Drew established his first Moorish congregation in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913, naming it the Canaanite Temple. He was forced to flee soon after, chased out for his teachings on race. For the next 12 years he and his followers kept moving westward, planting congregations in Philadelphia, D.C., and Detroit on their way to their final destination, Chicago. Legend has it that in D.C. Drew got a meeting with Woodrow Wilson and forced the president to hand over the Moorish flag, a red cloth with a green star and crescent supposedly passed down through generations of Moors. Drew said the signers of the Constitution had seized it from Moors who’d been living in America since before colonization and he’d been sent by Allah to reclaim it.
With the flag in hand as proof of his divinity, Drew landed in Chicago in 1925. In a 2002 article in American Quarterly about the Moors’ early days here, historian Susan Nance wrote that “rumors began spreading around Chicago’s South Side that a group of exotically-dressed men had begun initiating altercations with strangers in public.... Some also witnessed these ‘Sheiks’ making agitating speeches at work and at the street universities at Washington Park and on State Street. Journalists later described their intimidating public presence: ‘They flaunted their fezzes on the street and treated the white man with undisguised contempt. Many of them affected formidable-looking beards.'”
Looking to avoid the hostility that forced him out of Newark, Drew told his flock to stop bothering whites and strive to live in peace with them. “I hereby warn all Moors that they must cease from all radical or agitating speeches while on their jobs, or in their homes, or on the streets,” he proclaimed. “We did not come to cause confusion; our work is to uplift the nation.” To make his point, in the winter of 1926, he paid ten dollars to the Illinois state legislature to legally incorporate the Moorish Science Temple. At Temple No. 9, the Moorish flag hangs on one side of the podium, the American flag on the other.
Drew set up shop on the south side in a rented space he called Unity Hall, on the 3600 block of Indiana Avenue. Two blocks away was a small factory called the Moorish Manufacturing Corporation, which made products like Moorish Herb Tea for Human Ailments and Moorish Body Builder and Blood Purifier. The Moors advertised in the Chicago Defender, which didn’t know what to make of them. It ran contradictory articles, sometimes likening the group to industrious fraternal organizations like the black Shriners, sometimes to snake-oil salesmen and harem operators. The Moors started printing their own newspaper, the Moorish Guide, which reached followers from Detroit to New Orleans. It ran excerpts of Drew’s Koran and stories like “Prophet’s Spirit Routs Enemy From Hall,” and it announced Drew’s political endorsements as he ingratiated himself with the south-side machine.
In September 1928 the first Moorish convention was held at Unity Hall. The Defender reported that 3,000 attended the gala event, including black Chicago politicians and judges who came at Drew’s invitation. Less than a year later Drew unexpectedly died in a follower’s south-side apartment; the cause of death was never made public. Some Moors claim he’d been violently beaten by police who questioned him after the murder of one of his estranged disciples. Another told the Defender, “The Prophet was not ill; his work was done and he laid his head upon the lap of one of his followers and passed out.”