’s theology of sovereignty reshaped the political and spiritual terrain of Black life across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.