Mike Wallace's five-part television series “The Hate That Hate Produced” brought the Nation of Islam (NOI) to national attention in 1959. This broadcast came five years after the historic Brown decision, three years after the launching of the successful Montgomery bus boycott, and one year before black students would begin the “lunch counter” phase of the civil rights movement. In 1959 segregation remained the dominant feature of southern life; and that meant that segregation remained the dominant feature for twelve million of the nineteen million black people in America. Not surprisingly, the struggle against apartheid defined the black agenda. But Mike Wallace uncovered a movement in the other direction. Wallace introduced his viewing audience to a black organization whose members had abandoned Christianity, rejected the goal of integration, and believed that white people were devils.

The organization had been around for a long time before Wallace featured it. The Nation of Islam's roots traced back to a number of religious movements that developed in Afro-American settlements in northern cities during the early decades of the twentieth century. These varied fringe religious groups displayed a number of common characteristics. They were generally messianic. They were overwhelmingly working-class. They “rejected Christianity as the religion of the hypocritical slavemaster,” and they often propagated racially chauvinistic ideas. The Black Jews of Harlem, for instance, refused to be called Negroes, and compared their oppression to that faced by Hebrews in Egypt. Another example, the Moorish Science Temple of America, was more important to the development of the Nation of Islam. The founder, Noble Drew Ali, referred to blacks as “Asiatics” and taught that Islam was the true religion of black people.