door, that could be unlocked, if only he knew how, and he cried because of his frustrated anxiety
to receive understanding. ) Elijah grew up into a still-frail teenager who displayed a most
uncommonly strong love for his race, and, Mother Marie said, instead of condemning Negroes'
faults, young Elijah always would speak of reasons for those faults.
Mother Marie has since died. I believe that she had as large a funeral as Chicago has seen. Not
only Muslims, but others knew of the deep bond that Messenger Elijah had with his mother.
"I am not ashamed to say how little learning I have had," Mr. Muhammad told me. "My going to
school no further than the fourth grade proves that I can know nothing except the truth I have
been taught by Allah. Allah taught memathematics. He found me with a sluggish tongue, and
taught me how to pronounce words."
Mr. Muhammad said that somehow, he never could stand how the Sandersville white farmers, the
sawmill foremen, or other white employers would habitually and often curse Negro workers. He
said he would politely ask any for whom he worked never to curse him. "I would ask them to just
fire me if they didn't like my work, but just don't curse me." (Mr. Muhammad's ordinary
conversation was the manner he used when making speeches. He was not "eloquent," as
eloquence is usually meant, but whatever he uttered had an impact on me that trained orators did
not begin to have. ) He said that on the jobs he got, he worked so honestly that generally he was
put in charge of the other Negroes.
After Mr. Muhammad and Sister Clara met and married and their first two children had been born,
a white employer early in 1923 did curse Mr. Muhammad, then Elijah Poole. Elijah Poole,
determined to avoid trouble, took his family to Detroit, arriving when he was twenty-five. Five
more children would be born there in Detroit, and, finally, the last one in Chicago.
In Detroit in 1931, Mr. Muhammad met Master W. D. Fard.
The effects of the depression were bad everywhere, but in the black ghetto they were horrible,
Mr. Muhammad told me. A small, light brown-skinned man knocked from door to door at the
apartments of the poverty-stricken Negroes. The man offered for sale silks and other yard goods,
and he identified himself as "a brother from the East."
This man began to tell Negroes how they came from a distant land, in the seeds of their
forefathers.
He warned them against eating the "filthy pig" and other "wrong foods" that it was habitual for
Negroes to eat.
Among the Negroes whom he found most receptive, he began holding little meetings in their poor
homes. The man taught both the Quran and the Bible, and his students included Elijah Poole.
This man said his name was W. D. Fard. He said that he was born in the Koreish tribe of
Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the Arabian prophet Himself. This peddler of silks and yard goods, Mr.
W. D. Fard, knew the Bible better than any of the Christian-bred Negroes.
In the essence, Mr. W. D. Fard taught that God's true name was Allah, that His true religion was
Islam, that the true name for that religion's people was Muslims.
Mr. W. D. Fard taught that the Negroes in America were directly descended from Muslims. He
taught that Negroes in America were Lost Sheep, lost for four hundred years from the Nation of
Islam, and that he, Mr. Fard, had come to redeem and return the Negro to his true religion.
No heaven was in the sky, Mr. Fard taught, and no hell was in the ground. Instead, both heaven
and hell were conditions in which people lived right here on this planet Earth. Mr. Fard taught that
the Negro in America had been for four hundred years in hell, and he, Mr. Fard, had come to
return them to where heaven for them was-back home, among their own kind.
Master Fard taught that as hell was on earth, also on earth was the devil-the white race which
was bred from black Original Man six thousand years before, purposely to create a hell on earth
for the next six thousand years.
The black people, God's children, were Gods themselves, Master Fard taught. And he taught that
among them was one, also a human being like the others, who was the God of Gods: The Most,
Most High, The Supreme Being, supreme in wisdom and power-and His proper name was Allah.
Among his handful of first converts in 1931 in Detroit, Master W. D. Fard taught that every religion
says that near the Last Day, or near the End of Time, God would come, to resurrect the Lost
darsice
(darsice)
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