Growth of the Black Muslim movement in the U.S.; Law enforcement and racial tensions

I'd like to began with certain background statements. I haven't titled The Magnolia myth. The psychological heritage of the Black Muslim movement and Commonwealth of all other negro protest organizations is at least as O as the institution of slavery in America. Protest has been a distinctive although frequently it's a threat widely distributed across the whole fabric of white black relations throughout the history of white and Negro contact in this country. These successive rows of pastors and bondsmen. Masters and slaves white men and freed men majority and minority groups have in fact been successive arrangements of Germany and subordination in which the negroes role as these of the that of the white man has not changed. From time to time especially since World War

2 there have been varying degrees of adjustment with in the system of arrangements. But the power relationship has remained constant hence the capacity of Negroes to affect decisions relating to themselves and the system of values which they hold to be important. It is not appreciable. Even the negro's limited capacity to affect decisions and produce change depends primarily upon the conscience and the convenience of the white man rather than upon any existent corpus of power possessed by Negroes. Indeed it is unlikely that the negro will ever have a dependable share in the control of the decision making operators of this country until he either controls a significant segment of the economy or a much larger percentage of the vote than he does at present his inordinate dependence upon protest derives precisely

from his lamentable failure to achieve the more dependable protection for his interests. That comes from sharing the white man's power rather than appealing to the white man's conscience. A protest movement is an aggressive expression of a subordinated group. It is the organization of the resources of the subordinated group to resist the coercive power of the dominant group. To challenge the morality on the justice of the expression of the power of. The negro did not wait until he was delivered in America to begin his enduring protestation of the white man's concept of the black man's place and the caste system to be established in this country. Available records show that no fewer than 55 slave revolts occurred at sea between seventeen hundred and eight thousand forty five.

During the height of the slave period. But 200 years from 1864 from 60 in 64 to 1864. There are recorded accounts of at least 109 slave them selections which occurred within the continental United States. Since it was customary to suppress all news and information concerning repose lest they become infectious. It is reasonable to assume that the reported cases were of some magnitude and that very many cases were not reported and that some cases which were reported have not yet been made available to recent research. Protest was not limited to armed insurrection. The rate of infanticide was higher suicide became a problem of such magnitude as to require the slave owners to devise quote the strongest arguments possible. Close quotes supported by religious and social taboos to reduce the rate of self-destruction among the slaves who resent it their place as it was defined in the American society.

Such a tide of livestock machinery and agricultural Pro-Tools produce were frequent horsemen was not unknown. Taking that elves from the white man as distinct from stealing from each other was routine. Running away was a form of protest so common as to have been considered a disease. Southern physicians described it sometimes in the journals of the period and gave it the name monomania quote a disease to which negroes are peculiarly subject close quote. As slavery became increasingly profitable the slave ocracy became concerned to offer a moral justification for its peculiar institution. Now I have to give this kind of background in order for you to understand the intrinsic nature of the general protest spectrum and particularly that of the Black Muslims as slavery became increasingly profitable. The slave ocracy became concerned to offer

a moral justification for its peculiar institution. At the same time it sought to in co-create the illiterate slaves as it saw later to indoctrinate the freedmen and their abolitionist brand. With an image of the negro shrewdly designed to discourage protest and to encourage resignation and accommodation. This was the myth of the Magnolia. So-called because it was usually accompanied by a fan of a banjo strawman doctors lounging about peacefully under the sweet scent of magnolia trees behind the big house. Happy and contented in their station and forever loyal to the kind hearted master in his arrangements for their mutual felicitous. The Magnolia met explained the negro's condition in terms of one his natural docility his instinctive servility and his inherent imbecility.

No it only hurts that the negroes docile nature led to his willing acceptance of this condition of bondage and that his instinctive servility made him an ideal slave of being peculiarly equipped psychologically to submit his will completely to that of another who sensed his own inferiority and who will that is by to be there at the complete disposal of the more sophisticated world of his master. His alleged imbecility derived it was said from an inherent incapacity to be creative or to learn. I don't know though beyond the simple abilities of a child. This was the principal intent of the Magnolia myth to perpetrate on to perpetuate an image of the negro as being inherently intellectually inferior and therefore incapable of mastering the complex requirements of citizenship and self-determination. The negro was a child who could never grow up.

He would never be ready. This was the image he was required to accept of himself. And this was the image the world was asked to accept and large part did accept. So we know anything. Reap the wild wind from the seeds that were some sometime ago the historians of the novelist the politicians in the various sort of other myth makers have done I believe America a very great disservice because each repetition of the myth makes it more difficult for those segments of the white majority who believe it to understand the behavior of Negroes at the present time. Each repetition of the meth. Increases the determination of the negro minority to be denied. Both science and history have discredited the Magnolia myth. But the protest movements provide the most dramatic refutation roll bar for example. There are no doubt Mills Muslims. There are no serve our

students participating in the sit ins and considering its success before the highest courts in the land. It is hard to believe that the legal staff of the noblest sleepy is a council of imbeciles. The Magnolia myth. With local modifications remains a pervasive influence in our society. How information media has done little to dispel it. The editors of the text we use to educate our children have done nothing a troll. It has remained them to the negro to destroy the myth themself and in the case of the Black Muslims to attempt to create a counter myth. The making of the Muslim movement. The Black Muslim movement had its beginning and the black ghetto of Detroit at the time was 1930. It was the first year of the Great Depression. It was an era of hunger confusion disillusionment despair and discontent. It was a period of very

widespread fear and anxiety. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen thirty two and a quarter million negroes left the farms on the plantations of the South. Most of them migrated to selected urban areas of the north. New York. Philadelphia Detroit and Chicago being among the most popular destinations. The negro population of Detroit for example increased 611 percent during the 10 years from 1910 to 1920. We are witnessing a similar migration to the West Coast at this very time which is probably responsible for a significant increase in the racial tensions in this area just as it was responsible for increasing the tensions in Detroit and Chicago and other places are generational so go. Known then the same period that us from 1910 to 1920 the total Negro population in the north increased from a mere

75000 to 300000. A total increase of more than 400 percent blacks crop failures boll weevils and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan all served to hasten the negro's exodus from the south. One hundred negroes were matched during the first year of the twentieth century by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The number stood one thousand one hundred when the war was over and the practice was resume twenty eight negroes being burned alive between 1918 and 1921. The negroes who left the South were temporarily welcomed in the north although the congeniality of the north are always better more impersonal sort than they are in the south. Many and many industries sent agents into the south to Negroes north with the promise of good jobs. But the negro was soon to find that it was a labor and not

necessarily his presence. That wasn't what it was a common practice for the agents to purchase tickets for whole families and to move them on mass for resettlement in the great industrial centers. The war had drained away the white manpower needed to build the ships and work the steel and packed the meat and to man the machines. The war had also cut off the normal supply of immigrant labor from Europe. After the war was over the negroes welcome in the north began to wear them. It became increasingly hard for Negroes to get jobs except the strikebreakers. There were not enough jobs to go around. Thousands of negroes were fired and replaced with white men. There was not enough house. The negroes were crowded into the black ghettos in the most deteriorated part of the inner city as they remain today. Landlords and law enforcement agencies alike were unsympathetic but still the negroes came out of the South. If you have scales. Most of them were illiterate. All of them were

filled with hope for something better than they had left some there was hunger crime Delenn and police brutality. The Bright promise of the North had failed. Hope turned to desperation desperation as the onset of anxiety. It is an interesting historical phenomenon the point to people reach the precipice of despair. There are so often waiting in the wings a savior a Messiah to snatch them back from the edge of the abbess. So it was that in Detroit there appeared in the black ghetto a mysterious mullah who called himself the good before ROTT Muhammad. He had come. He told a handful of negroes who gathered to hear him. He had come from the holy city of Mecca. He said. His mission as he described it was to wake the sleeping dead nation in the West to teach them the truth about the white man and to prepare them for the coming on again of. Them again and

what did this apocalyptic concept have to do with the problems of the Negro in America. Mr. For Rob the founder of what we now call the Black Muslim movement was quite explicit on this point. And the book of Revelation to this promise that there is to be a final battle between good and evil and that this decisive battle will take place on Hama get him in the great plane of Australia on an Asia Minor. But the Babel has a cryptic message for the initiator of the Black Muslims even as it has for more familiar sex. The forces of good and evil as interpreted by the Muslims are the forces of black and white. The valley of Estrella yom symbolizes the wilderness of North America. The battle of Armageddon is to be the black man's Bible confrontation of the race which has so long oppressed him. At first Farrar who was part of the time to be a prophet but who after his departure was recognized as a law that is as God Himself met

from house to house with small groups of Negroes. He went about his mission as unobtrusively as possible and listening to the problems of the destitute negroes sharing whatever they have to offer him a contemporary cause those modus operandi said one Muslim of the period. Quote He came first to our house selling raincoats and afterwards silks. And this way he could get into the people's houses. If we ask him to eat with us he would eat whatever we had on the table. When after the meal he began to talk close quote. What he had to say it must have been electrifying because another of his contemporaries describes his first encounter with the prophet o spiles. But up to that time I always went to the Baptist church. After I heard the sermon from the Prophet I was turned around completely. When I went home and heard the dead I was ready. I said I don't want any dinner I

just want to go back to the meetings. I would need my meals but I went back that night and I went to every meeting after that. That changed everything for me. Close quote. I remember these quotations are taken from people who became initiated into the movement in the 1930s. But the response that the message of a larger Muhammad has had and they have like ghettos of contemporary times was very much the same as it was 30 years ago. The fame of the prophet. Soon spread and became established there in Detroit. Soon he had to organize the first temple of Islam as this following increased. He grew more bold in his attacks upon the habits of the culture some Beau's the negroes had always taken for granted in the first place. He told his followers that they were not really negroes but that they were black men. As a contemporary Muslim explains that if the white

man is white then we are black different shades of black. And I see nothing wrong with that brow talk to him that the word negro was alleged to be an invention of the white man designed to better identify his victims and to separate them from the Asian and African brothers. Further the so-called Negro most corrupt talk was not really an American but he was an Asiatic. Or his forefathers had been stolen from the Afro-Asian continent by the white slave masters who came significantly in the name of Jesus. Christianity the prophet talk. Why is the white man's religion. It was a contrivance designed solely for the enslavement of numb white peoples. Whenever Christianity had gone the prophet continued men never lost their liberty and their freedom. Islam was declared to be the natural religion of all black men

only in Islam. Could there be freedom justice and equality for people who were not white. Little by little the Prophet began to enlighten these disillusioned migrants from the south about their true history as he interpreted it and their place in the future. Black man was the original man. He talked on the continent of the continent of Africa Asia black civilizations florist long before the white man quote stood up on his hind legs and dropped out of the caves of Europe close quote. The white man is a devil by nature heals the physical embodiment of the principle of evil and he is incapable of doing good. Heels separate and I quote the eternal adversary of the one true God who is right and proper name is a long close quote by TRC knowledge which is we were promised for Rod introduced into the Muslim

vocabulary by TRC knowledge of the blowout devils had enslaved the black man the black man Allah's chosen people he had taken away their native language which was Arabic and forced them to speak a foreign tongue which was English. The white man had taken away their names that is to say their identity and had given them European names which are badges of slavery. Said one Muslim to me in the name Lincoln that you wear so proudly is a European name. Is that would you think of something strange if you should meet a Chinaman whose name was Malone and I said yes. Then he said to me how is it that you a black man have a British name. So all the Muslims down. Dropped their surnames which they consider to be badges of slavery and take the designation X the X has a double signification. It means one that the Muslim has been cut off from his historical heritage

so he doesn't know what his name is. It also means a mystery some more because the white man does not know what the Muslim is planning to do either so them. If I should become a Muslim I would immediately lose my name Lincoln and I would become Eric X until such time as the Muslim leader decided to give me a truly Muslim name. Perhaps such a name as Chavez known. A Bobo. For our part. The cruel slave master took away the natural religion of the black man. The religion of Islam. And made the black man wash up. A blue eyed Jesus with blond hair telling them that this was their god. The so-called Negroes who are known to themselves comprise the Nation of Islam in the West

have been brainwashed and given a false image of themselves by their white teachers. They had been lulled into submission by the white preachers who promised them quote a home overjoyed when they could no longer heal the world and draw the water with a white man's compass but the wheel must turn the prophet insisted. The Nation of Islam has a manifest destiny. The Armageddon must come. It would come as soon as the black man in America learned who he was and accepted the truth about the white man. The prophet had been sent to declare the truth. Not all of Iraq's energy has were spent on attacking the white man. He told his followers cleverness and prepped. Even today you never see a dirty muslim. He persuaded them to give up liquor and unclean foods such as pork cornbread peas possums

and catfish bidding them to separate themselves from the habits they acquired in slavery. Not being a Georgian this would be a little bit difficult for me. He established a school. Where homemaking Negro History Arabic and other subjects of interest to the Muslims were taught. He demanded that his followers be clean at all times. Bathing at least once each day it taught them to give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. It taught them to be respectful of others and a book or to respect themselves. They must all obey all constituted authority but they must require an eye for an out and up to four. The prophet's first appearance in Detroit is dated as July 4th 1930 and no one can remember seeing him after June 30th 1934.

There are many legends but no authentic information on where it came from or where he went. But four years of preaching left a legacy of good and evil. It also left eight thousand negroes who had come to call themselves Muslims by 930 books known. In the troubled times of the early 1930s. Men and women everywhere are looking for some panacea to save them from the desperate circumstances with which they have been stopped. Large numbers of people found that they could not cope rationally with the excruciating anxiety the uncertainties with which they were confronted from day to day. Some escape us and some of us remember leapt from the rooftops of the very buildings which were the symbols of more stable times some clairvoyants who thought they could design the wave of the future in Marxist philosophy and found their panacea in the Communist Party. There are really gross capers too. But they're

staples a Muslim was of a more practical nature. Instead of taking the long route to heaven by jumping off tall buildings they built their homes here on Earth on the calls of the divine and they had a grace. Not a follower for Rob were both escapist and clairvoyance. Brother himself was the Messiah who had come to lead the so-called Negroes into the millennium which was to follow the battle of Armageddon. Berat was the prophet who had foreseen and foretold the golden age which would be there so when the black nation in the west at throwing off the yoke of the white slave masters but Ferrar had disappeared. The prophet had not left himself without a witness however for very early in his brief ministry in Detroit he had attracted the admiration and the loyalty of a young negro from the town of San Isidro Georgia a man whose name was a larger pool who was the son of a Baptist minister. Pool already embittered by the harshness of race relations in the South had migrated to

Detroit with his whole family in the early 1800s. His disillusionment with the Promised Land was almost immediate. Well he soon discovered that the limitations which describe his place in the north. Different only in degree from the familiar pattern of circumscription and soft. White time better jobs have been available in the north. But Poole soon wants to discover that job security operated on a racial basis. Housing was more strictly segregated than in the song and living conditions in the black ghetto were often worse than they had been in the sharecroppers capital. Berat had identified the black man's oppressor in terms never before heard in the Negro community. He had exposed the white man as a devil a literal doll created on the Isle of Patmos by a mad scientist whose name was your coop. This was the secret of the white man's power.

This was the secret of his cruelty and of his vulnerability. LR had given the devil a certain time to rule and the time for the rule of the devil was up. The black man must now prepare himself for the Armageddon and for the reversal to a larger pool for up and trusted both his mountain and his mission he made the first minister of Islam and put the put him in charge of the Muslim school. It put him in charge of the training of ministers and he put him in charge of the highly secret FOIA the Fruit of Islam which is the Leadership Training Corps for the coming on to get him and for the protection of the Muslim Ministry of the movement as a whole. Later Mr peroxide a larger pool out to Chicago to found temple number two which is the present headquarters of the Muslim movement. Not in recognition of Paul's dedicated and effective leadership brought relieved him obviously the name but is cool and honored him with the Muslim name Hemant.

Thereafter Mr. Ferrars public appearances were progressively less frequent until the day of a spinal disappears. I should pause here to say that it was characteristic of such movements as the Muslim movement to disintegrate and to break up into splinters. After the disappearance of the initial founder our leader who was usually charismatic personality. But in the case of the Muslim movement Mr For Rob apparently foresaw this possibility. So instead of allowing himself to be suddenly separated from the movement for a period of at least two years he put in his appearance less and less frequently giving the present leader illogical Hemant more and more power and more and more of the leadership of the movement so that by the time Farrar disappeared in 1934 the Muslims had already come to accept the lodge of Mohammed as their defacto leader. Under Elijah Mohammed

who calls himself the messenger of Islam the movement has spread from the initial Temple in Detroit to almost every major city in the country with a sizable Negro population. And most of the state is there as a temple and others rather movement is more in court there are missions where there are no missions there are likely to be representatives of the movement who are in contact with the Muslim leadership and the nearby set is the black ghetto is still the principal source of Muslim recruitment. They're in the streets in the crowded tenements where life is cheap and hope is minimal. But isolation from the common battles of the society and from the common privileges of citizenship is most acute. The voice of the messenger does not fall upon deaf ears so often. Heroes is the only message directed to the pimps the prostitutes the alcoholics and the addicts the unemployed whom

the responsible society all spoke out. It is a voice challenging them to recover the suff respect urging them to repudiate the white man's religion and the white man's culture daring them to believe in black supremacy offering them a blackguard and a black nation promising them the day will come when quote We will be masters and we are going to treat the white man the way he should be treated. Close what's demanded of them that. If anyone comes to take advantage of you lay down your life close quote and the black man will be respected all over the planet Earth. Says one Muslim leader never be the aggressor. Never look for trouble. But if any man molests you may Allah bless you. We must take things into our own hands the messenger says. We must return to the

Mosaic Law of an out front and a tooth for a tooth. What does it matter if 10 million of us that. There will be so 7 million of us left and they will enjoy justice and freedom for all sports. Such is the challenge of the Niger Mohammed who is hailed by his ministers as quote the most fearless black man in America. Close quote his followers are with few exceptions from America's most dis privileged class. They are the denizens of the black ghetto. To them the voice of Elijah Mohammed as a voice raised against injustice real or imagined. Mohammed has taken up the cudgel of gas the double was responsible for all of the miseries and all of the failures the resentments and the hostilities that breed in the ghetto. I finally focused upon a single object the white man. They're Muslim units and many of the state and federal prisons across the country. But the movement finds its prison audiences to

be ready made and highly receptive. Here too the racial character of the law enforcement agency the courts and the custodial personnel is a key factor and sharpening the prisoner's resentments and his sense of persecution have tried to preserve a developmental background for the Black Muslim movement against which we may now profitably examine their demands as a protest group. Generally speaking the movement has been a protest directed at the whole value construct of the white Christian society of which the Black Muslims kill themselves as Negroes to be an isolated and unappreciated appendage. Hence the burden of their protest is against their retention. In a society where they feel themselves to be unwanted. This is the soft side of the Armageddon complex which looks to the removal of the source of the discomfiture rather than going anywhere themselves.

Mr Mohammed teaches quote the white man's home is in Europe close quote and that there will be no peace until every man is in his own country. In a recent issue of the official Muslim newspaper which is called Mohammed speaks the Muslims state at their protests in the form of the following 10 propositions. One. We want freedom we want a full and complete freedom to. We want justice and equal justice under the law. We want justice applied equally to all regardless of creed or class or color. 3 We want equality and opportunity. We want membership in society with the best in civilized society. For. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves to be able to establish a separate state or territory of their own either

on this continent or somewhere else. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to provide such a living and that the area must be fertile and mineral rich. We believe that our former slave master is obligated to maintain and supply our needs on the separate territories for the next 20 to 25 years until we are able to produce and supply our own needs. 5. We want freedom for all believers of Islam now held in federal prisons. We want freedom for all black men and women now under a death sentence and innumerable prisons in the north as well as in the south. We want every black man and woman to have the freedom to accept or reject being separated from the slave masters children and establish a land of their own. 6. We want an immediate end to the police brutality and mob attacks against the so-called Negro throughout the United States. We believe that the federal government should intercede to see that black

men and women tried in bright courts receive justice in accordance with the laws of the land on allow us to build a new nation for ourselves dedicated to justice freedom and liberty. 7. As long as we are not allowed to establish a state or territory of our own we demand not only equal justice under the law of the United States but equal employment opportunity is not eight. We want the government of the United States to exempt our people from all taxation so long as we are deprived of equal justice under the laws of the land. Now we want equal education. But separate schools of to 16 for boys and 18 for girls on the condition that the girls be sent to women colleges and universities. We want all black children educated taught and trained by their own teachers. 10. We believe that in a marriage our race mixing should be prohibited.

We want the religion of Islam to talk without hindrance or suppression. These are some of the things that we the Muslims want for our people in North America. Well of course. Taken at face value and with quite obvious exceptions the protests and the demands of the Black Muslims as stated in the foregoing propositions do not seem unreasonable. I do not know any Americans who do not for example want freedom. Justice under the law. Equality of opportunity and freedom or worship. Oh approved values and our society. And they find their sanctions and the American creed further. They are objectives which are implicit in the programs of all other movements within the negro spectrum of protest. What then. Are the factors which qualified the Muslim protest movement and make it unacceptable to the general American public. The

fundamental difference between the attitudes the behavior and the goals of the Black Muslims as compared to other negro protest organizations may be explained in terms of their differing degrees of dissociation deriving from anxiety and frustration. Negroes as a caste are all outside the simulative. Process. And they exhibit from time to time the frustrations and Sadam to their marginality. However the dissociation of the Muslim membership in the larger society and even from the general negro subgroup. The negro subgroup tended to seek to identify itself with the American mainstream may be considered extreme and reacting to a marked difference pressures of the day to day experiences as a low caste negroes and a white oriented society. The Muslims have abandoned the fundamental principles of the American creed and have substituted in its place a new

system of values perceived as more consistent with the realities of their circumstances. This is a unique departure by an organized group in American history. You will know that I am not saying that the Muslims are un-American by the American creed it is not a legal or constitutional document against which the political loyalty of a group is to be measured. The American creed is a common set of beliefs and values in which all Americans have normally found consensus. It was a body of ideals a social philosophy which affirms the basic dignity of every individual and the existence of certain inalienable rights. Without respect to race creed or color the roots of the American creed are deep in the egalitarian doctrines of the 18th century Enlightenment Protestant Christianity and English long as it has been the cultural matrix within which all discordant attitudes converge

and from which derive the great diversity of social and political interpretations which makes democracy possible in a society where you have wildly varying populations. The Black Muslims. By the very nature of certain of their goals and requirements have accepted themselves from the aegis of the American creed and their demand for a separate state and their attacks upon Christianity and their repudiation of the principle of love and their dehumanization of the white man. And there are vowing resistance to assimilation. They have because they are black supremacy. And finally in their own systems that they are not Americans they themselves exclude themselves from a body of principles and a system of values within the framework of which Americans believe grievances ought to be negotiated. Now you may say other groups advocate white supremacy. Other

groups resist the assimilation of negroes and others and other groups practice hatred rather than love. The point is that these groups still remain loyal to the creed. The point is that although the creed is violated constantly in practice it remains the ideal. To which all others give their last operation and which or believe and from which we all derive our laws and our moral values. The difference is that the Black Muslim movement is not a violation. Of the principles and values of the American creed. It is the substitution of new principles and new battles. It is the problem of Geishas of a new creed based on a radically different interpretation of history and promising a new order which is considered. I never go to the approved values of the existing society so it is that in spite of the fact that the Black Muslim movement

shares at some points the immediate goals of the less radical protest movements its opponents to traditional values to limit its general acceptability as a protest organization. Muslims however do NOT JUST HAPPEN. They are somebody else of our failure to meet effectively the minimum needs of the large numbers of human beings who have been deprived of traditional incentives all looking for a cause and a leader. They are the victims of neurotic social anxiety people who are repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to make adjustments in a society which is unaware of their existence and accept them as the faceless subjects of statistical data. The future of the Black Muslim movement is hard to predict but whatever that future may be we shall all be in part responsible. Thank you.