The Victorian Theatre's conversion to a mosque was not simply a change of use — it was a transformation of meaning. Vaudeville theaters were designed for spectacle, for crowds, for the energy of performance. The Nation of Islam, which was expanding rapidly through Black urban communities in the late 1950s, needed spaces that could accommodate large congregations and serious organizing. The old theater on South Orange Avenue offered both scale and a certain symbolic logic: a building associated with entertainment would now serve a community building itself on different terms. Minister Louis Farrakhan, known then as Louis X, presided here, as did Minister James Russell McGregor, known as James 3X and later James Shabazz. Their tenure made Mosque No. 25 one of the organization's significant northeastern outposts.

In September 1959, Malcolm X returned from a trip to Africa — a journey that would eventually contribute to the transformation of his thinking about race and religion. When he came back to the United States, one of the places he stopped was Temple No. 25 in Newark, where he showed home movies of his travels to the congregation. It was a remarkable moment: a civil rights figure standing in a repurposed vaudeville theater, projecting images of Africa onto the screen for a community that had been told for centuries that Africa was something to be ashamed of. The visit was informal in some ways, but its meaning was substantial. The connection between Mosque No. 25 and Malcolm X's assassination would later become darker: men involved in his murder in 1965 had ties to this mosque, including three of the men convicted of the killing and two additional accomplices who were never charged.

On September 7, 1973, Mosque No. 25 was the site of the funeral for James Russell McGregor — James Shabazz — who had served as minister of the mosque. More than 3,000 people attended. The size of the gathering spoke to McGregor's significance within the Newark community and within the broader Nation of Islam network. He had been a figure of local authority during years when Newark was still working through the trauma of the 1967 riots, when the city was changing and searching for new forms of leadership. The funeral at South Orange Avenue drew a crowd that filled the old theater's space — a building that, in its vaudeville years, had never imagined serving quite this role.

The mosque is now known as Masjid Muhammad-Newark, reflecting the broader evolution of the community it serves. The Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s, went through significant changes after the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, with much of its membership — following his son Warith Deen Mohammed — transitioning toward mainstream Sunni Islam. The renaming reflects that history: a community that moved through vaudeville theater, Black nationalist mosque, and eventual integration into the larger Muslim world. The building at 257 South Orange Avenue has held all of those identities, one after another, across nearly a century.