SUBSCRIBERS SAVE UP TO $241 IN TODAY’S PAPER SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2012 WWW.LSJ.COM ‘War Horse’ and Venue has Sheryl Crow are coming to hot tickets Wharton. WHARTON for its 30th anniversary. CELEBRATES LIFE 1C MSU FOOTBALL: DEFENSE DOMINATES FIRST SCRIMMAGE. PAGE 1D POLICE BUDGET HEARING Lansing to present spending specifics Lindsay VanHulle [email protected] Most of the share of the $7.6 million voter-approved millage for Lansing’s police and fire de- partments in Mayor Virg Berne- ro’s proposed 2013 budget would cover such things as health care and pension costs, rather than more offi- WHAT’S cers on the NEXT street. From the The Lansing City start, Bernero Council will hold said he intended abudget hear- to use millage ing for the funds to prevent Lansing Police future cuts to the Department at departments. 5:30 p.m. Mon- Thirty-six police day at City Hall, officers and 11 124 W. Michigan firefighters Ave. The meet- were laid off and ing will precede two fire stations the formal 7 were closed this p.m. council year. session. Budget His budget hearings will recommenda- resume after- Fardowsa Omar, 13, laughs as she picks up cousin Muniira Barre, 7, after Friday prayers at the Wali Mahmoud Islamic Center. ROD SANFORD/LSJ tion for the fiscal ward with the year that starts city’s human July 1does, in resources and fact, increase finance depart- overall spending ments. of a Lansing for both depart- EVOLUTION ments. No additional cuts are ex- pected, and seven police officers will be recalled to work. What is clear is that most of the new millage revenue will be used for health care, pensions, energy and other public safety costs. What the city won’t say is how much of the money it plans to spend on each of those things. Of the $2.9 million in millage MOSQUE dollars budgeted for each of the Matthew Miller See POLICE, Page 2A How a neighborhood CORNER STORE [email protected] became a NATION OF ISLAM temple, The building was a corner market once, tucked among the houses on the SPEEDREADS city’s west side, but the shelves of fruits Adaily feed of top headlines and a Sunni MOSQUE and its U.S.-born and vegetables and the meat counter are long gone. MORE AT WWW.LSJ.COM What was once the storefront is congregation became INTERNATIONAL sealed up, wrapped with battered white NATION & WORLD siding. There is a hand-painted sign on Severe weather aims the back that says “Masjid Wali Mah- moud.” Inside, 17 men were seated on at nation’s midsection pale green-blue carpeting, gathered for OMAHA, Neb. — Forecasters on prayer under fluorescent Saturday warned residents across lights. the Midwest to brace for “life ONLINE It was the Friday of the threatening” weather as baseball- Go to big lottery jackpot. In the sized hail fell in Nebraska and torna- LSJ.com to world beyond the walls, the does were spotted in Kansas and view more day was percolating with Oklahoma. — Page 12A photos of half-billion-dollar dreams. the Islamic Anthony Weatherspoon had Secret Service puts 11 center. intended to talk about some- thing else, but, as he told his on leave for misconduct small congregation “we CARTAGENA, Colombia — An always ask Allah for inspiration.” embarrassing scandal involving “There is a frenzy out there to go out prostitutes and Secret Service agents and buy a lottery ticket,” he said. “Is it deepened Saturday as 11 agents tempting? Yes. They make it tempting. were placed on leave. — Page 7A It’s the glitter. It’s that hope. It’s that wish that you win, one in a hundred and LOCAL & STATE some million chances of winning. What Cyber bill under fire does it tell us in the Quran? We are not immune to the temptation.” Aproposal by Rep. Mike Rogers, Weatherspoon is a retired forest R-Howell, to combat cyberattacks is products specialist with the state of getting plenty of support in Con- Michigan, a big-framed man who grew gress and the private sector — but plenty of opposition from critics Worshippers, including Muhammad Qawwee (center), greet each other with hugs and who say it threatens privacy rights. handshakes after Friday prayers at Lansing’s Wali Mahmoud Islamic Center. See MOSQUE, Page 5A — Page 2B © 2012 Lansing State E! IT’S $1.75 Lottery....................2A Books......................6C RY TIM QUAL TODAY’S Opinion...........8A, 9A Travel ......................7C Journal, Lansing, DAI ITY Retail Local&State ............1B Sports......................1D Michigan. Y D FORECAST For home IT AI High in the mid-70s, Deaths..............4B, 5B Baseball..................8D AGannett AL RY delivery Newspaper. U T low in the upper 50s. 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COFFEE, CAPPUCCINO &HOT CHOCOLATE•NOSURCHARGE ATM YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD FOOD STORE LOTTERY-LOTTO •ALCOHOL AVAILABLE AT 7AM ON SUNDAYS www.lsj.com Lansing State Journal • Sunday, April 15,2012 • 5A MUHAMMAD QAWWEE: “It didn’t give us the full Islam, but it was leading us on the path toward Islam.” EVOLUTION OF A LANSING MOSQUE TIMELINE Nation of Islam 1929 Earl Little, a field organizer for Marcus Garvey’s Uni- versal Negro Improvement Association, moves his fam- ily to Lansing. His son, Mal- colm Little, who would become Malcolm X, was 4. 1930 Wallace D. Fard, a peddler whose origins are uncertain, founds the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in Detroit, teaching that American blacks were members of the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen by traders from Mecca 379 years before and that they must regain their religion, which was Islam. Fard would choose a Georgia-born skilled laborer named Elijah Poole as his “supreme minis- ter,” giving him the name Elijah Muhammad. 1931 Earl Little is run over by a streetcar at Michigan Ave- nue and Detroit Street and dies. Rumor holds that he was murdered by the Black Legion, a local white su- premacist group. 1934 Fard vanishes, and his fol- Fatima Mberwa (left), 6, and Zaituh Mussa, 5, study Arabic at the Wali Mahmoud Islamic Center last month. KEVIN W. FOWLER/FOR THE LANSING STATE JOURNAL lowers split over who should succeed him, with many leaving the movement. Mosque Muhammad, who had relo- cated to Chicago, would Continued from Page 1A spend many years traveling like an itinerant evangelist. up on a farm in Cass County, the imam here for the past dozen years. The wonders of the natural world and the science of 1948 Malcolm Little, in prison for plants have a way of popping up in his larceny and breaking and preaching, woven in among moral teach- entering in Massachusetts, ings that make much of reliance on God receives a letter from his and working to build the community. brother, Philbert, saying that “It tells us in the Quran, gambling only he and other family mem- benefits a few, but it is a harm to many,” bers had converted to Islam. Weatherspoon continued. “Right now, Malcolm was initially dismis- we’re saying this half a billion dollars is sive, but soon became a going to benefit either one or very few and devoted follower of the many who should not be spending those Nation of Islam. dollars are buying lottery tickets. That money is gone ... Give it to someone who needs that dollar. You’d be better blessed 1955 and you’d be better off.” Temple No. 16 opens in Most of the men listening in respectful Lansing on the second floor silence had come to Lansing as refugees, of a building at the corner escaping a brutal civil war in Somalia. of Main and Division streets. Others were men like Weatherspoon, Philbert Little is its minister. who once had an X in his name. Worshippers leave after Friday prayers at the Wali Mahmoud Islamic Center on April 6. The center Malcolm is now a minister with Temple No. 7 in Har- This place used to be Nation of Islam is in a small converted corner store and was formerly a Nation of Islam Temple. ROD SANFORD/LSJ Temple No. 16. From the winter of 1969 to lem, but travels frequently, the middle of the 1970s, the men and wom- been vindicated myself and Emmett Till board with the sun, moon and stars of the sometimes to Lansing. The en who came here heard a message of had been vindicated.” Nation’s flag on one side and a cross on the site of the building now lies black glorification and white demoniza- There was a lineage to what she heard. other, with a picture of a black man hang- under Interstate 496. tion, of self-sufficiency, self-discipline and Malcolm and Philbert’s father, Earl Little, ing from a tree. self-love, framed by a reading of Islam was a field organizer for Marcus Garvey’s It was “a time of black awareness,” he 1960S that would have been only thinly recogniz- Universal Negro Improvement Association said. Students were coming from Michigan Temple No. 16 operates out able to the rest of the Muslim world. when he brought their family here in 1929. State.