The story
Blend of trick + technology, apparently coined by Nation of Islam founder Wallace Fard Muhammad. The term first appears in the spelling tricknollogy in the 1938 American Journal of Sociology article "The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit" by Erdmann Doane Beynon, who quotes the term from the "Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam", which were lessons given by Muhammad at his "University of Islam" and preserved through oral tradition. Beynon describes it as '"[a] cult term pronounced "trickenollogy"' and paraphrased from the lesson that the '"[t]he illiteracy of the southern Negroes now seemed due to Caucasian "tricknollogy".'
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.