As is all too often the case with white people, the Establishment took one look at the Black Muslims and lurched from apathy to frenzy. No one paused long enough to study just what the Muslims believe, what makes them a religion, how they function as a religion. One of the reasons why this has not been done is that the Establishment, both Negro and white, was afraid that open acceptance of the Black Muslims as a religion would legitimize them. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, courts in several states have issued findings that the Muslims are, indeed, a religion, and as such enjoy the same freedom as, say, Roman Catholics. But this is to get ahead of the story. In truth, the scheme of events, both economic and moral, that led to the formation of the Black Muslims first began to unravel on the west coast of Africa some five hundred years ago. And we must begin _there_ and _then_ if we are to understand clearly the _here_ and _now_. Prior, and basic, to a full comprehension of the meaning of the Negro’s African experience, we must pause and understand the role of religion in the life of a people. _The Negro as African and Tribesman_ American Negro slaves were captured from the west coast of Africa. They were by no means products of a monolithic culture. They represented many tribes and sub-tribes. They spoke a myriad of languages. Indeed, one of the incredible ironies of the “Middle Passage” was that the African slaves chained together in the hold of a boat as it crossed the Atlantic were unable to talk to one another because they did not have a common language. Yet these were not uncivilized people. West Africans had developed a complex society, as Lerone Bennett, Jr., suggests, long before European penetration. Their political institutions, rooted in family groupings, spiraled outward into village states and empires. They had their armies and courts and, if this is of any comfort to modern Americans, their own internal-revenue departments. Speaking of Africa before the European penetration, anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits wrote, “Of the areas inhabited by non-literate peoples Africa exhibits the greatest incidence of complex governmental structure.” Not even the kingdoms of Peru and Mexico could mobilize resources and concentrate power more effectively than could some of these African monarchies, which are more to be compared with European states of the Middle Ages than referred to in the common conception, “primitive state.”