The second historical aspect of the Muslim doctrine involves an intensive study of the role of the American Negro in American history. Here again Malcolm and his followers walk into a void left by the American education system. The black child in Harlem learns about the Revolutionary War but he does not learn that the man who set it off by leading the Americans in the Boston Massacre was a Negro, Crispus Attucks. The black child sees the clock work but he does not know that Benjamin Bannaker, a Negro, invented the pendulum. The black child visits the blood bank but he does not know that a Negro, Dr. Charles Drew, discovered how to preserve blood and thus made the bank possible. Nobody tells the Negro child these things in school. On the contrary, the child is taught that American civilization flowed, for the most part, from white brains. And when Malcolm, to use his words, “pulls the cover off the white devil and tells black men the truth about the work of their ancestors,” the Negro child shrieks with pride and joy--probably for the first time in his life. Malcolm X brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves as a race or as individuals. Their encounters with white people are always unpleasant situations in which Negroes find themselves embarrassed or emasculated. Think it out for yourself: What contact does the Negro in Harlem have with the white man? The white man is the _man_ they must meet every morning when they go to work in the garment district; the _man_ they must meet when the rent is due; the _man_ they face when they go to the pawnshop; the _man_ who comes and sells things on credit; the _man_ who buys the installment paper and comes to collect the payments; the _man_ who gets work when they cannot; the _man_ whom they see on TV loosing dogs on Negro children; the _man_ they face as a schoolteacher who does not understand them and who is often contemptuous of them--the man, the man, the man, the white man, the goddam white man! And when Malcolm X says the white man is a devil, they roar “amen” because every experience they have with a white man is a devilish one. Chilling though it may be, the Black Muslims have erected their teaching on a group experience common to all American Negroes. Few of us concur in their conviction and sentencing of the white race. But none of us can question the accuracy of the indictment on which that conviction rests. _Elijah Goes to Mecca_ The _hajj_, the long, dusty pilgrimage to Mecca that every Moslem looks forward to, is the final criterion of whether one is or is not a Moslem. Only certified followers of Islam are allowed to enter Mecca during the holy period of the pilgrimage.