As I entered the arena Wednesday night, a phalanx of stony-faced men immediately greeted me, all wearing identical black suits and red bow ties.

I was quickly and professionally frisked. My pockets revealed a notepad, a ballpoint pen and a mini-screwdriver.

They kept the pen and screwdriver.

In 1930, a mysterious and enigmatic man named Wallace D. Fard Muhammad appeared in the slums of Detroit, preaching an eclectic mix of eastern religion, Christianity and black nationalism.

Fard’s message of mysticism and black empowerment struck home as America sank into an ever worsening depression and racial discrimination against African-Americans underwent a dramatic uptick.

Little is known about Muhammad  — who disappeared shortly after the religions founding  — but to members of the Nation of Islam, he is believed to have been a direct manifestation of God.

After Fard’s disappearance, his disciple, Elijah Muhammad, took over and grew his ministry from a small cult into a juggernaut of militant black supremacy.

At its height, the Nation had millions of followers. It opened black-only businesses and built a multi-million dollar industry out of its message of racial separatism. It incorporated a private security company, the Fruit of Islam, and patrolled black neighborhoods.

The current head of the Nation of Islam, the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, came to Baton Rouge Wednesday.

Farrakhan has been alternatively described as a visionary and an ego-maniacal cultist.

He organized the 1995 Million-Man-March in Washington, D.C. in which he and other latter-day civil rights leaders advocated for more unity in the African-American community and called for a reinvigoration of America’s inner-cities.

The former chair of the Anti-Defamation League once referred to Farrakhan as “the black Adolf Hitler,” after he allegedly referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion,” and went on to praise the actual Hitler as a strong and forthright leader.

And now his personal body guard had my ballpoint and I didn’t know how I was going to take notes.

It was an hour before Farrakhan himself took the stage. The pre-show was at times moving, and alternatively downright surreal.

A small choir sang a moving rendition of James Weldon Johnson’s “The Black National Anthem,” followed by a Nation rap duo that spit incomprehensible lyrics to songs with choruses like, “Lay down the ham,” and “Do the Farrakhan dance.”

All the while, Farrakhan’s red bow ties prowled the aisles and court, joined now by women in paramilitary uniforms with shiny brass buttons and peaked caps.

The Nation of Islam first came to national prominence during the Civil Rights Movement. The Nation was typified by Malcolm X and his fiery calls for racial separatism  — at the height of Jim Crow and the forced suppression of black rights in the South, the N.O.I. offered a militant alternative to Martin Luther King’s gospel of peaceful resistance.

But then Malcolm X left the Nation and traveled to the holy city of Mecca where he converted to orthodox Islam.

When he returned, he preached against the Nation and its black supremacist doctrines — and they murdered him for it.

As Farrakhan took the stage, he invoked Malcolm X as a mentor and a friend — an allusion that struck me as disingenuous, as it was Farrakhan’s own brethren who acted as the trigger men in Malcolm’s murder.

Farrakhan spoke without notes, telling the crowd of more than a thousand that he preferred to speak off the cuff.

And he made some pretty salient points.

He spoke about the need to encourage education in the black community, to develop black solidarity and to build black independence through black industry.

But interspersed between his bombastic calls for a renewed African-American community were oblique references to the Masons and Shriners, paired with underhanded comments about Jews and racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans.

It took me more than an hour to realize each time he said “The children of slave masters” as in, “and now the children of slave masters have put a robot on Mars,” he was referring to white people.

That being said, he rambled with style and I’ve never heard someone utter the words “We live in a white-supremist society” in a more buttery and seductive tone.

Ultimately, the sermon missed its mark — it’s no wonder what once was a dynamic American religion has dwindled in membership to only 20,000 to 30,000 adherents.

Farrakhan offered no practical solutions to the problems facing contemporary African-Americans.

He was fighting old fights, his message was stuck in the past. He called for racial division after decades of reconciliation — it really seemed as though he was preaching from a pulpit on a foreign planet.