What happened to the African is exemplified by the pious captain who held prayer service twice a day on his slave ship. After the prayer services were over, he retired to his cabin and wrote the now-famous hymn which begins “How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear, it quells the sorrow, drowns his fears, and drives away his tears.” Further evidence of the complete Americanization of the African lies in the fact that descendants of the first Negro slaves--Negro Christians born in Spain and Portugal--settled in the New World long before the _Mayflower_ came. These Negroes were explorers, not slaves. Some of them accompanied the French into the Mississippi Valley, and others went with the Portuguese into South America. Thirty Negroes were with Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean, and several were with Menéndez as he marched into Florida. The bulk of the Negroes in America are descendants, at least partially, of Africans who arrived in this country first as indentured servants and who were then lowered into slavery. It was under the aegis of slavery that the black American accepted Jehovah as his God. It is this ignominious first meeting between Jesus and the black American that Malcolm X probes so accurately and exploits so effectively. _Christ and His Cotton Curtain_ When the Black Muslims call upon American Negroes to forsake Christianity and return to Islam, they not only flirt with historical inaccuracy, but they declare open war against the Negro church, which has been properly described by E. Franklin Frazier as the most important institution the American Negro has built. That the Black Muslims have had remarkable success in leading thousands of Negroes out of the Christian church and into the temples of Islam is clear evidence that somewhere in the history of American Christendom faith failed the Negro. And when it is realized that the Black Muslims are able to attract three times as many fellow travelers as they do members, the failure of Christianity becomes even more pronounced. How and why that failure came about lies deep in the swamps and plantations of the South, and we must return there and examine the record of that failure if we are to grasp fully the meaning of Malcolm X when he says, “Christianity is a white man’s religion.”