When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim WorldLomax, Louis E.
Religion
When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World
Lomax, Louis E.
Black Muslims
MALCOLM X: The white man supports Reverend Martin Luther King,
subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther
King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless--that’s what
you mean by nonviolent--be defenseless in the face of one of the most
cruel beasts that has ever taken people into captivity--that’s this
American white man, and they have proved it throughout the country by
the police dogs and the police clubs. A hundred years ago they used to
put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. Today they
have taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms and traded
in the bloodhounds for police dogs, and they’re still doing the same
thing. Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes
from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching
them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully,
today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle
Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep
Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the
plantation to keep _those_ Negroes defenseless in the face of the
attack of the Klan in that day.
Now, the goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance
to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who has
brutalized them for four hundred years. The goal of Martin Luther King
is to get Negroes to forgive the people, the people who have brutalized
them for four hundred years, by lulling them to sleep and making them
forget what those whites have done to them, but the masses of black
people today don’t go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.
LOMAX: Minister Malcolm, you often speak of unity among our people.
Unity for what?
MALCOLM X: The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God now is
about to establish a kingdom on this earth based upon brotherhood and
peace, and the white man is against brotherhood and the white man is
against peace. His history on this earth has proved that. Nowhere
in history has he been brotherly toward anyone. The only time he is
brotherly toward you is when he can use you, when he can exploit you,
when he will oppress you, when you will submit to him, and since his
own history makes him unqualified to be an inhabitant or a citizen in
the kingdom of brotherhood, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us
that God is about to eliminate that particular race from this earth.
Since they are due for elimination, we don’t want to be with them. We
are not trying to integrate with that which we know has come to the end
of its rope. We are trying to separate from it and get with something
that is more lasting, and we think that God is more lasting than the
white man.
LOMAX: Then your movement does not share the integration goals of the
NAACP, CORE, Martin Luther King’s movement, and the Student Nonviolent
movement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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