The Nation of Islam's 275 Murders

Via: the Autonomist

An ominous anniversary just passed -- that of the Zebra Murders. From 1970-1974, the Nation of Islam earned the title of the bloodiest domestic terrorist group in American history, as it murdered as many as 270 whites in California alone.


The three men went out hunting that night. But their prey was human. White humans, to be exact. Only they didn't consider whites human, but rather "grafted snakes," "white devils," and "blue-eyed devils."

They grabbed three children, and tried to get them into their van, but the resourceful kids ran away.

The children were Michele Denise Carrasco, 11, Marie Stewart, 12, and Marie's 15-year-old brother, Frank.

The angry, frustrated hunters went back to their van, and sought after new quarry. They found it in the form of a happy married couple, out for an after-dinner walk near their home on Telegraph Hill. The wife ran away, but when one of the hunters put a gun to her husband's chest and said he'd kill him, she stopped and returned. Her devotion cost her her life.

In the van, the hunters brutally assaulted the husband and wife, and two of the hunters (Cooks and Green) robbed the husband and wife, and two (Cooks and Harris) sexually molested the wife. Parking near some deserted railroad tracks in the Potrero District, the hunters had at husband and wife alike, taking turns hacking their faces with a machete, and nearly decapitating the wife, before leaving them for dead.

The couple was named Quita and Richard Hague. The date was October 20, 1973.

Quita Hague was dead, but a hideously mutilated Richard Hague miraculously survived.

The hunters that night were Jesse Lee Cooks, Larry Green, and Anthony Cornelius Harris. Cooks, Green, and Harris were members of the Black Muslims (now known as the Nation of Islam), who had been recruited, along with dozens of other Black Muslims, to randomly murder whites.

That was the official beginning of the "Zebra" Killings, which would be carried out on the streets of San Francisco, and would hold the city by the bay -- one of the most beautiful in the world -- in a state of terrified siege for the next six months. Or rather, would hold white San Franciscans in a state of terror. As black residents told reporters, since only whites were being murdered, they felt no fear or concern.

The Zebra Killings were so called because the San Francisco Police Department reserved radio frequency "Z" ("Zebra" in military and police parlance) for all dispatches that might be related to the serial killings.

The operation came down from the highest levels of the NOI, making the NOI the bloodiest domestic terrorist group in American history.


Killers and Suspects

Between October 20, 1973 and April 16, 1974, Jesse Lee Cooks, Larry Green, and Anthony Cornelius Harris, as well as J.C. (aka J.C.X.) Simon and Manuel Moore, murdered at least 15 whites and grievously wounded at least another nine whites in failed murder attempts. In at least one case ("John Doe #169"), the devils kidnapped a homeless white man, took him to Black Self-Help Moving and Storage, the NOI-owned business where all of the above-named killers but Cooks worked, bound and gagged their victim, and began chopping off his body parts while he was still alive. (Cooks worked at the NOI-owned Shabazz Bakery; according to Anthony Harris, the NOI assassins had butchered at least one other white victim at Black Self-Help.)

One of the detectives who worked the Zebra detail told me that one of the cases in which the dismembered white murder victim could not be identified was known as "the turkey case," since the victim, who was found on Ocean Beach minus his feet and hands (and head?), was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Jesse Lee Cooks also raped twice and sodomized (at least) one white woman, whom he had planned on murdering, as well, but who succeeded in maneuvering him, much to his consternation, into letting her live.

Black Self-Help was managed by Tom Manney, an NOI member who, according to a different detective from the case was a former St. Ignatius High School and City College football star.

Getting back to the West Coast, the retired SFPD inspector told me that the San Francisco murder campaign was run through the NOI's local Mosque #26.

The killers all sought membership in an elite NOI group called the "Death Angels," which had recruiting meetings and pep rallies in the loft at Black Self-Help. In order to become a Death Angel, one had to murder four white children, five white women, or nine white men. In the NOI, cowardice is a virtue.

According to Clark Howard, the NOI had gangs of assassins up and down the state of California:

At that time, there were fifteen accredited Death Angels in California. To achieve their collective membership, they had already quietly killed throughout the state 135 white men, 75 white women, 60 white children -- or enough of a combination thereof to give each of them his required four, five, or nine credits. This was October of 1973. The California attorney general's office had already secretly compiled a list of forty-five of those killings which had taken place in the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Long Beach, Signal Hill, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Pacifica, San Diego, and Los Angeles; and in the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Ventura, and Alameda. All of the victims were white. All the known suspects in the killings had been associated with the Black Muslim movement. The killings were even then continuing throughout the state.

The operation came down from the highest levels of the NOI, making the NOI the bloodiest domestic terrorist group in American history.

During the same period, murdering whites had become quite a sport for black San Francisco criminals, a sport that did not bother black San Francisco civilians, who were of little help to police in solving the Zebra killings. On the bloodiest night of the killings, January 28, 1974, the NOI murderers shot five whites within two hours, leaving four dead and one crippled. In the most brazen incident that night, the killers shot to death a white woman, Jane Holly, in front of eight black women in a well-lighted laundromat. Yet none of the black women would give police a useful description of the killer.

Had blacks helped police, the NOI killers could have been caught months earlier, and several of their victims spared.

As retired SFPD assistant chief and historian Kevin J. Mullen, who at the time was a veteran of over 20 years on the force, recently wrote,

By the late 1970s, San Francisco's homicide rate was 18.5 per 100,000 population, up from 5.9 in an equivalent period in the early 1960s. Much of the increase was driven by a rise in black on white killings. It was in this climate that the Zebra killings occurred.

Note that at 13.4 percent, blacks then comprised barely more than one-eighth of the city's population.

We still do not know how many whites the Nation of Islam murdered during the period of 1970-74, let alone how many it has since murdered, not to mention how many copycat black-on-white murders the NOI may have inspired.

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