Editing Elijah Muhammed (section)

===Early years===
Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Robert Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, the seventh of thirteen children of William Poole Sr. (1868–1942), a Baptist lay preacher and sharecropper, and Mariah Hall (1873–1958), a homemaker and sharecropper.

Elijah's education ended at the third grade, after which he went to work in sawmills and brickyards. To support the family, he worked with his parents as a sharecropper. When he was sixteen years old, he left home and began working in factories and at other businesses.

Poole married Clara Evans (1899–1972) on March 7, 1917. The Poole family was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the oppressive and economically troubled South in search of safety and employment. Poole later recounted that before the age of 20, he had witnessed the [[lynching]]s of three black men by white people. He said, "I seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years".

Moving his own family, parents and siblings, Elijah and the Pooles settled in the industrial North of Hamtramck, Michigan. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Poole struggled to find and keep work as the economy suffered during the post [[World War I]] and Great Depression eras. During their years in Detroit, Elijah and Clara had eight children, six boys and two girls.