February is Black History Month and WDET’s Detroit Evening Report collected stories from listeners for the Black History Listening Project.

Hadiyah Ahmad is the wife of late Imam Nadir Ahmad, founder and director of Al-Ikhlas Training Academy, one of the first Islamic schools in Detroit. She serves as the Administrative Assistant at the school.

In an interview with WDET, Hadiyah Ahmad shares the story of her husband’s life.

Religion brings Ahmad to Detroit

She says they both converted to Islam from Christianity in 1973. They lived in Virginia before moving to Detroit.

Imam Nadir came to Detroit in 1980 to study Islam at Wayne County Community College’s Muslim World Studies program. Ahmad says Imam Nadir was working on writing a book.

“He’s always been an avid reader and researcher. He studied the religion constantly,” she says.

Ahmad says Imam Nadir studied under Dr. Shahbazz from Masjid Wali Muhammad. The mosque was given historical designation in Detroit in 2013. It was the first temple for the Nation of Islam before becoming a Sunni Muslim mosque.

From student to teacher

Nadir Ahmad became an Imam and taught at the Sister Clara Muhammad School, starting as a 5th grade teacher and eventually making his way up to assistant principal and principal.

“He’s always been committed to giving the children an Islamic education,” Ahmad says.

Ahmad says following the closure of the Clara Muhammad school, Imam Nadir opened Al-Ikhlas in 1991 as a space for kids to continue their Islamic education.

“We had our children, and many parents had their children that they didn’t want them to go to public school. So we decided that… we weren’t going to wait. We were going to continue with Islamic education. He said that, well, we’re going to branch out and open our own school,” she says.

In an effort to allow all students to attend, he created a sliding pay scale for tuition.

Family and community focus

Ahmad says Imam Nadir balanced his home life as a father and husband while working for the community.

“He was doing what he loved doing,” she says.

“We worked hard together, and he always let me know what his mission was and where we were going and what the plans that he had,” she says.

The couple was married for 53 years and worked together in the schools.

Ahmad says Imam Nadir did a lot of work behind the scenes.

“Allah had blessed him with so many talents; he could basically do anything that he decided to do. We didn’t hire a lot of different people to do a lot of different skills, but he did most of it himself,” she shares.

After Imam Nadir’s passing last month, several students shared their memories online, saying they were inspired to come together. They also created a fundraiser in his honor to raise funds for the school.

Ahmad says he was a little obsessed with his role.

“He could not even think unless he thought about the children, what they need, when they need it, how they need it. He loved those children,” Ahmad expresses.

A life of service and a lasting legacy

Imam Nadir previously served in Vietnam, having been affected by Agent Orange from his time in service. Ahmad says he got cancer in 1997 and had to remove a kidney. But that didn’t stop him from continuing his work.

“It didn’t really start affecting him until 10 years ago. He had to get on dialysis. He was the type of person that he never really let anything stop him from what he wanted to do in terms of leading the school he was teaching during this time, he was Mashallah,” she says.

Ahmad says Imam Nadir’s legacy is his love of Allah and the love of community. He died in January 2026.

February is Black History Month and WDET’s Detroit Evening Report has collected Black history stories from listeners.

We’re sharing the story of Walter Greene Sr., one of the first Black politicians in Detroit and Walter Greene Jr., who was a Buffalo Soldier during World War II.

WDET’s Bre’Anna Tinsley spoke with Walter Greene III, also known as Trey. He starts by explaining Greene Sr.’s role as a ward constable in the City of Detroit.

The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

Trey Greene: At the time that the state hadn’t figured out some of the relationships between the city and the county and the state. And so it was, in effect, the person who went and served warrants and actually evicted people on behalf of landlords and maintained order for it on behalf of the County, besides what the police department was doing. His ward number was number seven.

One of the interesting things about it was that Black Bottom, at the time he got here, was beginning probably what was it ended up being its most rapid change, and he ran and won in a ward in 1931 that was Jewish predominantly, but that was becoming Black rapidly. And he was light skinned enough that, depending on what kind of photograph you used in the campaign, I’m sure there were many, many Jewish people who thought they were voting for a Jewish guy named Greene to be ward constable. And didn’t have any particular problems that where they’d have to deal with him, where they needed to know the difference and to get involved with it.

So, he ended up being elected seven times. In that sense, I think he’s probably one of Michigan’s most successful Black politicians in history.

Bre’Anna Tinsley: I want to move on to your father, Walter Greene, Jr. So clarify for me, your father was a Buffalo Soldier?

TG: That’s correct, the Buffalo Soldiers were the troops that the United States Army decided they needed to keep in service after the Civil War was over.

During the Civil War, one of the facts that people are not very well aware of is that the number of Negro troops, 180,000 of them for the North in the Civil War, ended up being the thing that turned the war. Abraham Lincoln finally had to concede that that was the case after he had not accepted the advice of Frederick Douglass to do it. But ultimately, when Robert Smalls also said, ‘you need to allow us to help fight this war,’ well, that turned the war around in just, you know, a few months. Then they decided they needed to keep a small number of Negro troops in the army.

When the Civil War was over, those ultimately came became two infantry regiments and two cavalry regiments, and they mostly served out west to engage in oppressing the Indigenous people. Which is a whole ironic, weird thing that nobody ever talks about in this country. But the way, of course, we treated the people who were here first has been and continues to be unfair. And in the way America works, you get the Black folks to do the dirtiest of the work one way or another.

BT: Did your father share any of the stories of what led to his promotion to Second Lieutenant?

TG: Well, one of the things that had to happen was he had to go to Fort Custer first, to be trained as a soldier at all. Then later after that, to be sent down to what was called Fort Benning in Georgia, to Officer Candidate School. One of the signal things of that is being on the train from Detroit on your way to the South, and the train stops in Cincinnati, so that before you go across the river, everybody black who might be sitting in any car that they could afford to pay for on the train has to move to a black car to drive over into Kentucky.

And because he had not grown up with Jim Crow at all, that was some of the first of his exposure to American Jim Crow. And then he got down to Georgia, and he managed to get through Officer Candidate School.

But from then on, through the rest of the war, he was in trouble all the time, because so much of the stuff that is involved with Jim Crow is so backward, so awkward, so stupid, so nonsensical, that if you’re not skilled at it, quote-unquote, you’re going to be making little mistakes. And he was the kind of guy making mistakes all the time and being accused of being a troublemaker.

BT: I have the book that you left for me earlier with your father and your grandfather on the cover of it. Actually, can you talk a little bit about that particular book and how that photo came to be on that cover?

TG: Yes, it’s a wonderful book. It’s published by the Johns Hopkins University, and it we have it because a guy named Robert Jefferson, who’s a very senior member of the history faculty out at the University of New Mexico and now was hired at Wayne State as he finished his doctorate at Michigan. And I happened to be in a position to have seen his paperwork before being hired here at Wayne and to call the History Department to tell the guy to come see me, since his book was about my dad’s unit during World War II, that I’d like to meet him and welcome him to Detroit.

And he finished his dissertation and finished everything that went into the creation of that book, and used the photo on the cover of our family in 1943 when my dad was home, before he went to Arizona, before he went to the South Pacific for the war.

BT: Was there specific mentions of your father in the book?

TG: No, the book is really about the things going on at home, including, for instance, my mom having to go out to Arizona and California to be with her husband before he went overseas during the war, and lots and lots of disruptions like that. But I recommend that book to everybody, Professor Robert Jefferson, and the title of the book is “Fighting for Hope: [African American Troops of] the 93rd Division in World War II [and Postwar America].”