The Long History of Black Muslims in Texas

When Americans picture Islam in Texas, they usually picture immigrants and their children. That picture leaves out the people with the longest claim on American Islam. Black Muslims, from enslaved West Africans to twentieth-century converts and their descendants, are a foundation of Muslim life in the United States, and Texas is part of that history even where the local record is thin.

African Muslim antecedents

Akbar Ahmed's Brookings study of American Muslims notes that scholars estimate 15 to 30 percent of enslaved African men and about 15 percent of enslaved African women brought to the Americas were Muslim, and that some Muslims believe the true share was higher ^[1]. These are estimates for the Atlantic slave trade as a whole, not a count for Texas. Still, Texas was a slaveholding state, and it is reasonable to say that Islam almost certainly arrived here with some enslaved people long before any mosque was built. What we cannot say is who they were: plantation records rarely noted religion, and the practice of enslaved Muslims was usually suppressed or hidden.

The documented Texas beginning is Estevanico, a Moroccan-born enslaved man who crossed the region after the 1528 Narváez shipwreck ^[2]. He was baptized, and how long he held to Islam is uncertain, as our evidence check explains. He is best understood as the first chapter in an African Muslim-connected Texas history, not as its whole.

The twentieth century

Nationally, African American Islam grew through conversion and through movements that tied religion to Black dignity and self-determination, and Ahmed's study counts African Americans as roughly one-third of American Muslims ^[1]. Texas cities were part of that story. But the published record of Black Muslim congregations in Texas, their founding dates, leaders and members, is far thinner than the record of immigrant-founded mosques. The Texas State Historical Association's overview of Texas Muslims focuses mainly on the modern immigrant-era community ^[2], which reflects where documentation exists more than where history happened.

Why the archive is incomplete

There are understandable reasons for the gap. Early congregations often met in homes and rented rooms that left no building behind. Many kept their own records rather than depositing them with universities or historical societies. Newspapers of the era covered Black religious movements sporadically and sometimes with hostility. The result is that a subject central to American Islam survives in Texas mainly in family memory and community papers, which is where the next generation of documentation will have to begin. Our archive collects finding guides and welcomes records.

A multiracial present

Today Black Muslims in Texas include African Americans whose families have been Muslim for generations, new converts and immigrants from Somalia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan and elsewhere. Their lives overlap with Latino Muslim communities such as the one around IslamInSpanish in Alief ^[3] and with the large South Asian and Arab congregations. Treating Black Muslims as a footnote to that picture gets the order of American Muslim history backward. Read more in Texas Muslims Are Not a Monolith and our history of Muslims in Texas.