"Do you know why the white man really hates you? It's because every time he sees your face,
he sees a mirror of his crime-and his guilty conscience can't bear to face it!
"Every white man in America, when he looks into a black man's eyes, should fall to his knees and
say 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry-my kind has committed history's greatest crime against your kind; will you
give me the chance to atone?' But do you brothers and sisters expect any white man to do that?
No, you know better! And why won't he do it? Because he can't do it. The white man has
created a devil, to bring chaos upon this earth... ."
Somewhere about this time, I left the Gar Wood factory and I went to work for the Ford Motor
Company, one of the Lincoln-Mercury Division assembly lines.
As a young minister, I would go to Chicago and see Mr. Elijah Muhammad every time I could get
off. He encouraged me to come when I could. I was treated as if I had been one of the sons of Mr.
Muhammad and his dark, good wife Sister Clara Muhammad. I saw their children only
occasionally. Most of them in those years worked around Chicago in various jobs, laborers,
driving taxis, and things such as that. Also living in the home was Mr. Muhammad's dear Mother
Marie.
I would spend almost as much time with Mother Marie as I did with Mr. Muhammad. I loved to
hear her reminiscences about her son Elijah's early life when they lived in Sandersville, Georgia,
where he was born in 1897.
Mr. Muhammad would talk with me for hours. After eating good, healthful Muslim food, we would
stay at the dinner table and talk. Or I would ride with him as he drove on his daily rounds between
the few grocery stores that the Muslims then owned in Chicago. The stores were examples to
help black people see what they could do for themselves by hiring their own kind and trading with
their own kind and thus quit being exploited by the white man.
In the Muslim-owned combination grocery-drug store on Wentworth and 31st Street, Mr.
Muhammad would sweep the floor or something like that. He would do such work himself as an
example to his followers whom he taught that idleness and laziness were among the black man's
greatest sins against himself. I would want to snatch the broom from Mr. Muhammad's hand,
because I thought he was too valuable to be sweeping a floor. But he wouldn't let me do anything
but stay with him and listen while he advised me on the best ways to spread his message.
The way we were with each other, it would make me think of Socrates on the steps of the Athens
market place, spreading his wisdom to his students. Or how one of those students, Aristotle, had
his students following behind him, walking through the Lyceum.
One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammad put a clean
glass of water beside it. "You want to know how to spread my teachings?" he said, and he pointed
to the glasses of water. "Don't condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water," he said,
"just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won't have to
say that yours is better."
Of all the things that Mr. Muhammad ever was to teach me, I don't know why, that still stands out
in my mind. Although I haven't always practiced it. I love too much to battle. I'm inclined to tell
somebody if his glass of water is dirty.
Mother Marie, when Mr. Muhammad was busy, would tell me about her son's boyhood and of his
growing up in Georgia to young manhood.Mother Marie's account of her son began when she
was herself but seven years old. She told me that then she had a vision that one day she would
be the mother of a very great man. She married a Baptist minister, Reverend Poole, who worked
around Sandersville on the farms, and in the sawmills. Among their thirteen children, said Mother
Marie, little Elijah was very different, almost from when he could walk and talk.
The small, frail boy usually settled his older brothers' and sisters' disputes, Mother Marie said.
And young as he was, he became regarded by them as their leader. And Elijah, about the time he
entered school, began displaying a strong race consciousness. After the fourth grade, because
the family was so poor, Elijah had to quit school and begin full-time working. An older sister taught
Elijah as much as she was able at night.
Mother Marie said that Elijah spent hours poring through the Bible, with tears shining in his eyes.
(Mr. Muhammad told me himself later that as a boy he felt that the Bible's words were a locked
darsice
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