Reunion 005: Ula Y. Taylor: Gender and Power in Family Relationships
In the 1930s, while her husband, Elijah Muhammad, was imprisoned, Clara Poole (later known as Clara Muhammad) quietly stepped into leadership. She wasn’t given a title. She didn’t stand at a pulpit. But she taught the children, organized the women, and held the Nation of Islam together. In a movement that promised both protection and patriarchy, Clara found a way to lead from within. Her story is not unique. Across the early years of the Nation of Islam, Black women built schools, sustained families, and shaped theology, often behind the scenes, always at the center. They navigated a religious world that asked them to submit, even as it relied on their strength.
In The Promise of Patriarchy, historian Ula Y. Taylor uncovers the lives of these women, showing how they negotiated faith, family, and gendered expectations to shape a movement that would transform Black religious and political life in America. Today, Ula joins us to talk about how power moves through families, how women lead in spaces that don’t always recognize their leadership, and how history remembers (or forgets) them.
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Ula Yvette Taylor is a professor in the Department of African American Studies. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.
Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award. She earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara.
SHOW NOTES
- Nitoshia Ford, Dissertation on Memory Workers
- Jarvis Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021)
- Paula Marie Seniors, Mae Mallory, The Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (University of Georgia Press, 2024).
- Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
- Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
- Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017).
