Clara Muhammad

Clara Muhammad was born in Macon, Georgia on 2 November 1899 as Clara Evans, and was also known as Clara Poole.¹² She married Elijah Poole in Georgia in 1917, before he changed his name to Elijah Muhammad and became leader of the Nation of Islam; between 1917 and 1939 they had eight children, among them Warith Deen Mohammed.¹³ Clara was known as the First Lady of the Nation of Islam, and is credited with introducing her husband to the teachings of the movement's founder W. D. Fard.¹³ She died on 12 August 1972 after a long illness with stomach cancer, and was buried at Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens South in Illinois.¹

Clara moved with her husband from Georgia to Detroit amid financial hardship and racial prejudice, and there she encountered Fard's teachings and brought them to her husband.¹⁴ Clara guided the organisation herself during her husband's long absence from 1935 to 1946, while he was fleeing death threats and then imprisoned for sedition during the Second World War.³ She helped establish and run the movement's University of Islam schools and contributed to building the community's educational institutions.¹ After her death her son Warith Deen Mohammed renamed the University of Islam schools the Sister Clara Muhammad Schools in her honour.¹

Two school legacies carry Clara's name directly: the University of Islam schools she helped found, and the Sister Clara Muhammad School network that bore her name after her death in several American cities.¹ The historians cited in the articles credit Clara with a founding role in the movement itself, as the one who brought its founder's teachings to its leader.¹³

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The sources describe Clara as a leader in the Nation of Islam, the movement her husband led, but name no school for Clara herself; her school is therefore recorded in the museum's data as unknown, since membership in a spouse's movement is background, not an attestation of her own school.¹² Historical estimates of the size of Clara's role in founding and leading the movement differ, but the articles agree on the centrality of her role during her husband's long absence and in building the movement's schools.¹³

• Clara Muhammad — English Wikipedia¹
• Clara Muhammad — Arabic Wikipedia³
• Clara Muhammad — Urdu Wikipedia⁴
• Clara Muhammad — Wikidata Q5126028²