Dr. Malachi Z. York’s Son: Prince York Speaks On His Father’s Innocence
Dwight D. York (born June 26, 1945, also known as Malachi Z. York, Issa Al Haadi Al Mahdi, Dr. York, et alii, is an American musician and writer, known as the founding leader of various religious/political groups, including most notably the quasi-religious cult known as the Nuwaubian movement, among other names.
He and his group were long based in Brooklyn, New York, where York exercised control over the community’s sexual practices and claimed access to most of the women, married or not. He required members to sell goods on the street to raise funds; it owned an estimated 20 buildings. About 1990 the community left and eventually relocated to rural Putnam County, Georgia, where they built a large complex. York was convicted in 2004 of numerous counts of federal charges of child molestation and violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; he is serving a 135-year sentence. An appeals court upheld his conviction; the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
York began his ministry began in the late 1960s; in 1967 he was preaching to the “Ansaaru Allah” (viz. African Americans) in Brooklyn, New York, during the period of the Black Power movement. He founded numerous esoteric or quasi-religious fraternal orders under various names during the 1970s and 1980s. These were at first based on pseudo-Islamic themes and Judaism (Nubian Islamic Hebrews). Later he developed a theme derived from “Ancient Egypt,” eclectically mixing ideas taken from black nationalism, cryptozoological and UFO religions, and popular conspiracy theory. He last called his group the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, or Nuwabians.
York and the Nuwaubians came under increased federal and state government scrutiny in the early 1990s, after they built Tama-Re, an Egyptian-themed “city” for about a hundred of his followers, in rural Putnam County, Georgia. Before York’s trial, the community had been joined directly and in the area by hundreds of other followers from out of state, while alienating both black and white local residents. The community was intensively investigated after numerous reports that York had molested numerous children of his followers.
York was arrested in May 2002. In 2004 he was convicted on federal charges of transporting minors across state lines for the purposes of sexual molestation, as well as racketeering and financial reporting violations. York’s case was reported as the largest prosecution for child molestation ever directed at a single person in the history of the United States, both in terms of number of victims and number of incidents.
