Sufi Abdul Hamid

Sufi Abdul Hamid (born Eugene Brown) (January 6, 1903 in Lowell, Massachusetts - July 30, 1938) was an African-American religious and labor leader, among the first African-American converts to Islam, accused of Anti-Semitism. He is best known for his role in the business boycotts in Harlem in the early 1930s that were designed to draw attention to discriminatory employment practices of mainly Jewish business owners.

In Chicago he styled himself Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric, then moved to New York in 1932, taking up residence in Harlem. Despite converting to Islam, he probably had no connection with the Nation of Islam. He eventually styled himself His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid, and his press man claimed that he had been born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. He sported a mustache, and dressed flamboyantly, wearing a Nazi-style military shirt, gold-lined cape, purple turban, and a dagger in his belt.

During the Great Depression, unemployment among blacks in Harlem reached 50%. Hamid initiated an effort to encourage white business owners in Harlem to hire black workers, often picketing stores and giving speeches on street corners.

Hamid especially targeted Jewish store owners, and encouraged black shoppers to boycott certain stores that did not hire blacks, intimidating them into hiring workers from his own private labor union. His usual modus operandi was to collect one dollar dues from each unemployed black worker who wanted a job at a store before starting his pressure campaign to get them hired. Eventually he became wealthy.

He was openly anti-Semitic. Giving speeches from stepladders on 125th Street, he declared himself the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and calling on his followers to tear out the tongue of any Jew they met. He boasted that he was the "only one fit to carry on the war against the Jews", and vowed "an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites." This caused him to be known as the "Black Hitler".

After Jewish store owners met with New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Hamid was arrested, but later released.

His union changed names many times, from the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance to the Afro-American Federation of Labor. Adam Clayton Powell briefly joined forces with him in labor protests and store boycotts, and broke ranks when his rhetoric moved beyond targeting whites and Jews to light-skinned blacks.

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