Elijah Muhammad, Aunt Clara ... and me

News comes that my great-aunt Clara Weber Greenwald’s home may go onto the National Register of Historic Places.

Aunt Clara must be spinning in her grave.

That's because of who is being honored. It's not Aunt Clara but a subsequent owner: The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975), Messenger of Allah to the Nation of Islam*, which he founded. Elijah Muhammad ran the religion from that house at 4847 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago IL 60615.

*Members of the Nation of Islam are sometimes referred to as “Black Muslims.” They view that term as a slur, so I avoid using it here.

The Messenger of Islam (credit: Wikipedia)

Clara died in May 1940, 3½ months after I was born, so I didn’t know her. But my mom, Marjorie-Lee (Weber) Baum, was her niece. Mom never had a kind word for Clara. No Weber did. To know Clara was to hate her guts.

Clara was rich. Her husband Joe Greenwald ran General Furniture, a chain of a dozen stores across Chicagoland. “The General” must have been very prosperous, given the way Clara threw Joe’s money around.

She supported her brothers and sisters financially to the ends of their lives and then from the grave, with a trust stuck in ultra-low-yield government bonds, yet so fiendishly constructed it took more than half a century to break.

The trust was part of Aunt Clara’s plan to rule the Webers for eternity. I never heard its beneficiaries breathe a word of thanks.

My mom Marjorie-Lee “Marj” (Weber) Baum (l.) and my great-aunt Clara (Weber) Greenwald. These photos accompany a website devoted to the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903, the deadliest theater fire and deadliest single-building fire in U.S. history with at least 602 known deaths. My grandmother Leona (Weber) Baum, then 12 years old, barely escaped but was hospitalized for months afterward with burns that scarred her face and hands for life. She would have been burned worse had she not been wearing a long dress, according to family lore. Credit. www.Iriquoistheater.com, where you’ll also discover more information on Aunt Clara, Uncle Joe, the General Furniture stores and other connections linking my family to Chicago history. But that’s another topic for another time.

Just how did Clara Greenwald go about alienating her family? This story may shed light.

Clara's oldest daughter Alice-Ruth married a nice man named Eddie. But Clara deemed this marriage beneath a Weber girl and cut her daughter dead. In due course Eddie and Alice-Ruth had a baby, my cousin Barbara. Hoping to end this painful rift, Alice-Ruth and Eddie took the baby to Clara and knocked. Clara opened the door and baby Barbie burst into tears. “Give her to me,” Clara commanded. The crying stopped immediately. “She knows where her bread is buttered,” Clara said.

I heard this story from my cousin Elaine, who just turned 98. Elaine may be the only person alive who was inside the Elijah Muhammad mansion when it belonged to Aunt Clara and Uncle Joe.

Elaine was a little kid when she was inside the mansion during the 1930s. She recalls a stately formal dining room and a few other details, but one sticks tight in her mind: A grand staircase leading to a ballroom on the second floor.

I’ve only imagined that ballroom, but last week I got a glimpse of the staircase courtesy of a 23-minute video tour of the interior of 4847 S. Woodlawn Ave.

4847 S. Woodlawn (credit: Mark Monaghan, Hyde Park Herald)

In addition to the historic-places designation, the mansion is on track to become a “historic Black homes” museum and Nation of Islam visitor center called Sajdah House. The driving force is Wendy Muhammad, a relative of the Messenger, who raised the money to buy it out of foreclosure and now is seeking support to renovate it.

I contacted her. She was happy to hear from me. Ain’t LinkedIn grand?

She and I traded phone calls and e-messages. As I write this, she is interviewing Cousin Elaine via Zoom. She is eager to know everything about that house. The Weber family is a link she’d been missing.

One thing Wendy Muhammad has discovered is that Joe and Clara weren’t the first occupants. The house was built in 1902 for William French Burrows and designed by the architecture firm of Frost and Grainger. Wendy Muhammad posted the YouTube video with that 23-minute tour. You can watch it for yourself.

What you’ll see is lovely architectural themes carried out throughout, beamed ceilings and paneling in walnut and mahogany, and surprisingly little damage considering the house was vacant for years. You’ll glimpse the staircase, but you won’t go upstairs to the ballroom because the videographer’s camcorder died around Minute 29. Wendy Muhammad thanks a raccoon family for keeping rat damage under control. The raccoons ate the rats.

But back to Aunt Clara. Why would she be spinning in her grave? Just guessing here, but she probably was a racist. Like many many white Americans of that generation, the Webers tended to be. Racists that is.

My grandmother Leona (Weber) Baum had the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known –– except when it came to Those People. “But you work with Negroes,” I’d remonstrate, using the polite term of the time. “Oh, those ones are different,” she’d respond. When I’d argue, she’d sniff, “You’re just a kid, you wouldn’t understand.”

Perhaps because in all other ways my grandmother was so warm and loving, my mom didn’t pick up on this particular turn of mind. She and my dad taught brotherhood and tolerance to me and my sister Judy.

But I was a white, Jewish kid growing up at mid century in Chicago, then the most residentially segregated big city in the North and maybe the South too. Racism was in the air I breathed. I couldn’t help picking things up.

Now I’ve written three novels about such “things.” My Chicago Trilogy is to be published by TouchPoint Press, starting next fall with To Do Justice, the final novel in the trilogy. These are tales of Blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, how children view the world, conflict and forgiveness … and Chicago at mid century, a great city going up in flames.

Postscript: Though I never was inside 4847 S. Woodlawn, one February night in 1965, with two Chicago cops, we staked out the joint. Malcolm X* had just been assassinated and Chicago was having A Moment.

*Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was Elijah Muhammad’s charismatic chief lieutenant. But Malcolm split with the Nation of Islam after it came out that Elijah Muhammad had illicitly fathered children with teen-age girls, against the religion’s tenets and teachings. Malcolm was cut down by gunfire on Feb. 21, 1965. The murderers were identified as members of the Nation of Islam. For more on this history, see Wikipedia.

When Malcolm was assassinated, America went nuts. At least it seemed that way in the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press, where I was a reporter. There were death threats against the Prophet, leading Chicago police to station a guard outside the mansion. My editor sent me to investigate.

I sat in the back seat of a cop car while the officers shot the breeze for two or three hours. When nothing happened, I went back to the office.

No story. Just another irony in the strange tale of the Nation of Islam, great-aunt Clara Weber Greenwald … and me.

Author, the Chicago Trilogy [forthcoming from TouchPoint Press]

P.S. We’ve finished editing To Love Mercy, To Walk Humbly and To Do Justice, the three novels of my Chicago Trilogy. Readers of this communiqué can get a free copy of To Love Mercy (the 2006 edition published by Mid Atlantic Highlands). If you like it and care to post a review after the TouchPoint edition is published, that will be thanks enough.

P.P.S. Know someone who’d enjoy these occasional posts? Send me their emails and I’ll add them to the list.