Justice and Faith: The Story of Keith Ellison
Keith Ellison
19 years old, from United States
Previous Religion: Catholicism
My Life Before Islam
Keith Ellison was born on August 4, 1963, in Detroit, Michigan, into a family with deep roots in the African American struggle for justice. His maternal grandfather had faced death threats and cross burnings while organizing voters for the NAACP in the segregated South, and that legacy shaped young Keith's sense of purpose. He was raised Catholic and attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, but he later admitted that he was not a particularly observant Catholic. As he entered Wayne State University, he found himself asking hard questions about the social circumstances of the country, about issues of justice and change, and about what his own spiritual life had to do with any of it.
The Moment of Guidance
At Wayne State University in the mid-1980s, Ellison began a serious search that brought him toward Islam, which he encountered through Muslim classmates and through reading during a period of intense questioning about faith and social justice. He has recalled that it was Islam's message of social justice and equality that affected him most, and that it satisfied both his spiritual yearning and his wondering about God, man, nature, and humanity. He became active on campus in campaigns for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa, and he found in the Islamic tradition a faith that seemed to connect inner conviction with the public duty of justice in a way that felt complete to him.
Reflections
At the age of nineteen, Keith Ellison formally converted from Catholicism to Islam. He has described the decision not as a rejection of a religious upbringing but as the fulfillment of a search for a faith that could speak to both the heart and the social conscience. After graduating with a degree in economics, he moved to Minneapolis, attended law school, and built a career as a civil rights lawyer. In 2002 he was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, and in November 2006 he became the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Congress, representing Minnesota's Fifth District.
Ellison represented Minnesota's Fifth District in Congress from 2007 to 2019, where he championed civil rights, consumer protection, and economic fairness, and he took his oath of office on a copy of the Qur'an that had once belonged to President Thomas Jefferson. In 2019 he was sworn in as Minnesota's attorney general, the first African American and the first Muslim elected to statewide office in the state, and he led the prosecution team that secured the murder conviction of the officer who killed George Floyd in 2021. His example inspired a generation of American Muslims to engage in civic and political life, and he has said that his faith remains a deep source of guidance in his public service.