Khadijah Farrakhan spent decades as the “mother of the faithful” for the adherents of the Nation of Islam. Working closely with her husband, Louis, to rebuild the Chicago-based religious organization in the late 1970s, she handled a vast array of duties, including overseeing accounting, designing uniforms worn at mosques and later devising children’s programming for the group’s annual Saviours’ Day holiday.
“What I remember most about her is her spirit — her spirit was just so wonderful, and her smile was contagious,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, senior pastor at St. Sabina Catholic Church on the South Side, a longtime friend. “She had a smile that when you saw her, the whole room lit up. You just felt her presence, and she had a gentleness about her but also a strength about her.”
Farrakhan, 90, died of natural causes on June 27 at a hospital in Michigan City, Indiana, said Ishmael Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s national assistant minister. A longtime resident of the South Side Kenwood neighborhood, she also owned a farm in New Buffalo, Michigan.
Born Betsy Ross in Boston in 1935, Farrakhan grew up in a Catholic family in Boston’s lower Roxbury area. In the middle of Louis Farrakhan’s first year of college in North Carolina, he met Betsy, and after that, “it was always ‘Betsy, Betsy, Betsy.’ He never made time for anyone else and he never looked at anyone else,” Louis Farrakhan’s classmate, Clarence Jones, told biographer Arthur Magida in the 1996 book “Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation.”
Homesick and missing Betsy, Louis Farrakhan chose to leave college in the summer of 1953, instead announcing he would marry Betsy, who by that time was pregnant. The couple wed on Sept. 12, 1953, at St. Cyprian’s Church in Boston, where her husband had served as an acolyte as a boy.
In 1955, the young family attended the Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day convention in Chicago. Betsy rose to join the organization when there was a call for acceptances at the end of the convention — even before her husband did, Dawn-Marie Gibson wrote in her 2023 biography, “The Ministry of Louis Farrakhan in the Nation of Islam.”
“Betsy’s decision to join the (Nation of Islam) independently of her husband is noteworthy and indicates that she was one of thousands of women to do so,” Gibson wrote.
Joining the Nation of Islam, Betsy Ross first changed her surname to X. According to the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, The Final Call, Louis Farrakhan gave her the name Khadijah, after the first wife of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad gave Khadijah and Louis, who was born Louis Walcott, the surname Farrakhan. Some have written that Farrakhan is a variation of an Arabic word meaning “The Criterion,” while Louis Farrakhan has said in interviews and sermons that he did not know what the name meant because Muhammad never told him.
In the years after Malcolm X’s assassination, Louis Farrakhan advanced within the Nation of Islam, moving from Boston to New York City to Chicago. After Muhammad’s death in 1975, the group foundered. In 1977, when the Farrakhans decided to rebuild the Nation of Islam, Khadijah Farrakhan assumed a key role as the organization’s first secretary — effectively its chief financial officer. She also edited and managed the production of The Final Call.
“When (Louis Farrakhan) began having meetings, when he began collecting charity and when he began having financial responsibilities, when those things happened, the person responsible for ensuring that every dime, nickel and penny was accounted for was Mother Khadijah, and (Louis) said personally from the rostrum that there was never a time when one cent was off while she served as secretary for the Nation of Islam,” said Sa’ad Alim Muhammad, the organization’s current national secretary. “I thought that was very important because when you’re talking about the rebuilding, (Louis) was responsible and functioned for the spiritual word, (while) the management of the Nation of Islam quite honestly began with her with respect to the financial resources.”
A trained seamstress, Farrakhan was responsible for the designs of the clothing worn by women in the Nation of Islam, such as the white uniform worn for mosque services, Ishmael Muhammad said.
Over the ensuing decades, as the Nation of Islam gained momentum, Farrakhan became known both as the group’s first lady and as “mother of the faithful,” Ishmael Muhammad said.
“That’s the title that her husband gave to her … because as the wife to a spiritual leader and teacher, she had the role not just as a wife but she was intimately involved in the nurturing and cultivation of faith of both the men and the women who come to accept God and his religion,” he said.
In 1997, along with Winnie Mandela, Farrakhan spoke at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia, a gathering of Black women modeled after the Million Man March that had occurred in Washington two years earlier.
“She had that quiet strength, but she knew how not to be quiet if she had to,” recalled former Ald. Dorothy Tillman. “She was very quiet but also very supportive of her husband, and I would think having her as a wife gave him the strength to rebuild the Nation. So she played a major role in that and she always had a lot of concern for the women and the children, and she was a real helpmate. I loved Sister Khadijah — she was loving and she had strength, and she was really the strength behind the minister (Louis Farrakhan).”
In the early 2000s, Farrakhan created children’s programming — dubbed “Mother Khadijah’s Children’s Village” — for the organization’s annual Saviours’ Day event, which usually is held in Chicago. Until then, there had been no children’s programming at that celebration.
“That was a major part of her contribution to the Nation of Islam in recent years,” Ishmael Muhammad said. “She came up with activities that children could enjoy to celebrate the founder of the Nation of Islam, and Mother Khadijah’s Children’s Village was both educational and offered interactive activities along with some of the spiritual lessons that are given to the young Muslims.”
In a statement, Farrakhan’s daughter Maria, called her mother “my first teacher, my first example of faith, my first best friend and my first glimpse of what a woman of God truly looked like.”
“When my father answered God’s call to stand back up in 1977 and rebuild the Nation of Islam, my mother never hesitated. She stood beside him with unwavering faith and quiet strength,” she said. “While my father carried the tremendous responsibility of rebuilding (the Nation of Islam), my mother carried the responsibility of keeping our home filled with peace, love, stability and faith. Somehow, even during the many times my father was away traveling to fulfill his mission, she made us feel secure, cherished and deeply connected to the work they were doing together.”
Farrakhan had an affinity for music, and she enjoyed spending time with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Ishmael Muhammad said.
In addition to her husband and her daughter Maria, Farrakhan is survived by two sons, Mustapha and Abnar; four other daughters, Betsy Jean, Donna, Fatima and Khallada; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A funeral service will take place at 11 a.m. on Friday at Mosque Maryam, 7351 S. Stony Island Ave.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
