Nation of Islam Associate: Ex-Official Dies After Suffering Hemorrhage

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Farrakhan, who has battled prostate cancer, has said that a ``near-death experience'' in 1999 had left him a changed man. Since then he has stressed unity for all races and religions.

In a speech in April 1994, before a cheering audience of about 2,000, Muhammad denounced Jews as ``honkies.''

``I am going to be like a pit bull. That is the way I am going to be against the Jews. I am going to bite the tail of the honkies,'' Muhammad said.

Also that year, Muhammad was shot in the leg and wounded by a former Nation of Islam member during a speech at the University of California at Riverside.

Muhammad was unrepentant about his rhetoric.

``I was born to give the white man hell, and I will give him hell from the cradle to the grave,'' he told a crowd in Atlanta in September 1995.

Muhammad, who became national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, led the ``Million Youth March'' in New York City in 1998. The rally, attended by about 6,000 people, ended in a clash between police and marchers; dozens were injured.

In 1999, Muhammad organized a second ``Million Youth March,'' and about 2,000 people showed up. But a third gathering last year drew barely more than 100, police estimated. Muhammad blamed the ``devil white media'' and city officials for the low turnout.

Muhammad was born Harold Moore Jr. in 1948. He began preaching as a child and was later a quarterback at an all-black high school in Houston. He attended Dillard University, a Methodist school in New Orleans, in the late 1960s. It was there that he became interested in the black liberation movement after hearing Farrakhan speak.