"My brothers and sisters, our white slavemaster's Christian religion has taught us black people
here in the wilderness of North America that we will sprout wings when we die and fly up into the
sky where God will have for us a special place called heaven. This is white man's Christian
religion used to brainwash us black people! We have accepted it! We have embraced it!
We have believed it! We have practiced it! And while we are doing all of that, for himself, this
blue-eyed devil has twisted his Christianity, to keep his foot on our backs... to keep our
eyes fixed on the pie in the sky andheaven in the hereafter... while he enjoys his heaven
right here... on this earth... in this life."
Today when thousands of Muslims and others have been audiences out before me, when
audiences of millions have been beyond radio and television microphones, I'm sure I rarely feel
as much electricity as was then generated in me by the upturned faces of those seventy-five or a
hundred Muslims, plus other curious visitors, sitting there in our storefront temple with the
squealing of pigs filtering in from the slaughterhouse just outside.
In the summer of 1953-all praise is due to Allah-I was named Detroit Temple Number One's
Assistant Minister.
Every day after work, I walked, "fishing" for potential converts in the Detroit black ghetto. I saw
the African features of my black brothers and sisters whom the devilish white man had
brainwashed. I saw the hair as mine had been for years, conked by cooking it with lye until it lay
limp, looking straight like the white man's hair. Time and again Mr. Muhammad's teachings were
rebuffed and even ridiculed... ."Aw, man, get out of my face, you niggers are crazy!" My head
would reel sometimes, with mingled anger and pity for my poor blind black brothers. I couldn't
wait for the next time our Minister Lemuel Hassan would let me speak:
"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters-Plymouth Rock landed on us!"...
"Give all you can to help Messenger Elijah Muhammad's independence program for the black
man!... This white man always has controlled us black people by keeping us running to him
begging, 'Please, lawdy, please, Mr. White Man, boss, would you push me off another crumb
down from your table that's sagging with riches... .'
"... my beautiful, black brothers and sisters! And when we say 'black,' wemean everything not
white, brothers and sisters! Because look at your skins! We're all black to the white man, but
we're a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, look at each other! What shade of
black African polluted by devil white man are you? You see me-well, in the streets they used to
call me Detroit Red. Yes! Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! That close,
yes! My mother's father! She didn't like to speak of it, can you blame her? She said she never
laid eyes on him! She was glad for that! I'm glad for her! If I could drain away his blood
that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I'd do it! Because I hate every drop of the
rapist's blood that's in me!
"And it's not just me, it's all of us! During slavery, think of it, it was a rare one of our black
grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and our great-great-grandmothers who escaped the white
rapist slavemaster. That rapist slavemaster who emasculated the black man... with threats, with
fear... until even today the black man lives with fear of the white man in his heart! Lives even
today still under the heel of the white man!
"Think of it-think of that black slave man filled with fear and dread, hearing the screams of his
wife, his mother, his daughter being taken-in the barn, the kitchen, in the bushes! Think of it,
my dear brothers and sisters! Think of hearing wives, mothers, daughters, being raped! And
you were too filled with fear of the rapist to do anything about it! And his vicious, animal attacks'
offspring, this white man named things like 'mulatto' and 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' and all those
other things that he has called us-you and me-when he is not calling us 'nigger'!