Notes on the MSTA Schisms in

Detroit and Pittsburgh, 1928-29

Printed for the East Coast Moorish Men’s Brotherhood Summit

Baltimore, MD
March 29-31, 2013

By Patrick D. Bowen

Email: pbowen303@gmail.com
Website: http://du.academia.edu/PatrickBowen
I. Introduction

Throughout 1929, there were several contestations over leadership within the MSTA that
ultimately resulted in both the emergence of multiple MSTA factions and several Moors joining
other Islamic sects. While the in-fighting connected to that year’s MSTA convention and the
subsequent shootout in Chicago probably had the greatest direct impact on the future
development of MSTA history, earlier struggles over leadership had significantly weakened
MSTA unity, making the organization more susceptible to schisms, violence, and membership
decline than it might otherwise have been.
This paper is a study of the early conflicts within two influential MSTA temples: No. 4 in
Detroit and No. 5 in Pittsburgh. Using newspaper articles (from both the public press and the
Moorish press), court records (or, in one case, a summary of a court record), and an FBI file, I
will attempt to outline what can be documented about the in-fighting at these two temples in
1928-29. As we will see, sometimes the available accounts conflict on key points and, on other
occasions, we are left with significant gaps in our knowledge of what took place in Detroit and
Pittsburgh. The aim of this paper, however, is not to provide a final, authoritative narrative and
explanation for the conflicts in these cities, but rather to give other historians useful information
that they can use for future research. To reach this goal, I will A) clearly identify—either in the
main body of the text or in the footnotes—the currently available evidence, B) discuss problems
concerning the collection of relevant documents, and C) compare the various available accounts
in order to point out precisely where they conflict and where they agree so that future researchers
might know which specific historical claims are well-grounded and which need resolving. Each
section will conclude by showing how the schisms in these temples contributed to a decline in
MSTA membership and the growth of other Islamic sects.

II. Temple No. 4 in Detroit

In September 1927, James Lomax (or Lomax Bey), who had earlier been in charge of the Grand
Temple in Chicago, was officially made Detroit’s agent of the Moorish Temple of Science.1 All
available evidence suggests that for about the next fourteen or fifteen months under Lomax the
Detroit temple flourished, experiencing both significant growth2 and financial profit through

1
This was the MSTA’s official name at the time. See “Prophet’s Trip to Detroit a Success,” Moorish Guide,
September 14, 1928, 1 and the “Appointment of Agent” document, dated Sept. 22, 1927 and signed by “Drew Alin,”
contained in the MSTA incorporation records on file with the state of Michigan. These records contain a copy of the
November 1926 Moorish Temple of Science incorporation record from Illinois, which lists James Lomax as one of
the incorporators.
2
So far, I have only been able to look at one issue of the Moorish Guide that contains temple membership numbers
(the October 28, 1928 issue); this particular issue only gives the numbers for ten temples, and it does not give
numbers for Temple No. 4. There are, however, other clues about the Detroit temple’s size. First of all, a 1928
Moorish Guide article indicates that in a single week in September that year, over seventy people were made adepts
in the temple, and “a thousand were turned away from the temple, so immense was the crowd” (see “Prophet’s Trip
to Detroit”). Second, the Detroit temple’s finances were published in the October 28 issue, and they showed a total
income of $19,458, which was five times as much as the temple with the next highest reported income: Pittsburgh
(the Chicago Grand Temple’s income was not reported). Therefore, we could estimate that the Detroit temple had
around five times as many members as the Pittsburgh temple, putting it at 2,295. Still, the MST historians, ALI’S

1
owning several businesses, including two combination grocery store and meat markets, a
laundry, and a printing press.3
Despite this early success, by the beginning of 1929 all was not well in Detroit, and the
temple’s problems came to a head on the evening of Tuesday, March 12. Although the details
vary, all accounts agree that during a temple meeting that night, pistols were drawn and soon
gunfire was being exchanged with police.

The Detroit newspaper accounts

On Wednesday, March 13, three Detroit newspapers ran articles about the shootout.4 Their
stories agree for most of the major details, which are as follows:
The police first became aware of an incident at the MSTA temple at 632 Livingstone
Avenue5 when a man—probably the man calling himself Zack Lowe, who claimed to be the
temple’s forty-year-old treasurer—ran up to the police car parked on nearby Hastings Street
screaming, “They’re waving a half-dozen big guns and getting ready to shoot!” The officers
followed Lowe to the temple where they were met by the forty-nine-year-old Stan Stone Bey
who, pointing a revolver, ordered them to leave the temple. He then repeatedly yelled at the
congregation, which was already rushing out of the building, to stand back. At that point,
according to police, Stone Bey started shooting, hitting one of the patrolmen in the leg. The other
police returned fire, hitting Stone Bey, though not before Stone Bey had shot Lowe. In the midst
of the melee, in which a total of twenty-four shots were fired and five bullet holes were left in the
door of the temple, another policeman was also hit, though it is unclear who fired that particular
shot. The shootout ended when riot police arrived on the scene and, subsequently, arrested Stone
Bey, Lowe, and one Allan Jordan6 and charged them with assault with intent to kill. While being
treated for his wound in Detroit’s Receiving Hospital, Lowe revealed that he had $800 in his
pocket, around $600 of which, he claimed, belonged to the temple, and the remaining amount
was his wife’s.
The newspaper accounts differed when it came to a few important issues. One was the
number of people present. The Detroit News reported that there were only thirty temple members

MEN, have told me (though have not provided a copy) that “In the ‘Report of Temples’ published in the Moorish
Guide (Oct. 6, 1928), Temple 4 in Detroit shows 1500 members,” email correspondence with the author, August 5,
2012. ALI’S MEN have also informed me that there is supposedly evidence that the Detroit temple actually had
4,000 members. However, despite all of these estimates placing the number at over one thousand, there are two
reasons to think the temple might have actually been much smaller, though still one of the larger early MSTA
temples. First is the fact that in 1944 a follower of Kirkman Bey told the FBI that in 1928 the Detroit membership
peaked at five or six hundred (see AAUAA FBI file, Report, 4/13/1944, Chicago file 100-11280, 3). Second, reports
about the shootout at the temple in March, 1929 indicate that even fewer people were present at that particular
temple meeting—in one case the number estimated was 200, in another article, only thirty people were said to have
been there (for citations, see below).
3
See “Moorish Leader is Postmaster’s Guest,” Chicago Defender (City ed.), June 30, 1928, sect. I, [3?]; “Moorish
Head Makes Plans for Conclave,” Chicago Defender (Ntl ed.), July 21, 1928, A4; “Report of Temples,” Moorish
Guide, October 26, 1928, 4.
4
"Four Men Shot in Gun Battle," Detroit News, March 13, 1929, 14; “2 Police, 2 Negroes Shot in Battle at Moorish
Temple,” Detroit Free Press, March 13, 1929, 1; “4 Wounded in Lodge Riot,” Detroit Times, March 13, 1929, 2, 4.
5
The Detroit temple was originally at 1023 Illinois Street, but the group had moved to the Livingstone address by
January, 1929 (see the temple’s addresses listed in the Moorish Guide from September 1928 to February 1929). The
Livingstone Avenue temple would later become the Detroit headquarters of the Kirkman Bey branch.
6
A thirty-year-old who lived at the temple.

2
there that night; the Detroit Times did not give a number but simply said “there were so many
negroes in the temple that [the police] were unable to pick out the disturbers”; and the Detroit
Free Press indicated that there were 200 Moorish Americans in the building, 150 of which were
women. A second issue is what had transpired immediately before the police were called. The
Detroit Times printed a quote from Lowe saying that Stone Bey had started “jostling” him, trying
to get his hand in Lowe’s pocket. Stone Bey then struck Lowe in the head with his revolver, at
which point Lowe fled to the police. The Detroit Free Press confirmed that Lowe claimed to
have been the person who called the police, but it also reported that temple members said that
Stone Bey had both hit and shot Lowe before the police arrived, and that it was a different
individual who ran to the patrol car. Interestingly, the Detroit News indicated that Lowe
originally told police that it was not just Stone Bey who had brandished a gun in the meeting, but
that “five men were waving revolvers in the air and threatening the 30 lodge members present.”
Finally, it is uncertain as to what exactly had instigated the whole event. As noted above, Lowe
said Stone Bey was “trying to get his hand in [Lowe’s] pocket” (which contained several
hundred dollars), but, as noted in the Detroit News, the police explained that the main issue was a
leadership dispute. Although these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, how exactly
they were connected remains unclear.
Three other facts concerning the Detroit newspaper accounts should be pointed out. First
is that, despite only being struck in the leg, Stan Stone Bey was reportedly not expected to live.
Second is that, in an article that appeared on March 15, only Stan Stone Bey and Allan Jordan
were noted as being arraigned—Lowe’s name is not mentioned, which is consistent with his
earlier claim that he had not actually fired a shot at anyone and that there was no evidence that he
had.7 As far as I am aware, this was the last time new information about the case appeared in a
Detroit newspaper.8 The third fact is that nowhere in any of these accounts is the name James
Lomax (or anything similar) mentioned.

The Chicago Defender version

On Thursday, March 14, two days after the shootout in Detroit, Claude D. Greene, the MSTA’s
former business manager, was shot and killed in the Unity Club at 3140 Indiana Avenue in
Chicago, which had served as the location for the MSTA’s office. Upon receiving a tip that one
Small Bey, a former member of the MSTA,9 possessed valuable information on the killing, a
reporter for the African-American newspaper The Chicago Defender traveled with a police
officer to Small Bey’s home.10 There, Small Bey named Ira Johnson as the leader of the group of
men who killed Greene, and said that he had done so because of Greene’s actions in connection
with the MSTA. Small Bey related that recently there had been a split in the MSTA and that
Greene had been allied with a faction opposing Noble Drew Ali. Reports indicated that on

7
“Man is Arraigned in Lodge Battle,” Detroit Free Press, March 15, 1929, 5.
8
The Detroit Saturday Night, yet another paper in city, ran a two-sentence news brief about the shootout on March
16, but it gave no new information.
9
It is likely that this was J. Small Bey, who had been the assistant Grand Sheik of the state of Illinois; see “Prophet’s
Spirit Routs Enemies from Temple,” Moorish Guide, September 14, 1928, 1.
10
“Claude Greene Shot to Death in Unity Hall,” Chicago Defender (City ed.), March 16, 1929, 1, 2. This article
incorrectly places the date of the shooting at Friday, March 15—but this was corrected when the article was
reprinted (under the headline “Hold Moorish Temple ‘Prophet’ in Murder Plot”) in the newspaper’s national edition
on March 23.

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Sunday, March 10, Greene had held a meeting of his faction at the Unity Club, but “spies” for
Noble Drew Ali’s faction were in attendance and learned that Greene’s group had some of the
strongest temples in the movement. This news, according to Small Bey, “alarmed” the prophet
who immediately set into motion plans to kill Greene and moved his office equipment out of the
Unity Club. The police attempted to interview other MSTA members about Greene’s March 10
meeting, but they were not able to get much information. They did discover, however, that James
Lomax, who was “another powerful member of the order” and the head of the Detroit temple,
was “a marked man because he was allied with Greene to establish a rival organization.”11 A
week later, on March 23, the Chicago Defender’s city edition reported that Ira Johnson had
appeared in Detroit by Saturday, March 16 with the intention of killing Lomax.12 This article
also indicated that although Noble Drew Ali had “ousted” Lomax as the temple’s head, Lomax
had refused to step down and took his followers and formed a new organization.
On the same day that this article ran (March 23), in its national edition the Chicago
Defender printed a small article concerning the events in Detroit.13 Despite the fact that the piece
was dated March 22 and that it seemed to imply that the events it discussed had taken place
during the week of March 18-23, it was clearly referring to the shootout that had taken place on
March 12: the article reported that two MSTA members—Stan Stone Bey and Zack Lowe—and
two police officers had been shot in a shootout at the group’s temple on Livingstone and were
patients at Detroit’s Receiving Hospital. However, this article, likely because it had been written
by the same reporter who had been following the investigation of Greene’s death in Chicago,
added information that was somewhat different from what the Detroit newspapers had reported.
It indicated that the shootout began “when the two factions of the order attended a mass
meeting.” Furthermore, it added,

Previous to the riot word had been flashed to Lomax Bey, head of the Detroit temple, that
he was a “marked” man, because of his efforts to split the organization. Someone fired a
shot into the meeting, which Lomax was addressing, and the general fighting began. Two
members of the police riot squad, which rushed to the scene were wounded in the
encounter.

This is the first known instance of Lomax’s name being brought up in connection with the
Detroit shootout on March 12. It raises the question of whether Lomax had used an alias—of
either Zack Lowe or Stan Stone Bey—when the police came to the temple.
Another interesting piece of evidence was brought forth in the article’s final paragraph:

Noble Drew Ali … arrived [in Detroit] from Chicago on last Wednesday [March 13?] to
right the temple’s affairs. He accused Lomax of taking $8,000 in temple funds. In a
proclamation the prophet dismissed Lomax from connection with the order.

We already have seen that A) the man going as Zack Lowe, who claimed to be the temple’s
treasurer, had $800 in his pocket, most of which he claimed had belonged to the temple; B) Stan
Stone Bey had been trying to take that money from him, which, according to Lowe, resulted in
the violence in the temple; and C) the Detroit police reported that the violence had arisen due to a

11
“Claude Greene Shot.”
12
“Cult Leader Lured Girls to His Harem,” Chicago Defender (City ed.), March 23, 1929, 1.
13
“Detroit Followers Riot,” Chicago Defender (Ntl ed.), March 23, 1929, 3.

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contestation over leadership. It seems likely, then, that A) “Lowe” was really Lomax, B) either
the $800 he had was exaggerated to be $8,000 or Lomax did indeed have $8,000 and he told the
reporters he only had ten per cent of that in order to make the controversy seem less severe, and
C) Stan Stone Bey was a leader of the faction in Detroit opposed to Lomax. The identification of
Lomax with Lowe seems to be confirmed by a news brief from late April in the Pittsburgh
Courier in which it explained that “Lomax was arrested recently following a riot in which two
officers and two members of the order were wounded.”14

Other documents

Unfortunately, the city of Detroit has not made available the court and police records concerning
the March 12 shootout.15 However, there is mention of a court record concerning James Lomax
in the FBI file for the Addeynu Allahe-Universal Arabic Association (AAUAA), a Sunni Muslim
organization founded by Lomax (who was using the name Muhammad Ezaldeen) in the late
1930s. In the 1940s, when the FBI was investigating the AAUAA, they contacted the Detroit
field office whose records indicated that on Monday, March 11, 1929—the day before the
shootout—James Lomax was arrested after another Moor, Alexander Wise Bey, charged him
with embezzling from the temple.16 This raises a few questions about the narrative that we have
just established. First, if Lomax was indeed at the temple on March 12, why is it that none of the
police officers or reporters involved in the shootout realized right away that he was the man who
had been arrested in connection with the exact same temple the previous day and probably had
been bailed out earlier in the very same day on which the shootout occurred? Even if he had
tricked some by insisting that his name was Zack Lowe, it seems somewhat lucky for him that no
one appears to have identified him that day. Also, as pointed out above, the Pittsburgh Courier
article from late April indicates that Lomax was “still” in jail (implying he had been in jail since
the March shootout) and had not been bailed out because his followers had not been able to raise
his bond—so how was he able to have been bailed out from his March 11 arrest to be at the
temple on March 12? Despite all these questions, we cannot jump to conclusions—after all, after
March 13 there was only one more new mention of the Moors in Detroit’s newspapers that year,
so it is very much possible that someone did realize the connection, but that that fact was simply
ignored by the news.
In any case, the transcript of Lomax’s trial, which was held on April 18, showed that the
embezzlement arrest had grown out of “internal dissension” in the temple, and that the court had
examined the temple’s books and concluded that Lomax did not embezzle, so the case was
dismissed.17 Why, then, did the Pittsburgh Courier, in an article that gave an April 22 dateline,
say Lomax was “still” in jail? At this point, we can only speculate. Perhaps the answer is that
Lomax was charged with two crimes, embezzlement and something more directly connected to
the shootout. Also, it is possible that the Pittsburgh Courier’s story simply had the dates wrong,
much like the Chicago Defender story about the Detroit shootout.

14
“‘Moorish’ Head to Stay in Jail,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1929, 2.
15
I have talked to Detroit’s court clerk office several times; they have so far been unable to provide me with the
records, but they have not explicitly told me that these records are not in their possession. I hope that future
researchers can clear up this issue.
16
AAUAA FBI file, Report, 3/18/1944, Buffalo file 100-6320, 12.
17
Ibid.

5
 Whatever the truth about these events, the FBI heard in its investigation that there were,
in 1929, around 200 total people within the MSTA who had wished to leave and start their own
organization, and Lomax was the leader of this faction.18 The FBI also learned from a member of
Kirkman Bey’s faction that the name of the break-off group Lomax had started was the
Mohammedan Church Temple.19 Apparently, when Lomax tried to incorporate this organization,
he gave as its address the same address of the MSTA on Livingstone Avenue. The government
workers looking at his paperwork noticed this and contacted the MSTA’s president, Noble Drew
Ali, who at that point

instituted legal proceedings in Detroit to forestall Lomax’s attempt. In an attempt to

forestall these proceedings by Lomax, a shooting incident occurred in which several
members of the organization and the Detroit Police force were wounded. Shortly
thereafter the President, Noble Drew [Ali], got an order from the court to attach the funds
of Lomax, but Lomax apparently learned of this attempt and withdrew all the funds from
the bank a few minutes before they were to be attached and fled to New York City where
he boarded a boat and went to Turkey. … It is estimated … that the amount of these
funds was between $20,000 and $25,000.20

Here, the order of events is slightly—though not significantly—different from what we have
attempted to establish. The key difference is the timing of the embezzlement charge and arrest,
though this may be explained by allowing for the possibility that the recorded date of the March
11 arrest in the Detroit field office’s records was incorrect. The main historical significance of
this account, however, is that it confirms that the shootout was less about money than it was
about trying to prevent Lomax from creating his own faction.
Nevertheless, in the end, Lomax soon departed from Detroit and all but a small, devoted
core group of followers abandoned his faction. After leaving the city, Lomax traveled first to
New York, then, in 1930, to Turkey. By 1932 he was in Egypt where he was trained by Sunni
Muslims who sent him back to the U.S. in late 1936 to start the AAUAA. Despite the failure of
Lomax’s faction, however, Temple No. 4 was not able to reel in all its former members in the
city. The conflicts that were plaguing the MSTA at the time had likely left many disillusioned
with MSTA leadership, and so in 1930, when a new man appeared in the city claiming to be a
Moroccan and preaching a message that was similar but still distinct from the MSTA, many
Moors took an interest.21 This man was Wallace Fard, and his Nation of Islam soon had so many
former MSTA members that some people referred to his group as “the Beys.”22 According to
some reports, by 1932 the Nation had 8,000 members in the Detroit area, far surpassing the
numbers that had been gained by the local MSTA. The early schisms in Detroit, then, had
weakened the local MSTA community so much that a new, similar organization could
successfully compete for its followers and surpass it in size.

18
Ibid.
19
AAUAA FBI file, Report, 4/13/1944, Chicago file 100-11280, 3.
20
Ibid.
21
MSTA FBI file, Report, 3/16/1943, Detroit file 100-6603, 4; “Killer Shows Detectives How He Slew,” Detroit
Evening Times, November 22, 1932, 2.
22
“‘Asiatic’ Trend of Negroes Is Cited,” Detroit Times, November 22, 1932, 3. It is notable that many of the NOI’s
early ministers, including Abdul Mohammed and Othman Ali (and possibly Elijah Muhammad), were Moors.

6
III. Temple No. 5 in Pittsburgh

One of the names that the Chicago Defender connected to the events surrounding Greene’s
murder and Lomax’s ousting was Turner Crumby Bey.23 When the paper’s reporter interviewed
Small Bey, he discovered that Noble Drew Ali, after learning about Greene being affiliated with
a rebelling faction, had requested Crumby Bey to come to Chicago from Pittsburgh, where he
was the head of the local temple and Grand Governor for the state of Pennsylvania.24 Then, when
Noble Drew Ali showed up in Detroit on March 13,25 he brought with him the proclamation,
which contained Crumby Bey’s signature, that dismissed Lomax.26 Later, after the Chicago
shootout in September, the Pittsburgh temple sent letters in support of Ira Johnson to MSTA
members in Chicago.27 All of this is good evidence that Crumby Bey was a strong Noble Drew
Ali partisan.
Prior to the events in March, however, Crumby Bey had been the subject of some
controversy and in-fighting in the Pittsburgh temple. The conflict in Pittsburgh seems to have
been subdued during the spring of 1929, but when it erupted again in the summer and late fall, it
most likely led to a significant exodus from the MSTA, one that would, like in Detroit, lead to a
change in the direction of the history of Islam in America. A discussion of the earlier problems in
Temple No. 5, then, may help us understand how it was that the Muslim community in
Pittsburgh—for which the leader was undeniably a supporter of Noble Drew Ali—underwent its
significant schism.

Conflicts in 1928

Pittsburgh’s Temple No. 5 achieved rapid growth in late 1927/early 1928 under the leadership of
Turner Crumby Bey, a passionate and inspiring speaker who was not afraid of making his views
known to the wider public. In April, 1928, however, when the temple was said to have a
membership of over 600,28 Crumby Bey was angering the local authorities, who raided Temple
No. 5, had Crumby arrested twice, and were demanding that he leave the city in twenty-four
hours.29 Because a search of court records for this particular incident has not produced any
results, we cannot say what exactly the charges were at the time, but the problem sprang from
him supposedly promising his congregation “all the wives you want for $10” and for selling
medicine without a license.30 Crumby Bey, however, would not be intimidated. He hired a
lawyer on a one-year contract to defend all charges against the MSTA temples in both Pittsburgh
and Philadelphia.

23
His name was sometimes spelled Cumby, Crumbey, Crumbly, Crombie, and Grumby.
24
“Claude Greene Shot.”
25
As I indicated above, we cannot be absolutely sure about this date.
26
“Detroit Followers Riot.”
27
“Five Moors to Face Trial for Murder Next Week,” Chicago Defender (City ed.), January 25, 1930, [?].
28
“‘Negroes Moabites,’ Says Science Leader,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 21, 1928, 9. Another report, however,
placed the number at around eighty; see “‘$10 for Wives’ Cult Head to Fight Ban,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, April
17, 1928, 18.
29
“Pittsburgh,” New York Evening Post, April 17, 1928, 28; “Negroes Moabites”; “$10 for Wives”; “Moorish Sheik
Nabbed Again,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, April 21, 1928, 11.
30
“$10 for Wives”; “Moorish Sheik Nabbed Again”; “T. Crumby Bey Freed of Charges,” Moorish Guide,
September 14, 1928, 3.

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 But hiring a lawyer was not enough to put an end to the group’s difficulties, and over the
summer, problems continued to pile up. In June, Crumby Bey was in court again after his first
wife had accused him of bigamy.31 Then, in August, just over a week before his trial for the
charges from earlier in the year, Crumby Bey was arrested, along with ten others, in connection
with the shooting and stabbing of one George Welsh, who lived near the temple on Arcena
Street.32
In September, things started to go in Crumby Bey’s favor. On September 4, the second
day of his trial, not a single witness (including his wife) showed up at the courthouse, resulting in
the case being dismissed. Crumby Bey announced that this was a “vindication,” and that the
charges against him had been made by “liars.”33 After the trial, he left for Charleston, West
Virginia where the helped revive Temple No. 2, and then traveled to Youngstown, Ohio to lend
the local Grand Sheik support.34 In Pittsburgh, meanwhile, plans were being made by the temple
to start a grocery store, which would be, along with its barber shop and laundry, the group’s third
business.35
But before the month was over, violence had reared its head again. Court documents from
Pittsburgh show that on September 29, Carson Crumby Bey, who almost certainly was kin to
Turner, appeared in the nearby town of Blythedale, where he attempted to shoot and kill two
men, J.F. Freyer and Robert Ellison.36 It is unclear what relationship either man had with Carson
and whether or not the incident had any connections with the MSTA, but it is suggestive that
Turner’s wife was herself from Blythedale.37 Carson was arrested and charged with two counts
of felony assault and battery with intent to kill. In May he was found guilty and served three
months in jail.
Whatever the motives were, it appears that Carson’s shooting did not have a significant
negative impact on the temple. By mid-October, Turner’s Temple No. 5 had 459 eligible
members and 147 Adepts, and was one of the most successful temples in the MSTA.38 By late
January 1929, Turner, who had recently been made the Chairman of the Young Peoples’
Moorish League at Pittsburgh, was enrolling more youths than any other chapter of the
auxiliary.39 On the outside at least, it looked as if Temple No. 5 had overcome its problems and
was growing.

Conflicts in 1929

It seems, however, that this outward appearance of stability and unity was masking tensions that
were still fostering divisions. The reality was that internecine conflict had produced full-fledged

31
Ibid.
32
“Shot and Stabbed,” Pittsburgh Press, August 28, 1928, 1.
33
“T. Crumby Bey Freed of Charges”; “Greetings in Peace,” Moorish Guide, September 28, 1928, 1.
34
“Message from Temple No. Five,” Moorish Guide, September 14, 1928, 3; T. Crumby-Bey, “Bro T. Crumbey-
Bey Will Visit Youngstown, O.,” Moorish Guide, September 28, 1928, 3. In Charleston, he left J. Crumby Bey
(presumably his brother) in charge.
35
“Message from Temple No. Five.”
36
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Carson Crumby Bey, Case Nos. 178 and 179 (Court of Quarter Sessions of
the Peace) November 9, 1928.
37
“T. Crumby Bey Freed of Charges.”
38
“Report of Temples,” Moorish Guide, October 26, 1928, 4.
39
“Pittsburgh Shows Rapid Growth in Last Fortnight,” Moorish Guide, February 1, 1929, 1.

8
factions in the temple, each of which regularly complained to the police about the other, though
they remained reluctant to sign official affidavits that might prompt police action.40 Currently
available evidence cannot tell us conclusively whether one of the Pittsburgh factions was
connected to the Greene/Lomax faction, though this seems like a good possibility, given that the
rumor was, as we have seen, that the Greene/Lomax faction had followers in the most popular
temples, and Temple No. 5 was certainly one of these.
Since we know, furthermore, that Turner Crumby Bey was strongly opposed to the
Greene/Lomax faction and that violence had already erupted between the two factions (on March
12 in Detroit), it is likely that it was partisans of Greene and Lomax who were responsible for the
violence in the summer of 1929. The first incident took place in June, when there was an attempt
on the life of Turner’s brother.41 Then, on July 11, someone tried to kill Turner himself.
Like with the Detroit shootout in March, reports of the details of the events on July 11
sometimes conflict with each other. It is necessary, then, to show precisely how each of the five
known accounts contradicts or agrees with the others in order to see if we can come to a clearer
understanding of the events that day. As we will see, although they vary somewhat in their
details, a close examination of these documents reveals that they are referring to the same events
and persons.
The first three documents are Pittsburgh newspaper articles that ran on July 12. In the
Pittsburgh Press piece, it was indicated that during the previous evening an unknown male
entered a building at 12 Liedly Street, where he shot at Turner Crumby Bey from behind with a
twelve-gauge shotgun; Turner sustained several wounds, but survived.42 The reporter noted that
the police believed the assassination attempt was the result of dissension in the temple, and four
Moors were put in jail that night as material witnesses,43 though the shooter had escaped. In the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, meanwhile, it was explained that the assailant had hid in the
basement of 12 Liedley Street and had waited for Crumby Bey to walk in front of the building
when he shot at him.44 The Post-Gazette clarified that seven shotgun pellets had hit Turner and
the paper noted that, in addition to the four people whom the Pittsburgh Press said were arrested,
a Thomas Bey was also jailed. The only additional information that the Sun-Telegraph added
was that the four people who were arrested were charged with felonious shooting.45
A few days later, on July 16, one G. Martin Bey was brought in front of a Pittsburgh
judge on the charge of wantonly pointing and discharging a firearm.46 The court records say that
on July 11, Martin Bey shot a rifle at one “A. Crumbly Bey” with the intent to kill. There were
several witnesses to this shooting as well, some with Moorish names and others without them,
but none of the names matched those of the people whom had been identified in the July 12
articles.47 Despite the fact that Turner’s last name was indeed sometimes reported as “Crumbly,”
the discrepancies between the two cases—particularly the different types of guns reported as
being used—seem to suggest that the two documents were discussing two different events.

40
“High Moorish Temple Head Fired Upon from Ambush,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 12, 1929, 17.
41
Ibid.; the name of this particular brother is not given.
42
“High Priest of Moors is Shot, Disciples Jailed,” Pittsburgh Press, July 12, 1929, 1.
43
These were J. Howie (Howard) Bey, Louis Mans El, Mary Brown El, and Minni Leit El.
44
“High Moorish Temple.”
45
“Quartet Held in Shooting,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, July 12, 1929, 2.
46
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. G. Martin Bey, Case No. 63 (Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace)
September 4, 1929.
47
These were James N. Hoey, A. Crumbly Bey (who was most likely Turner Crumby Bey), G. Crimbly Bey, Jr., M.
Johnson, David Fitzsimmons, Harry Lempp, Gwendolin Browne, M. Leath Bey, and M. Campbell Bey.

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 However, in a September 21 Pittsburgh Courier article, the discrepancies were cleared
up.48 Here it was explained that G. Martin Bey had in fact been the person thought to have shot
Turner (“T. Crombie Bey”).49 It also indicated that the other Moors arrested on July 11 were
being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In addition, the article explained that prior to
the incident, the temple had voted unanimously to remove Crumby Bey from office, but he,
apparently, refused to give up his position. Nevertheless, Martin Bey was found innocent50 and
Crumby Bey had begun recovering from his wounds.
In late October, a month after a MSTA convention that was fraught with contestations
over leadership and Ira Johnson’s shootout with police in Chicago, Crumby Bey was attacked
again. This time, the attempt on his life took the form of a bomb that was placed near his home
but had failed to kill him.51 Then on November 5, there was yet another bomb. This time, though,
it had been placed inside Temple No. 5 and exploded during a sheik meeting being attended by at
least thirty Moors.52 Several Moors were injured, but Crumby Bey was not one of them, as he
was not attendance that evening. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette learned that Crumby Bey believed
that the parties responsible were the same people who had shot at him in July—ex-members of
the MSTA who were “angered by some of his rites.”53

Aftermath

It is clear that there had been major disagreements over Crumby Bey’s leadership of Temple No.
5; it is therefore rather unsurprising that in 1929 several Pittsburgh Moors left the MSTA and
soon joined up with another Islamic group, the Ahmadiyya movement. The Ahmadiyyas, a South
Asian sect, had been drawing African-American converts since 1920, when their missionary for
America started reaching out to African Americans after personally experiencing racism from
whites.54 He had been relatively successful in aligning his movement with Marcus Garvey’s
United Negro Improvement Association and in three years he converted around 700 people,
primarily in Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Detroit. After a lull from 1925 to 1928, in
around 1929 the group started experiencing a revival under the leadership of one Sufi Bengalee
and his assistant Muhammad Yusuf Khan. Khan, who had worked with the group since the early
1920s, was given the responsibility of growing the movement in Ohio and Pennsylvania. In
around 1929 or 1930, he converted Walter Smith Bey, a Moor who had left Temple No. 555 and
who took with him to Ahmadiyya Islam several other Moors. Khan made Smith Bey the main
Ahmadi leader in the Ohio River Valley region, and the Pittsburgh Ahmadiyya group, which was

48
Blanche Taylor Dickinson, “Smoky City Streets,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 21, 1929, 8.
49
The kind of gun used was not indicated, though the article noted that Turner had only been shot once.
50
On the first page of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. G. Martin Bey court record, in the upper left-hand
corner is written the phrase “not guilty,” indicating that Martin Bey was not convicted.
51
“Bomb Blasts Hill Temple,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 6, 1929, 1; “Bey, Safe at Home, Misses
Bombing Intended for Him,” Pittsburgh Press, November 6, 1929, 6. Both of these articles indicate that the first
bomb attempt was in late October, but an article that ran in the Sun-Telegraph indicated that the first bomb came in
early October; see “Hill Bombing Mystery to Police,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, November 6, 1929, 3.
52
Ibid.
53
“Bomb Blasts Hill Temple.”
54
On this group, see Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, [1997] 2003).
55
Walter Smith Bey may have been the same W. Smith Bey noted in 1928 as being the director of Temple No. 5’s
new grocery store; see “Message from Temple No. Five.”

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largely composed of former members of the MSTA, became the center of a new wave of
Ahmadiyya Islam.56 In the mid-to-late 1930s, many of the individuals in this community joined
up with the AAUAA, the newly-formed Sunni Muslim community led by Lomax (Ezaldeen).

IV. Conclusion

This short paper has been an attempt to clearly outline what can currently be confidently known
about the MSTA schisms in Detroit and Pittsburgh in 1928-29. Effort has been made to
emphasize the publicly-available documented evidence and to resist, as much as possible,
indulging in speculation about the motives of those who participated in the schismatic groups,
about whether any MSTA leaders were abusing their power, and about how much of a role the
distinct doctrines of other Islamic movements played in drawing Moors away from the MSTA.
As far as the events themselves are concerned, this paper has, hopefully, cleared up some
(though not all) of the contradicting claims concerning the actors and their actions—the most
notable of which are James Lomax’s in March 1929 and Crumby Bey’s would-be assassin’s in
July 1929. The outline of the events in Pittsburgh has, in addition, provided better context for the
well-known exodus of Moors into the Ahmadiyya movement (and later Sunni Islam) in the
1930s. We have also established that the conflicts in these cities were significant enough that
violence erupted on more than one occasion, several Moors ended up in courts, and some MSTA
members were imprisoned—facts that demonstrate just how serious the consequences were for
early MSTA temples when they were unable to peacefully resolve their internal problems.
As for the documents, we have seen, first of all, that the greatest number of sources are
newspaper articles, from both the public press and the Moorish press. Attempts should be made
to find any remaining articles in order to check potentially inaccurate data and gaps in
information, which are, as we have seen, clearly common features of newspaper articles. It is
highly probable that a number of newspaper articles concerning the early Detroit and Pittsburgh
temples (but particularly the Pittsburgh temple) remain unexamined. These articles would be in
the less popular newspapers, copies of which would only be available in libraries in Detroit and
Pittsburgh. It is also very likely that more relevant court records exist, though, given my
experience in trying to obtain these records, I believe there is little chance any are available in
Detroit—Pittsburgh is probably where most of these will be. Lastly, some attempt should be
made to both systematically document oral traditions about these conflicts and to obtain other
information (newspaper clippings, personal letters, court records, etc.) from the descendants of
those involved.

Note: This version of Notes on the MSTA Schisms in Detroit and Pittsburgh, 1928-29 contains a few small
differences (phrasing and two additional newspaper citations) from the version that was printed in March, 2013.

56
See Jameela A. Hakim, History of the First Muslim Mosque of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Cedar Rapids: Igram
Press, 1979).

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