On CNN this morning they showed footage of the Chicago funeral of Derrion Albert, the teenager beaten to death by a group of other teens as he waited for the school bus.
Attending the funeral were the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Nation of Islam Head Honcho Louis Farrakhan. Also in attendence were about a dozen guys wearing bright red pointy hats with a matching red scarf-thingie around the base of the hat (maybe the scarf-thingie was part of the hat?).
Anyone know who these guys are? My wife suggested that they were with the Nation of Islam, since they had a presence at the funeral, but I’ve never seen N.O.I. guys decked out like this; usually they go with the dark suit-dark shades-and-bowtie look. Any clue?
I have seen such hats before in paintings, perhaps of long-ago India. This is the first time I’ve seen them on present-day men. It seems to be a turban with a crown of stiffer fabric.
Okay, I frittered away most of an hour, poking around through references, starting with ancient Indian pointy turban, where a few of them told me the Persians had the pointy turbans. I changed Indian to Persian, and I began to get little shards of info. The Persians wore red turbans, a few sources said. The Persians wore pointed caps and domed caps, other places said. (Some of the domed caps look like what Scott Adams’s Elbonians wear in Dilbert.)
That’s about as far as I care to dig. It looks like the red turbans with the points on top are based on a long-ago Persian style. I don’t know who wore them at the funeral, or why. Good luck on your further excavations. I did not dig into NOI or Prince Hall Masonry, which might be promising.