raise some money. And three or four nights a week, they were in their storefront rehearsing for
the next Sunday, I guess, shaking and rattling and rolling the gospels with their guitars and
tambourines.
I don't know if you know it, but there's a whole circuit of commercial gospel entertainers who have
come out of these little churches in the city ghettoes or from down South. People such as Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, The Clara Ward Singers are examples, and there must be five hundred lesser
lights of the same general order. Mahalia Jackson, the greatest of them all-she was a preacher's
daughter in Louisiana. She came up there to Chicago where she worked cooking and scrubbing
for white people and then in a factory while she sang in the Negro churches the gospel style that,
when it caught on, made her the first Negro that Negroes ever made famous. She was selling
hundreds of thousands of records among Negroes before white people ever knew who Mahalia
Jackson was. Anyway, I know that somewhere I once read that Mahalia said that every time she
can, she will slip unannounced into some little ghetto storefront churchand sing with her people.
She calls that "my filling station."
The black Christians we "fished" to our Temple were conditioned, I found, by the very shock I
could give them about what had been happening to them while they worshiped a blond, blue-
eyed God. I knew the temple that I could build if I could really get to those Christians. I tailored
the teachings for them. I would start to speak and sometimes be so emotionally charged I had to
explain myself:
"You see my tears, brothers and sisters.... Tears haven't been in my eyes since I was a young
boy. But I cannot help this when I feel the responsibility I have to help you comprehend for the
first time what this white man's religion that we call Christianity has done to us....
"Brothers and sisters here for the first time, please don't let that shock you. I know you didn't
expect this. Because almost none of us black people have thought that maybe we were making a
mistake not wondering if there wasn't a special religion somewhere for us-a special religion for
the black man.
"Well, there is such a religion. It's called Islam. Let me spell it for you, I-s-I-a-m! Islam! But I'm
going to tell you about Islam a little later. First, we need to understand some things about this
Christianity before we can understand why the answer for us is Islam.
"Brothers and sisters, the white man has brainwashed us black people to fasten our gaze upon a
blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus! We're worshiping a Jesus that doesn't even look like us! Oh,
yes! Now just bear with me, listen to the teachings of the Messenger of Allah, The Honorable
Elijah Muhammad. Now, just think of this. The blond-haired, blue-eyed white man has taught you
and me to worship a white Jesus, and to shout and sing and pray to this God that's his God,
the white man's God. The white man has taught us to shoutand sing and pray until we die, to
wait until death, for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter, when we're dead, while this white
man has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!
"You don't want to believe what I am telling you, brothers and sisters? Well, I'll tell you what you
do. You go out of here, you just take a good look around where you live. Look at not only how
you live, but look at how anybody that you know lives-that way, you'll be sure that you're not
just a bad-luck accident. And when you get through looking at where you live, then you take
you a walk down across Central Park, and start to look at what this white God had brought to the
white man. I mean, take yourself a look down there at how the white man is living!
"And don't stop there. In fact, you won't be able to stop for long-his doormen are going to tell you
'Move on!' But catch a subway and keep on downtown. Anywhere you may want to get off, look
at the white man's apartments, businesses! Go right on down to the tip of Manhattan Island that
this devilish white man stole from the trusting Indians for twenty-four dollars! Look at his City Hall,
down there; look at his Wall Street! Look at yourself! Look at his God!"