• Minnesota congressman
• First Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
• Supported Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam
• Former steering committee member of the National Lawyers Guild's Minnesota chapter
• Publicly defended former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah

Born in August 1963, Keith Maurice Ellison was raised as a Roman Catholic in Detroit, Michigan. He converted to Islam at age 19, while attending Wayne State University. After graduating with a B.A. in economics in 1987, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota Law School.

As a third-year law student in 1989-90, Ellison penned two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name "Keith Hakim." In the first, he made respectful reference to "Minister Louis Farrakhan" and used a tone indicating that he was an avid Nation of Islam (NOI) advocate; Ellison also defended the incendiary NOI spokesman and black supremacist Khalid Abdul Muhammad. In the second piece, Ellison demanded reparations for slavery and said that African Americans should be offered the option of settling in an all-black, geographically self-contained, separate "homeland" if they wished. In February 1990, Ellison participated in sponsoring Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) to speak at his law school on the subject, "Zionism: Imperialism, White Supremacy or Both?"

After earning a Juris Doctorate in 1990, Ellison worked three years as a litigator with the firm of Lindquist & Vennum. He then served as executive director of the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis, which specialized in the pro bono defense of "low-income people and people of color." After that, he took a job with the law firm Hassan & Reed Ltd.

Between 1992 and 2000, Ellison failed to pay all or part of his income taxes in five separate years. Consequently, the IRS placed liens on his home and he eventually was forced to pay some $25,000 in back taxes. Ellison also ignored fines that he had incurred for parking tickets and moving violations so numerous that his driver's license was suspended multiple times.

In October 1992 Ellison publicly came to the defense of Sharif Willis, a convicted murderer and ex-convict who was now the leader of Minneapolis' violent Vice Lords gang. The previous month, four Vice Lords members had used Willis' house as their headquarters for planning the murder of a local police officer named Jerry Haaf. At the trial of one of the killers, two witnesses implicated Willis in the plot. Willis was never charged, however, because law-enforcement authorities said they lacked sufficient evidence to convict him. But Ellison nonetheless helped organize a demonstration against Minneapolis police, where he denounced "the campaign of slander the police federation has been waging" against Willis. He told the crowd that the police union was systematically trying to frighten white people in order to persuade the city to hire more officers and thereby strengthen the police union's power base.

In February 1993, while the trial of Officer Haaf's killers was in progress, Ellison led a protesting crowd outside the courthouse in the chant: "We don't get no justice, you don't get no peace!"

Ellison's working relationship with Sharif Willis came to an end in February 1995, when the latter was convicted in federal court on several counts of drug and gun-related crimes and was sent back to prison for 20 years.

In 1995 Ellison worked actively on behalf of the Nation of Islam. At a University of Minnesota rally to promote Louis Farrakhan's highly anticipated Million Man March, Ellison appeared onstage with Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who delivered a thundering, racist diatribe.

That same year, when Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of the late Malcolm X, was indicted for conspiring to murder Farrakhan, Ellison organized a march on the U.S. Attorney's office in Minneapolis demanding that Shabazz be released and alleging that the FBI itself had conspired to try to kill Farrakhan. In a November 6, 1995, column for the Minneapolis periodical Insight News, Ellison wrote under the name "Keith X Ellison" and condemned a Star Tribune editorial cartoon implying that Farrakhan was an anti-Semite. Ellison argued to the contrary.

In February 1997 Ellison appeared as a local NOI spokesman with the surname "Muhammad." He spoke at a public hearing in connection with a controversy involving Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism (MIAR), who supported Louis Farrakhan and was alleged to have said, "Jews are among the most racist white people I know." Declared Ellison:

"We stand by the truth contained in the remarks attributed to [Ms. Jackson], and by her right to express her views without sanction. Here is why we support Ms. Jackson: She is correct about Minister Farrakhan. He is not a racist. He is also not an anti-Semite. Minister Farrakhan is a tireless public servant of Black people, who constantly teaches self-reliance and self-examination to the Black community."

Ellison first emerged as a candidate for public office in 1998, when he ran for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party nomination for state representative as "Keith Ellison-Muhammad." In a contemporaneous Insight News article on his candidacy, Ellison was reported to be still defending Louis Farrakhan:

"Anticipating possible criticism for his NOI affiliation, Ellison-Muhammad says he is aware that not everyone appreciates what the Nation does and feels there is a propaganda war being launched against its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan."

In February 2000 Ellison gave a speech at a fundraising event sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he previously had served. The event was a fundraiser for former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah after her apprehension in St. Paul for the attempted murder of Los Angeles police officers in 1975. Ellison referred to Soliah as a "black gang member" (though she is white) and a victim of government persecution. He described her as a woman who had been "fighting for freedom in the '60s and '70s" and called for her release. (Soliah subsequently pleaded guilty to charges in Los Angeles and to an additional murder charge in Sacramento.) Ellison also spoke favorably of cop-killers Mumia Abu Jamal and Assata Shakur.

In November 2002 Ellison was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives and was re-elected two years later.

In 2006 Ellison ran (as a Democrat) for Minnesota's Fifth District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Early that year, the Minnesota State Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board reprimanded his campaign for unreported contributions, misclassified disbursements, and inaccurate cash balances. Ellison himself was fined for willful violation of Minnesota's campaign-finance-reporting law and was sued twice by the state attorney general.

During the 2006 campaign, the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) Executive Director Nihad Awad spoke at an August 25th fundraiser for Ellison, who accepted thousands of dollars in donations from Awad and another CAIR leader. In October of that year, Ellison traveled to Florida on a fundraising tour that included a party hosted by Altaf Ali, CAIR's state director there.

Also in 2006, Ellison addressed his Nation of Islam links in a letter he penned to the local chapter of the Jewish Community Relations Council. In the letter, Ellison asserted that his involvement with NOI had been limited to an 18-month period around the time of the Million Man March in 1995; that he had been unfamiliar with the organization's anti-Semitic views at that time; and that he himself had never expressed or defended such views. All of those assertions were false.

Ellison won his congressional election on November 7, 2006. Eleven days later, he gave a speech titled "Imams and Politics" to the Fourth Annual Body Meeting of the North American Imams Federation (NAIF). He also participated in a "Community Night" event with Imams Siraj Wahhaj and Omar Shahin. The latter was an NAIF board member and a representative of the (now-defunct) organization KindHearts. Two days after that event, Shahin and five other NAIF conference attendees were ejected from a US Airways flight when their suspicious behavior alarmed other passengers.

On December 24, 2006, Ellison spoke at a Dearborn, Michigan convention of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America.

On January 4, 2007, Ellison placed his right hand on a Quran instead of a Bible at the photo-op reenactment of his congressional swearing-in ceremony. At the earlier, official ceremony, all the newly elected representatives were sworn in at one time, without any books.

On February 20, 2007, Ellison endorsed the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, praising the senator's "unifying spirit" as well as his "message of an open and fair economy, a balanced prosperity and clear opposition to the war in Iraq."

In May 2007 Ellison spoke at the Fourth Annual Convention of the Muslim American Society. On June 16, 2007, he was a featured speaker at the First Annual Banquet of CAIR's Minnesota chapter. That same month, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee honored Ellison with its Trailblazer Award, for his "career of advocacy focused on promoting civil and human rights, peace, and prosperity for working families."

On June 28, 2007, Ellison co-sponsored Rep. Dennis Kucinich's bill to impeach Republican Vice President Dick Cheney for "high crimes and misdemeanors"; the bill charged that Cheney had "purposefully manipulated [pre-Iraq War] intelligence" and had "fabricated a threat of weapons of mass destruction." Other co-sponsors included William Lacy Clay, Jan Schakowsky, Albert Russell Wynn, Yvette Clarke, Hank Johnson, Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey, and Maxine Waters.

In September 2007 Ellison was a keynote speaker during the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention.

Ellison was re-elected to his Fifth District congressional seat in 2008.


Portions of this profile are adapted, with permission, from the article "Louis Farrakhan's First Congressman," written by Scott W. Johnson and published by The Weekly Standard on October 9, 2006.