Muhammad himself.
Today, I have appointments with world-famous personages, including some heads of nations. But
I looked forward to the Sunday before Labor Day in 1952 with an eagerness never since
duplicated. Detroit Temple Number One Muslims were going in a motor caravan-I think about ten
automobiles-to visit Chicago Temple Number Two, to hear Elijah Muhammad.
Not since childhood had I been so excited as when we drove in Wilfred's car. At great Muslim
rallies since then I have seen, and heard, and felt ten thousand black people applauding and
cheering. But on that Sunday afternoon when our two little temples assembled, perhaps only two
hundred Muslims, the Chicagoans welcoming and greeting us Detroiters, I experienced tinglings
up my spine as I've never had since.
I was totally unprepared for the Messenger Elijah Muhammad's physical impact upon my
emotions. From the rear of Temple Number Two, he came toward the platform. The small,
sensitive, gentle, brown face that I had studied in photographs, until I had dreamed about it, was
fixed straight ahead as the Messengerstrode, encircled by the marching, strapping Fruit of Islam
guards. The Messenger, compared to them, seemed fragile, almost tiny. He and the Fruit of Islam
were dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and bow ties. The Messenger wore a gold-embroidered
fez.
I stared at the great man who had taken the time to write to me when I was a convict whom he
knew nothing about. He was the man whom I had been told had spent years of his life in suffering
and sacrifice to lead us, the black people, because he loved us so much. And then, hearing his
voice, I sat leaning forward, riveted upon his words. (I try to reconstruct what Elijah Muhammad
said from having since heard him speak hundreds of times.)
"I have not stopped one day for the past twenty-one years. I have been standing, preaching to
you throughout those past twenty-one years, while I was free, and even while I was in bondage. I
spent three and one-half years in the federal penitentiary, and also over a year in the city jail for
teaching this truth. I was also deprived of a father's love for his family for seven long years while I
was running from hypocrites and other enemies of this word and revelation of God-which will give
life to you, and put you on the same level with all other civilized and independent nations and
peoples of this planet earth... ."
Elijah Muhammad spoke of how in this wilderness of North America, for centuries the "blue-eyed
devil white man" had brainwashed the "so-called Negro." He told us how, as one result, the black
man in America was "mentally, morally and spiritually dead." Elijah Muhammad spoke of how the
black man was Original Man, who had been kidnapped from his homeland and stripped of his
language, his culture, his family structure, his family name, until the black man in America did not
even realize who he was.
He told us, and showed us, how his teachings of the true knowledge of ourselves would lift up the
black man from the bottom of the white man's societyand place the black man where he had
begun, at the top of civilization.
Concluding, pausing for breath, he called my name.
It was like an electrical shock. Not looking at me directly, he asked me to stand.
He told them that I was just out of prison. He said how "strong" I had been while in prison. "Every
day," he said, "for years, Brother Malcolm has written a letter from prison to me. And I have
written to him as often as I could."
Standing there, feeling the eyes of the two hundred Muslims upon me, I heard him make a
parable about me.