my home telephone, if I said, "I'm going to bomb the Empire State Building," I guarantee you in
five minutes it would be surrounded. When I was speaking publicly sometimes I'd guess which
were F.B.I. faces in the audience, or other types of agents. Both thepolice and the F.B.I. intently
and persistently visited and questioned us. "I do not fear them," Mr. Muhammad said. "I have all
that I need-the truth."
Many a night, I drifted off to sleep, filled with wonder at how the two-edged-sword teachings so
hurt, confused, concerned, and upset the government full of men trained highly in all of the
modern sciences. I felt that it never could have been unless The Most Learned One, Allah
Himself, had given the little fourth-grade-trained Messenger something.
Black agents were sent to infiltrate us. But the white man's "secret" spy often proved, first of all, a
black man. I can't say all of them, of course, there's no way to know-but some of them, after
joining us, and hearing, seeing and feeling the truth for every black man, revealed their roles to
us. Some resigned from the white man's agencies and came to work in the Nation of Islam. A few
kept their jobs to counterspy, telling us the white man's statements and plans about our Nation.
This was how we learned that after wanting to know what happened within our Temples, the white
law agencies' second major concern was the thing that I believe still ranks today as a big worry
among America's penologists: the steadily increasing rate at which black convicts embrace Islam.
Generally, while still in prison, our convict-converts preconditioned themselves to meet our
Nation's moral laws. As it had happened with me, when they left prison, they entered a Temple
fully qualified to become registered Muslims. In fact, convict-converts usually were better
prepared than were numerous prospective Muslims who never had been inside a prison.
We were not nearly so easy to enter as a Christian church. One did not merely declare himself a
follower of Mr. Muhammad, then continue leading the same old, sinful, immoral life. The Muslim
first had to change his physical and moralself to meet our strict rules. To remain a Muslim he had
to maintain those rules.
Few temple meetings were held, for instance, without the minister looking down upon some
freshly shaved bald domes of new Muslim brothers in the audience. They had just banished from
their lives forever that phony, lye-conked, metallic-looking hair, or "the process," as some call it
these days. It grieves me that I don't care where you go, you see this symbol of ignorance and
self-hate on so many Negroes' heads. I know it's bound to hurt the feelings of some of my good
conked non-Muslim friends-but if you study closely any conked or "processed" Negro, you usually
find he is an ignorant Negro. Whatever "show" or "front" he affects, his hair lye-cooked to be
"white-looking" fairly shouts to everyone who looks at his head, "I'm ashamed to be a Negro." He
will discover, just as I did, that he will be much-improved mentally whenever he discovers enough
black self-pride to have that mess clipped off, and then wear the natural hair that God gives black
men to wear.
No Muslim smokes-that was another of our rules. Some prospective Muslims found it more
difficult to quit tobacco than others found quitting the dope habit. But black men and women quit
more easily when we got them to consider seriously how the white man's government cared less
about the public's health than about continuing the tobacco industry's billions in tax revenue.
"What does a serviceman pay for a carton of cigarettes?" a prospective Muslim convert would be
asked. It helped him to see that every regularly priced carton he bought meant that the white
man's government took around two dollars of a black man's hard-earned money for taxes, not for
tobacco.
You may have read somewhere-a lot has been written concerning it-about the Nation of Islam's
phenomenal record of dope-addiction cures of longtime junkies. In fact, the New York Times
carried a story about how some of the social agencies have asked representatives of the Muslim
program for clinical suggestions.
The Muslim program began with recognizing that color and addiction have a distinct connection. It
is no accident that in the entire Western Hemisphere, the greatest localized concentration of
addicts is in Harlem.
Our cure program's first major ingredient was the painfully patient work of Muslims who previously