Minister Don Muhammad, 87, praised for work with Nation of Islam, Boston youth

Yawu Miller

Yawu Miller is the former senior editor of the Bay State Banner. He has written for the Banner since 1988.... VIEW BIO

Boston’s Black clergy members expressed shock and outrage after a 1992 incident at the Morningstar Baptist Church after a dozen young men barged into a funeral service for a rival gang member, fired gunshots and stabbed three people.

Minister Don Muhammad dispatched a detachment of the Fruit of Islam to the Blue Hill Avenue church, marching them from the Grove Hall location of Muhammad’s Mosque No. 11 to the Mattapan sanctuary.

The young men, many of them rescued from prison or life on the streets by Minister Don’s mission of redemption, stood straight and tall during the rescheduled funeral.

Minister Don Muhammad PHOTO: COURTESY RANDY MUHAMMAD

“They came in and protected us,” Rev. John Borders said, speaking during a memorial service for Muhammad at Morningstar on a snowy, wind-whipped day. “When I stood to preach, they were standing on each side.”

Muhammad died Dec. 17 at age 87. Borders, fellow clergy, Nation of Islam members and others recalled Muhammad as a leader to whom they turned for wise counsel and protection during the many decades he spent at the helm of the Roxbury mosque.

The protection he extended to Morningstar ruffled some feathers among brothers in the Nation of Islam and congregants at Morningstar. But Muhammad wasn’t interested in interdenominational conflicts.

“Minister Don realized this wasn’t about the Nation of Islam,” recalled his son, Don Straughter at the Dec. 20 service. “This wasn’t about the churches. This was about people helping each other.”

Muhammad was also remembered for his key role brokering peace between community factions, whether community activists, clergy, elected officials or gang members.

It was Muhammad’s work with gang-involved and incarcerated young men that first caught the attention of local law enforcement and led to a unique role of the Nation of Islam in the so-called “Boston Miracle” that attracted national attention in the 1990s for the 79% drop in gang violence.

But that alliance was long in developing. Muhammad was outspoken in criticizing police after Boston cops shot and killed unarmed Black men in a string of shootings in the early 1980s. The election of Raymond L. Flynn to Boston City Hall in 1983 brought new leadership to the city and a new police commissioner, Francis M. “Mickey” Roache, who knew Minister Don from his work in the Community Disorders Unit.

Despite outside criticism, the alliance between the Nation of Islam and law enforcement – which grew to include State Police, state prosecutors and the U.S. Attorney’s Office – yielded results. Alongside the Boston Ten Point Coalition of Christian clergy, Minister Don and his Nation of Islam acolytes worked the projects, streets and schools to intervene in gang disputes and maintain peace.

Embracing the view expressed by Rev. Jeffrey Brown that “we’ll never arrest ourselves out of this situation,” Minister Don led efforts to find alternatives to gang life while interceding to resolve conflicts between factions.

Nearly unheard of in other cities, it was common in Boston to see Nation of Islam members under Minister Don join with police brass like Area B Commander William “Billy” Celester and the mayor at press conferences, responding to outbreaks of violence or pushing for more state and federal resources to address youth violence.

However, Minister Don’s close relationship to civic powers did not prevent him from speaking out over incidents like the police converging on the Mission Hill projects to search for a non-existent Black suspect after the murder of Carol Stuart by her husband Charles, whose lies set off a brutal manhunt.

Muhammad was also an ardent believer in economic self-sufficiency for African Americans, promoting business development and investment in the Black community.

The unusual nature of Minister Don’s prominence in Boston civic life was apparent in a 1990 appearance at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, where he addressed a packed auditorium during a fall seminar. Some students came out of curiosity, some to question the Nation of Islam’s fraught relationship with the Jewish community.

Muhammad’s forthright presentation of the Nation’s peaceful philosophy, his message of economic empowerment and rescuing young people from lives of despair won him sustained applause at the end of the hour.

Born Don Straughter in Beckley, West Virginia in 1937, he moved from the heart of coal country to Boston at age 17 to work with his brother, Justice, in dry cleaning. Shortly after arriving in Boston, Straughter met his soon-to-be wife, Shirley Upshaw, who came to Boston from Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were married within a year of meeting each other.

The couple joined the Nation of Islam as part of Mosque No. 11 on Intervale Street, which was then headed by Louis X, a Roxbury native formerly known as Eugene Walcott, who later took the name Farrakhan. During Farrakhan’s leadership of the Roxbury mosque, he and Muhammad forged a decades-long close relationship.

When Farrakhan sought in 1981 to revive the Nation of Islam after several years during which the organization was dormant, he relied heavily on Muhammad to build out the organization, recalled Mustafa Farrakhan, the NOI leader’s son.

“He was a hero in the Nation,” Farrakhan said during the service at Morningstar. “He was one of the pillars my father depended on to rebuild the nation.”

Over the decades, Farrakhan tapped Muhammad to train ministers across the country and, from time to time, to negotiate conflicts NOI mosques had with local authorities. On one such occasion, Muhammad held negotiations between New York’s Mosque No. 7 and then New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, with whom Muhammad had worked in Boston when Bratton was on the Boston Police Department command staff.

“This was a great statesman, a diplomat,” said Minister Rodney Muhammad, who now leads Mosque No. 11. “He was respected from the streets to the suites.”

Muhammad is survived by his five children — Yvette Muhammad, Cheryl Straughter, Don Straughter Jr., Shirley Straughter Carrington and Brian Straughter — as well as 20 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

Family members recalled Muhammad’s kindness and his love for his wife, Shirley, who passed away last year.

Brian Wright O’Connor contributed to this report.