In my first effort to get over this hurdle, I had some little leaflets printed. There wasn't a muchtraveled
Harlem street corner that five or six good Muslim brothers and I missed. We would step
up right in front of a walking black man or woman so that they had to accept our leaflet, and if
they hesitated one second, they had to hear us saying some catch thing such as "Hear how the
white man kidnapped and robbed and raped our black race-"
Next, we went to work "fishing" on those Harlem corners-on the fringes of the Nationalist
meetings. The method today has many refinements, but then it consisted of working the always
shifting edges of the audiences that others had managed to draw. At a Nationalist meeting,
everyone who was listening was interested in the revolution of the black race. We began to get
visible results almost immediately after we began thrusting handbills in people's hands, "Come to
hear us, too, brother.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us how to cure the black man's spiritual, mental,
moral, economic, and political sicknesses-"
I saw the new faces of our Temple Seven meetings. And then we discovered the best "fishing"
audience of all, by far the best-conditioned audience for Mr. Muhammad's teachings: the
Christian churches.
Our Sunday services were held at two P. M. All over Harlem during the hour or so before that,
Christian church services were dismissing. We by-passed the larger churches with their higher
ratio of so-called "middle-class" Negroes who were so full of pretense and "status" that they
wouldn't be caught in our little storefront.
We went "fishing" fast and furiously when those little evangelical storefront churches each let out
their thirty to fifty people on the sidewalk. "Come to hear us, brother, sister-" "You haven't heard
anything until you have heard the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad-" These
Congregations were usually Southern migrant people, usually older, who would go anywhere to
hear what they called "good preaching." These were the church congregations who were always
putting out little signs announcing that inside they were selling fried chicken and chitlin dinners to
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, blueeyed
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
darsice
(darsice)
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