THE BLACK MUSLIMS

...The black man must prepare himself for the Armageddon...

...For a time, better jobs were available in the North, but Poole was soon to discover that job security operated on a racial basis...

...What did this apocalyptic concept have to do with the problems of the Negro in America...

...Housing was more strictly segregated than in the South, and living conditions in the black ghetto were often worse than they had been in the sharecroppers' cabins...

...Here, the racial character of most law enforcement agencies, courts, and custodial personnel is an important factor in sharpening the prisoner's resent-ments and his sense of persecution...

...Muhammad Speaks, the Muslims stated their protests in the form of ten propositions demanding "full and complete freedom, equal justice under the law, and equality of opportunity...

...In a recent issue of the official Muslim newspaper, Mr...

...he is the physical embodiment of the principle of evil, and he is incapable of doing good...

...In recognition of Poole's dedicated and effective leadership, Farad relieved him of his "slave name" Poole, and honored him with the Muslim name, "Muhammad...

...The so-called Negroes, who, unknown to themselves, comprised "The nation of Islam in the West," had been brainwashed and given a false image of themselves by their white teachers...

...But still the Negroes came out of the South...

...He went about his mission as unobtrusively as possible, listening to the problems of the destitute Negroes, sharing whatever they had to offer him...

...But there are other factors which qualify the Muslim protest movement and make it unacceptable to the general American public...

...Further, the so-called Negro was not an American, but an "Asiatic," for his forefathers had been stolen from the Afro-Asian continent by the white slavemasters who came there in the name of Jesus with a Bible in one hand and a set of manacles in the other...

...The Muslims also say they want "freedom for all believers now held in Federal prisons . . . [and] freedom for all black men and women now held under death sentence in innumerable prisons in the North as well as in the South...

...Under Elijah Muhammad the movement has spread from the initial temple in Detroit to almost every major city in the country with a sizable Negro population...

...Rather, it is a common set of beliefs and values in which Americans have nominally found consensus...

...He established a school where homemaking, Negro history, Arabic, and other subjects of interest to the Muslims were taught...

...Intermarriage must be strictly prohibited, and "the religion of Islam taught without hindrance or suppression...

...Why single out the Muslims as beyond the pale...

...His mission was "to wake the 'Dead Nation in the West...

...Little by little the Prophet began to enlighten these disillusioned migrants from the South about their true history and their place in the future...

...There are Muslim units in many of the state and Federal prisons across the country, for the movement finds its prison audiences to be ready-made and highly receptive...

...The Black Muslims are among the best organized and most articulate of the protest movements...

...However, the Prophet had not left himself without a witness...

...And everywhere police brutality was the same...

...They demand "an immediate end to police brutality and mob attacks against [Negroes] throughout the United States," and they want the Federal government to "intercede to see that black men and women tried in white courts secure justice in accordance with the laws of the land...

...Early in his brief ministry in Detroit he had attracted the admiration and loyalty of a young Negro from the town of Sandersville, Georgia—Elijah Poole, son of a Baptist minister...

...Further, the Prophet said, the white man is a devil by nature...

...The Black Muslim movement is not so much a violation of the American creed as it is the substitution of new principles and new values which are antithetical to it...

...The battle of Armageddon is to be the black man's final confrontation of the race which has so long oppressed him...

...Elijah was ready for the racist doctrines of Wali Farad, and from their first meeting, he became the Prophet's most dedicated apostle and his chief amanuensis...

...many were illiterate...

...Scores of others were dispatched by equally cruel methods...

...The Muslims say they see no audaciousness in such a proposal "inasmuch as the Federal government is presently underwriting the economies of half the nations of the world, many of which are Communist, and others which accept our money and then tell us 'go home.We believe," says Minister Malcolm X, "that the so-called Negroes who have been more loyal to America than any other ethnic group, and who served America for 300 years in absolute slavery, and another hundred years since the Civil War in semi-slavery, have a right to expect something for their labor...

...The white man had taken away their names, i.e., their identity, and given them European names, which every black man should hate as badges of slavery...

...By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the number lynched stood at 1,100...

...But the Bible has a cryptic message for the initiated of Black Islam: The forces of "good and evil" are the forces of "black and white...

...If we can pay the Indians for the land stolen from their forefathers, we can pay the so-called Negroes for the exploited lives of their ancestors who served in slavery...

...This is a unique departure by an organized group in American history...

...come, he told the handful of Negroes who gathered to hear him, from the Holy City of Mecca...

...Black man was the original man, he taught...

...Floods, crop failures, boll weevils, and night-raiding Klansmen all served to hasten the Negro's exodus from the South...

...It is 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...

...Islam was declared to be "the natural religion of the black man...

...Soon there were hunger and crime and delinquency—and police brutality...

...Yet the Black Muslims are not generally acceptable to the spirit of protest which has won universal respect and frequent admiration for other Negro protest organizations...

...There was not enough housing, and Negroes were crowded into the infamous black ghettos in the most deteriorated part of the inner city...

...In most of these cities there is a temple...

...The Black Muslims quite properly identify these values with white Christian culture, and in their resentment of their subordinated status in a white-oriented society, they reject not only the symbols of subordination but the very principles which, though imperfectly expressed in practice, provide the ideal goals which order our social behavior...

...But whatever that future may be, we shall all be in part responsible...

...He taught his followers cleanliness and thrift...

...He had exposed the white man as a devil—a literal devil, created on the Isle of Patmos by a madman whose name was Yakub...

...He taught new Muslims that they were not Negroes, but "black men...

...This was the secret of the white man's power, his cruelty, and his vulnerability...

...It was the first year of the great depression, an era of hunger, confusion, disillusionment, despair, and discontent, a period of widespread fear and anxiety...

...Most of them migrated to selected urban areas of the North— New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit were among the most popular destinations...

...Taken at face value, and with quite obvious exceptions, the protests and demands of the Black Muslims as stated do not seem unreasonable...

...all were filled with hope for something better than they had left...

...They must obey "all constituted authority," but they must require of their adversaries "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth...

...It is an interesting historical phenomenon that when a people reach the precipice of despair, there is so often waiting in the bushes a savior—a messiah who promises to snatch them back from the edge of the abyss and turn their grief into greatness...

...Elijah Muhammad teaches that "the white man's home is in Europe," and that "there will be no peace until every man is in his own country...

...On the continent of Afro-Asia, "black civilizations flourished long before the white man stood up on his hind legs and crept out of the caves of Europe...

...Above all, the cruel slavemas-ter took away their natural religion and made them worship a blue-eyed Jesus with blond hair, telling them that this was their God...

...A contemporary who later heeded the mezzin's call recalls his modus operandi as that of a salesman who "came first to our house selling raincoats, and afterwards silks...

...The Prophet's first appearance in Detroit is dated as July 4, 1930, and no one can remember seeing him after June 30, 1934...

...It will come as soon as the black man in America learns who he is, and accepts the truth about the white man the Prophet was sent to declare...

...The belittling paternalism of the South had been replaced by the cold indifference of the North, and Elijah Poole found himself and his family with no better chance of assimilation in the great "melting pot" of the North than he had known in Georgia...

...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 except as the faceless subjects of statistical data...

...There are many legends, but no authentic information as to where he came from, or where he went...

...Many industries sent agents into the South to lure the Negroes north with promises of good jobs, but the Negro was soon to find that it was only his labor and not his presence that was wanted...

...Justice under the law, equality of opportunity, and freedom of worship are all approved values in our society, and they find their sanctions in the American creed...

...No other racial or ethnic group has so deliberately and so completely rejected the fundamental premises or values implicit in the American creed...

...They further demanded that as the descendants of slaves who had contributed, so much to the making of America without compensation, they should be given a separate territory—"fertile and minerally rich" which should be subsidized by the Federal government "for the next twenty to twenty-five years" until the black nation is able to produce for its own needs...

...The word "Negro" was an invention of the white man designed better to identify his victims and separate them from their Asian and African brothers, he said...

...Hope turned to desperation...

...In others where the movement is more inchoate, there are missions...

...He had taken away their native language (which was Arabic), and forced them to speak English, a foreign tongue...

...Wherever Christianity has gone, he declared, men have lost their liberty and their freedom...

...His disillusionment with the "promised land" was immediate, for he soon discovered that the limitations which prescribed his place in the North differed only in degree from the familiar pattern of circumscription in the South...

...They found it increasingly hard to get jobs except as strikebreakers, for there were no longer enough jobs to go around...

...Thereafter, Farad's public appearances were progressively less frequent until the day of his final disappearance...

...Poole's contact with foreign-born elements speaking in strange "un-American" accents and wearing "foreign" clothes, increased his feelings of isolation and frustration...

...He had C. ERIC LINCOLN, professor of social relations at Clark College, Atlanta, is the author of "The Black Muslims in America...

...to teach them the truth about the white man, and to prepare them for the Armageddon...

...The fame of the Prophet spread, and he soon established the first of the Temples of Islam in Detroit...

...The Negroes who left the South were temporarily welcomed in the North, although the congenialities of the North have always been of an impersonal sort...

...As a sort of postscript to his catalogue of political and economic demands, the Muslim minister wants Negro children to have "equal education" (in schools segregated by sex), and he wants "all black children taught and trained by their own [black] teachers...

...The Muslims have abandoned the fundamental principles of the American creed as having no practical relevance to them or their conditions of existence...

...One hundred Negroes were lynched during the first year of the Twentieth Century...

...The movement has in effect promulgated a new creed based on a radically different interpretation of history, promising a new order which will insure a reversal of the black man's status in relation to the hated white devils...

...So it was in Detroit...

...The nation of Islam has a manifest destiny...

...After the war was over, the Negroes' welcome in the North wore thin...

...He saw the Negroes' jobs taken from them and given to white men who had not fought for this country, and who in some cases had fought against it...

...The wheel must turn, the Prophet insisted...

...Hence, the burden of their protest is against their retention in a society where they are not wanted...

...In their ardent racism and their insistence upon physical and political separation in a black nation of their own, in their repudiation of American citizenship, they exclude themselves from principles and values which have not functioned to secure to them the rights and privileges they feel to be consistent with human dignity...

...They clamor for some land of their own—"some of this good earth" on which to establish their own black nation...

...Thousands of Negroes were fired and replaced with white men...

...This is the soft side of the Armageddon complex which looks to the removal of the white devils as the source of their discomfiture rather than to going anywhere themselves...

...The point is that although the creed is violated constantly in practice, it remains an ideal to which most other organizations of questionable dedication—not excluding the Klan, the White Citizens Councils, and the John Birch Socie-ty—give their assent...

...an ideal in, which they allegedly derive their interpretations of moral values and social justice...

...Black Muslims do not "just happen...

...and he was embittered by the creeping realization that, in the North as in the South, the color of a man's skin, not the order of his citizenship nor the quality of his intrinsic worth, was the determining factor in all his important social relationships...

...By the nature of certain of their goals and requirements, the Black Muslims have exempted themselves from the aegis of the American creed...

...I do not know any Americans who do not want freedom...

...As his following increased, Farad grew more bold in his attacks upon the habits and the culture symbols the Negroes had always taken for granted...

...Where there are no missions there are likely to be representatives of the movement who are in touch with the Muslim leadership in nearby cities...

...To Elijah Poole, Farad entrusted his mantle and his mission...

...But four years of preaching left some 8,000 Black Muslims with a new self-image based on a counter-myth of black superiority...

...and the financial support of the movement is probably higher in proportion to income than that of most similar organizations...

...They have substituted in its place a new system of values perceived as more consistent with the realities of their peculiar circumstances...

...Few had skills...

...Generally speaking, the movement has been a protest directed at the whole structure of the white Christian society, a society to which the Black Muslims feel themselves (as Negroes) to be an isolated and unappreciated appendage...

...Between 1900 and 1930, two-and-a-quarter-million Negroes left the farms and plantations of the South...

...Life is worth more than land...

...Not all of Farad's energies were spent in attacking the white man...

...In this way," the convert said, "he could get into the people's houses...

...Armageddon must come...

...Finally, until they are given a separate territory for their black nation, Muhammad charges that the least the government can do is to provide immediate equal employment opportunities for its "so-called Negroes, and exempt them from all taxation as long as they are deprived of equal justice...

...When the war was over, the practice was resumed—twenty-eight Negroes were burned alive between 1918 and 1921...

...The Armageddon...

...Further, they are objectives which are implicit in the programs of all other Negro protest movements...

...I am not saying that the Muslims are "un-American," for the American creed is not a legal or constitutional document against which the political loyalty of a group may be measured...

...He persuaded them to give up liquor and such "unclean" foods as pork, cornbread, peas, possums, and catfish, bidding them to separate themselves from the habits they had acquired in slavery...

...By "Tricknology" the blue-eyed devils had enslaved the black man Allah's chosen people...

...The Valley of Esdraelon" symbolizes the "Wilderness of North America...

...The future of the Black Muslim movement is hard to predict...

...During the same period, the total Negro population in the North soared from a mere 75,000 to 300,000, an increase of 400 per cent...

...The bright promise of the North had failed...

...Allah had given the white devils a certain time to rule, and the time was up...

...Landlords and law-enforcement agencies alike were unsympathetic...

...Christianity, the Prophet taught, was a white man's religion, a contrivance designed solely for the enslavement of non-white peoples like themselves...

...Farad was explicit on this point: In the Book of Revelation it is promised that there must be a final battle between good and evil, and it is to take place at Armageddon, "the Mountain of Megiddo" in the Great Plain of Esdraelon in Asia Minor...

...Poole, already embittered by the harshness of race relations in the South, had migrated to Detroit with his family in the early 1920's...

...In terms of their immediate internal objectives, they have a highly effective leadership, some of which has been recruited from the Christian churches and retrained by Elijah Muhammad to serve the cause of Black Islam...

...Yet they remain "loyal" to the American creed...

...There appeared in the black ghetto a mysterious Mullah who called himself W. D. Farad Muhammad...

...At first, Farad, who was at the time thought to be a Prophet, but who after his departure was recognized as Allah himself, met from house to house with small groups of Negroes...

...The Negro population of Detroit increased 611 per cent during the ten years from 1910 to 1920...

...Farad had identified the black man's oppressor in terms never before heard in the Negro community...

...If the government is unwilling or unable to do this, the Muslims argue, then they want the government to "allow [them] to build a new nation for [themselves] dedicated to justice, freedom, and liberty...

...They are symbols of our failure to meet effectively the minimum needs of large numbers of human beings, who, deprived of traditional incentives and realistic participation in the common values of our society, are looking for a cause and a leader...

...He is," said Farad, "the eternal adversary of the one true God whose right and proper name is Allah...

...Later, Poole was sent to Chicago to found Temple Number Two, the present headquarters of the movement...

...Other groups advocate white supremacy, resist the assimilation of Negroes and others, and practice hatred rather than love...

...If we asked him to eat with us, he would eat whatever we had on the table, but after the meal he began to talk...

...The lynchings in the South had their counterparts in the race riots of the North...

...He made Poole First Minister of Islam and put the Muslim school, the training of his ministers, and the highly secret Fruit of Islam (the FOI is the leadership training corps for the Armageddon), under his direction...

...He demanded that his followers be clean at all times, bathing at least once each day...

...Their newspapers and magazines are superior in layout and technical quality to much of the Negro press...

...They had been lulled into submission by the white Christian preachers who promised them a home "over Jordan" when they could no longer hew the wood and draw the water for the white man's comfort...

...Only in Islam could the so-called Negroes find freedom, justice, and equality...

...He taught them to give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, to be respectful of others, and, above all, to respect themselves...