Beloved brothers and sisters: after receiving this Divine Revelation that I am teaching you from the Mouth of God, I have not stopped one day for the last twenty-nine years. I have been standing, preaching to you throughout these past twenty-nine 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, and which will give life to you and put you on the same level with all other civilized and independent nations of this earth ... and this is the greatest desire of Almighty God Allah and Elijah Muhammad. This afternoon I want to teach the so-called American Negroes the true knowledge of themselves that will lift them from the bottom and place them back at the top of civilization. I know how you feel. I know how you think. You think as Ezekiel says of you. Ezekiel says, “This whole House of Israel, they say their hope was lost and they were cut off from their fathers.” You are a people who are all hopeless because you think there is no hope for you. You think that because you have been cut off from your own people for so long there is no chance of you ever uniting or of ever becoming anything but what you now are. I say you are wrong. The God of your Fathers, whose proper name is Allah, will strengthen you and cause you to stand upon your own feet as an independent people in the eyes of other people on this earth. This Truth that I am teaching will raise you up from the grave, not out of the earthly grave, but out of the “grave of ignorance.” You just need the knowledge of yourself, your own God and your own religion. God has missioned me to give you this Truth: freedom, justice, and equality. These are the things I must teach you about: freedom first, because you have never been free here in America. You know nothing about the pleasures or happiness of a free person. You know nothing about justice. You know nothing about equality, or being equal with other civilized nations of earth. I know you and your thoughts about me and what I teach. Inwardly, some of you are with me 100 per cent, but outwardly you are not. Why? Because you have the greatest enemy over you a man can have, and that is “FEAR.” Fear is your greatest enemy. You were filled with fear of your slave master when you were little babies, over 400 years ago when our fathers were brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere on a slave ship that was named “The Good Ship Jesus.” The captain of that ship was an English Christian named John Hawkins.