The Moorish Science Temple of America is a religious organization founded in 1913 by Noble Drew Ali. Its main tenet was that African Americans were descended from the Moors and thus were originally Islamic.

Timothy Drew was born on January 8, 1886 in North Carolina, USA.^[1] The accounts of Timothy Drew's ancestry variously describe his being the son of two former slaves who was adopted by a tribe of Cherokee Native Americans,^[2] to his being the son of a Moroccan Muslim father and a Cherokee mother.^[3] He is recorded, perhaps apocryphally, as saying, “When I was born, it turned black dark in the daytime. The people put their hoes down and came out of the fields.”^{[citation needed]}

(... from Wikipedia on 2008-12-31 23:22:06 )