10/31/1982
IWDM Study Library
Austin High School 
Chicago IL

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
Dear beloved people, Muslim friends, peace be unto you as we say, in our religious greeting, as salaamu alaikum! Bismillah hir rahman nir raheem, alhamdu lilahi rabbil 'ailamin, ar-rahman nir raheem, maliki yawmid deen, iyyaka na'budu wa iyyaka nasta' een, ihdinas siraltal mustaqeem, siralta ladhina an amta alaihim, ghayril maghdubi alaihim wa lad dhaaleen. Aameen. Praise be to Allah, the one Lord, the creator of all of us. Peace and blessings upon Prophet Muhammad and all the righteous servants of G-d. We really appreciate your attendance here today. I hope that each and every one of you will find that you didn't waste your time, that you've benefited from your stay here, your visit here this afternoon. I would like to mention several concerns. first that we have carried as a people in hopes of finally showing the direction, plain direction, that we should continue to take as a people.
We have had many concerns since we have been in America. I think the greatest of all those concerns, the concern to improve our life, concern for improved life, for progress, for more freedom, better conditions, in very simple terms, progress. And I believe that still our greatest concern, concerns progress, for progress. We want to progress. And whenever people can't progress, then their life becomes dull, uncomfortable, even miserable. I would like to say that as a leader for the Muslims in America and all people who identifying our concerns, I have not been without hope, without faith, at any point in my life.
I have never thought that the way was blocked against us. I've never thought that there was no way to progress. I've always thought that there was a way open. I've always thought that we could progress. And it hurts me when I see members of our situation feeling that there's no way to progress. There's always an avenue of progress open for people. There's no need for us to be in the situations that many of us are in. In America, progress is not a simple thing. It's a very difficult thing. In spite of the fact that America is called the land of opportunity, progress in America is very difficult.
That is, if you want to maintain your dignity and self-respect, if you don't mind throwing that out of the window, then maybe progress is a simple matter in America. But if you take that direction or that course, then progress is short- lived. And I don't believe we want any short-lived progress. We want lasting progress. We've had too much short-lived progress. The lasting progress in America is a very difficult thing, a very difficult thing. I don't think it's any more difficult than it was for the people who had faith and determination, who lived under great societies, great nations of the past. In past history, they made their way. They survived, they advanced, they made progress.
I want to bring to our attention a number of developments in our history as a people. And I'm speaking now mainly to the blacks or African-Americans or whatever you choose to call yourself. I'm speaking mainly to you and I feel very comfortable doing that today because most of the faces I see out there belong to the African-American people. So I think I would be doing the proper thing to address the concerns of African-American people. This religion is open to everybody. You have not been invited here today for a religious sermon, but I am an Imam. I'm a leader in my religion. It's called Imam. This religion is open to everybody. It does not invite the black or the white. It invites all people.
However, I repeat, That we have to respect the reality that's before us. And the reality that's before is an African-American attendance here. So we should address the concerns of African-American people. And I thank G-d for making it that way because that was my plan. We've had a number of developments. The one that set us back the most was slavery. I believe that if you want to solve your problem, you should do the same thing that you do when you get knots in your shoes. When your shoelace gets knotted up, you try to pick the knots apart.
Now, if the shoelace is no good, you'll do what a lot of us have done. You just break the shoe lace, cause you don't want to waste time taking it out and say, well the shoe lace is no damn good. Excuse my language. This shoelace is no good anyway. And you just snap it and break it and take it out and go without the shoe lace until you get a shoe lace. But if the shoe shoelace is good, if it still works for the shoes, then you want to take your time and pick those knots loose and in picking them loose, you can tie it back again like you want without the knot.
Now sometimes our senses, our good senses get knotted up. And I think the developments in our past have had the effects of knotting up our good senses. And when your good senses get knotted up, you have to do the same thing. You have to start working at those knots, seeing how they're put together. I remember trying to untie a knot in my shoelace once and I couldn't get it. I was pulling and pinching and fingernails working and everything. I was determined to get that shoelace untied, get the knots out of there. And finally, finally I saw how the strings were knotted and I saw the way to take that last not loose. And I got the last not loose. And then it was just easy. It was easy. from then on, just finally took all the knots loose.
Prophet Muhammad says, tie your camel. He says, trust G-d, but tie your camel. So we believe that, trust G-d, but tie your camel. So here you have tie having a good meaning. When things are loose, they're subject to get lost. But if you keep things together, most likely you can watch them and most likely you'll hold them. They'll remain with you. Our senses are the same way. We have to keep our senses together. And I believe that's what the prophet meant, peace be on him, when he said tie your camel, he meant tie your senses. Tie your good senses. See, a camel is an animal that takes the Bedouin through the desert, takes them over the desert and out there and the desert it you don't have a map. You don't have signposts telling you which way to go. Traveling the desert is like traveling the sea. When you're on the sea, you need a conference. But that camel is so sharp, the senses are so sharp that he can find the way. .......make progress because that's a traveling road, isn't it? We need good senses for progress and we need to tie those senses. We need to keep those senses together.
I'm going to go back to slavery, but before going back to slavery, I want to come to something else and that is what happened after slavery. Freedom. So we have slavery and then freedom. Before slavery in our past we also have something that have affected us. It have affected us not as directly as slavery, but it has affected us, and that's the colonization of Africa by the colonial powers. Many leaders have addressed the African-American situation. When I went to China with the American people, pardon me, US- China People, Friendship tour, the first thing that struck me that was said by the host, who was our guide in China, was, how is the situation? Now you know, he could speak good English. He didn't have any trouble finding the right word.
He was fluent in English. And he said, how is the situation? And I didn't reply at all. He was speaking to a number of us and I didn't reply at all. And if I remember correctly, nobody replied. Instead they made comments behind what's behind his questions. But I thought about what he asked. It stuck with me for days. In fact, I brought it back home to America. How is the situation? And I think that's really the question for us now. How is the situation? What is the situation? How is the situation? Say, "Well, he got himself into a situation." What do we mean by that expression? We mean that he got himself where things were very difficult for him, it was difficult for him to maintain himself. That's a situation. A situation can also be good, can't it? If the factors are influences in that particular situation are good, that's a good situation. If they're bad, that's a bad situation. And we usually use the term situation for a bad condition, though he got himself into a situation. But we ask what is the situation? And I think that's just what our problem is. History has put us in a situation and it is very difficult for us to find our bearing.
If you throw someone out in the desert or out in the ocean without a compass, they're lost. If you take someone out in the countryside, even if they know their way around, if you take 'em out there blindfold and put 'em someplace, you'll put them in a situation. They'll have to start thinking and looking and getting their bearings. And until they get their bearings, they're lost, aren't they? Until they get their bearings, they're lost. Well, we have a progressive life that we are trying to maintain. We want to keep progressing. But if we don't stay in touch with history, if we don't stay in touch with the developments in our past, we'll lose our bearings. When a man wants to find his way on a particular road, when he finds that suddenly he's without direction, first thing he does is start thinking back. Now, did I make a left turn back there?
Or right turn. So he starts thinking back in order to get his bearings so he can continue to go forward. And you’ve heard the expression, that history is best qualified to reward all research. You see, we have to start looking back and there's a tendency in us nowadays to not to want to look back. I guess our past has been such a frustrating one that it has conditioned us to not to want to look back. It has frightened us away from the interest in what has happened behind us. And that's a sensitivity that we have to deal with. We have to face that. We have to deal with it. Say, why am I afraid to look back so I know why I'm afraid to look back. I had several bad experiences back then. And then what do you do? You mature on the basis of that knowledge. You mature and say, now that I know why I'm afraid to look back, I'm going to look back and deal with those past experiences. That's what we have to do. Well, I've never been afraid to look back either. And I think all of that's because of my upbringing.
Many things that I disagree with in the teachings of the honorable Elijah Muhammad. But to throw it all out as something that is unusable or something that should be ignored. No indeed. Why? Because the honorable Elijah Muhammad was not an entirely new man. The honorable Elijah Muhammad was a man in the spirit of the African American struggle and the honorable Elijah Muhammad was walking the same road that we are trying to walk now. The honorable Elijah Muhammad and Martin Luther King, though they represented different philosophies, they represented different points of view, they represented different concerns. But you find that they were united in one concern and that was the concern to bring dignity, to bring opportunity to help the Black American progress. They were at least united in that concern. So the honorable Elijah Muhammad was not entirely a new man. The honor Elijah Muhammad is part of that struggle to move forward and carry the people forward. So I would be a fool as a son of his to throw everything he said out. The honorable Elijah Muhammad said many things that are very profound. The honorable Elijah Muhammad is the one who gave me the idea that there are really two forces in this world. One is a force that promotes itself on the basis of lies, and the other is the force that promotes itself on the basis of truth.
Believe me, you can boil the whole world down to that. People are advancing either because they're big liars or either because they're heavily committed to truth. And I've chosen truth and I believe that I can survive in America, South Africa, anywhere they put me, because truth is too big for falsehood. The honorable Elijah Muhammad was a man who excited the curiosities of the African-American people. And anytime you excite the curiosities of people, you turn on their intellect. Those whose intellect were rusted, those whose intellect were locked, the honorable Elijah Muhammad, he was a factor in turning those intellects on because he roused the curiosities in the intellect.
He said things that made us wonder. He made us think about our circumstances. He made us think about our identity. He made us think about the white man. He made us think about the American situation for black people. He made us think. And though I disagree with him on several points, I see him as my leader. He led me to courage. He led me to self-respect. He led me to depend on my own self and my own resources. While most of the African-Americans don't have the faith in themselves to depend on self and their own resources, they depend on the white man and a white man's resources. And it was the honorable Elijah Muhammad who shocked us out of that dependency. Not that he was the only one, but he did a masterful job. He made us think big. He made us think free, free of the white man. Many of us were thinking free, but we weren't thinking free of the white man. The honorable Elijah Muhammad, he shocked our mind into thinking free of the white man. And I'm his son, I think free of the white man.
I don't hate him. He have done enough for me to hate him a thousand times over. But I don't hate him and I don't love him. Now that should give him a chance to win my love. He has to earn it. That's the truth. I don't hate him and I don't love him. And I would lie if I told you I love the white man, I love some white people, but I'm indifferent toward the white man. If I should wake up in the morning and find that all of them dropped dead, I would just think about my few white friends.
The honorable Elijah Muhammad, I repeat, he was a man who excited our curiosity and he was a man who gave us great courage, gave us great faith in our own self and our own resources. The honorable Elijah Muhammad said, you don't have to have the white man. You don't need the white man. The honorable Elijah Muhammad wanted to separate us from the white man. Now that was a psychology that I bought. I bought it and I still respect it. And I believe that we still have to separate ourselves from the white man in order to make progress. Because as long as we have this idea of courting a white man or allowing a white man to court us, then we are going to be hung up with the same kinds of problems we have had all along because the white man made those problems for us.
And I'm not interested in courting white people. I want the white man to know that I'm as healthy as he is. I want him to know that I'm as rational as he is. I want him to know that I am as independent thinking as he is. And if he can know that and still love me and want to court me, then maybe we'll get married and he'll be my wife. Well, we are here to try to get ourselves together to go forward. A distinguished gentlemen among the government people recently said of us and our relationship with the White House that we have a problem in that our approach to the White House is a visceral approach.
Now when he said that, I said, boy oh boy is he's saying what I think he's saying. I had never heard that word before. Visceral. If I had heard it, it never caught my attention. But from what had been said before and his response to what had been said before made me gather or made me conclude that he was really pointing to an emotional kind of stirring that kind of direct our course. Now if you think about this, you'll agree that the course of most African-Americans is directed emotionally. Emotionally. We'll put a man in the White House because he sounds good.
We'll put a man in the White House because he picked up a black child and kissed it and they put that on the front page or we saw it on tv. Oh, I'm going to vote for that white man. So this particular gentleman, white gentleman who was questioning the African-Americans and black people's relationship with the federal government or with the White House was correct. I went and looked up the word visceral. And visceral means your innards That's what old folks used to call the innards, your guts and all of the other things that's in you, intestines and all those organs within.
And since those organs down there operate quite differently from these up here, they use that word to identify emotional judgment, emotional kind of direction rather than rational direction. You see when you take something, a bite of food and you put it in your mouth, the tongue with the taste buds, the moisture there and everything make it possible for you to taste that food. And a good taster can tell the cook everything she put in that food. That's an intelligent mouth, isn't it? Say hey, I tell you what you put in this. They say, what is this? They say, I'll tell you what you can put in this. Say you put some black pepper in here and some salt and you put a little anise in here, and I think you got some parley in here and you put a little turmeric too in there. Hey, how do you know that? So I got sharp taste, right? So the mouth is very intelligent. It can taste and tell what's there, what's in the food that it has taken. But once it gets past the mouth, tongue part, it goes into the neck. The neck ain't tasting a thing, the neck ain't tasting anything.
Now the neck, its main role is to drop it down to the visceral section. So the neck passes it right on down into the visceral body. And the visceral body can't taste anything either. But the visceral body acts on impulse. And the first thing you know, throwing up! I shouldn't have eaten that. That stuff must have been false. Now it can have bad stuff in it, but if it is terrible, if it's too terrible, only when it's too terrible will the innards throw it back. They don't want that. Now you can put too much sugar down there. You ain't going to throw up eat too much salt. You ain't going to throw up, get sugar, diabetes, get the dropsies, get a whole lot of diseases. The stomach never threw it up. Say, Hey, don't do that. But the tongue says, Hey, that's too salty. The tongue says, Hey, that's too sweet. The tongue, the tongue got more intelligence than this visceral section, right?
Alright, so we find that as we go up toward the head, the senses are a little better. Now, once I ate something that hurt my feet, now when the feet fill it, I'm telling you that was really bad. We have to look at these developments and understand that these developments are not us. It didn't just start either. Do you know the Bible has a character in it. He's called Belial. And the man that our prophet chose to be a caller to worship for him is Bilal. And I'm convinced from my studies of scripture in the history that Bilal is the same name as Belial in the Bible. And Belial in the Bible is called a worthless thing. You can look up the name in a good English dictionary and a good English dictionary will tell you Bilal means a worthless thing.
Now, you may say, mister, are you saying that black people are worthless? Well, you know when you're lazy you'll be called worthless. I can't say black people are worthless because you've been working like the dog for the white man for better than four centuries. So I can't call you lazy. You just have a visceral attitude toward work and we hope we'll work this out. Now, what I meant when I said that this is not us, is this, slavery totally separated us from us. Slavery left us somewhere in the past and made of us a new creature. This is what we have to understand. Now I know there is that rare exception where a Sojourner Truth or somebody else survived, it came out. But how many Sojourner Truth's do we have?
How many Frederick Douglas' do we have? How many Nat Turner's have we had? Not that I'm approving his actions. I think he was acting too, from a visceral impulse, Nat Turner. The circumstances there didn't make it sensible for that man to do what he did. So either he was doing what the Elijah Muhammad did say, I'm going to make a great ripple on the ocean before I die. Maybe Nat Turner was saying the same thing, I'm going to make a great ripple on the ocean before I die. I don't know. But I know for one thing, what he did wasn't practical. What he did wasn't intelligent, wasn't sensible, not in the way of achieving the objective. If the objective was to liberate those people, then what he did was fool hearted. And those who have read the story of Nat Turner, you'll agree. Not only that at what John Brown did, he was a white man. What John Brown did was fool hearted.
And they picked a John Brown as a John the Baptist, a John the Baptist, who is so stirred up in emotions that he can't think straight and they picture him as a wild man. If you've seen some of the artists' drawings of John Brown, they draw him as a wild man. His eyes are wild, his hair is wild. They draw him as a wild man saying that this man was driven mad by the desire to free black people. Am I on the right road? Now, let me know. Give me some indication. I'm very sensitive. I usually can feel you.
But today something is different here. I don't feel you today. So let me know if I'm on the wrong direction. If I'm on the wrong road, I'll stop and talk to you. All right. In looking back, we have to consider how Africa has influenced our lives today. Now Africa is a place where Bilal was born and the Arab called Bilal, not an Ethiopian, they called him. Habatee. Habatee is Ethiopia. Ethiopia. And Habatee the same. There's only of these different names. I don't know why the Arabs don't call him an Ethiopian, but they don't. They call him, they choose to call him Habatee.
I think the name Ethiopia is a good name. I don't find nothing bad with Ethiopia. They say Ethiopia means black. Well, I'm going to do some more traveling with you in just a minute on Ethiopia. You know the map, the old map of Africa used to have the name Ethiopia across it. The whole thing was Ethiopia. And later it had other names on it and something happened during the colonial period. The white man's name was put on it. And the term Africa is not the black man's choosing the term. Africa is a white man choosing. Now what I advocate is a compromise with the honorable of Elijah Muhammad.
What I mean by compromise, a compromise is when you want something and I want something and I can't accept all of what you want and you can't accept all of what I want. So that's a compromise, right? Now there are many other ways to describe a compromise, but that's a compromise. So those minds who are of the mind of the honorable Elijah Muhammad of the old days, I can't buy everything that they want. I can't accept everything that they want, but I'm ready to make a compromise. What is this compromise? I want, insist upon everything that I want.
Now if I get everything that I want, it is not practical, it's not intelligent on my part for me to do that, you have to go back to the past. The future brings along the past. The present brings up the past. It has to not because it likes it, but because it's needed. So we want a compromise. And we are asking that we look back to Africa because the honorable Elijah Muhammad, he talked black, he insisted upon black man, black identity, identity with black people. And he insisted upon this too, that the black man will rule, that the time of the white man is out. He insisted upon that and I think that was a very good psychology, a very good psychology. Why? Because most of us thought that the white man was in and would never go out.
And most of us couldn't even make any progress because we say, oh, why make the effort? The white man ain't going to let us do it. Why try it, a white man won't let us succeed? So the honorable Elijah Muhammad said the white man's time is out. So you know those who accepted that, they said, well hell, if his time is out, maybe I can get started. And I'm just beginning to understand what he said. I agree with him. The white man's time it out, cause the white man is a man that was born with white supremacy and white supremacy is out.
I'm sure most of you can understand what I said and agree with me, that the white man is a man that was born with white supremacy. If you study the history of the people of earth, they weren't calling themselves white people until white supremacy was conceived. They were calling themselves Irish, Italian, English. They were calling themselves by many names, but they were not calling themselves white people. In fact, when you go among them now, they don't refer to themselves as white people. They refer to themselves by their ethnic names. But when they address a black and white world, they refer to themselves as white people.
We have made this mistake of buying their terminology, of going along with that terminology of picking up blindly their language. It's okay to use the term black if you know how to place that language. But if you don't know how to place that language, and if you think black is your identity, then you have been misled, you have been misguided, you have been tripped up by the white supremist. Black is no identity. The white man is white, but white ain't no identity. You can't identify a white man by saying he's white. You identify a white man by saying he's Irish, by saying he's Italian. You identify a white man by his ethnicity. His ethnicity identifies him, the history of his people as his people have evolved into society. And if you're going to identify blacks, you can't identify them as blacks. Blacks is nothing but the period of history that represents the racist domain. So how can I call myself black? Well, you may think Ethiopia being black brother and Ethiopia was the name given to Africa long before the white man came here. You are wrong. White man hadn't come there and the black man called himself Ethiopia and he didn't say I'm black. Ethiopia does not mean black. Ethiopia means exactly what the word indicates in its sounds. Ethi from ethics, opia from vision, ethical vision.
That's the meaning of Ethiopia, ethical vision. And if you study the history, you'll find that the Africans of that part of the continent, they had ethics when the white man was a barbarian. This is the fact of history. They had high ethics, high ethics, high dignified, decent principles when the white man was a barbarian. I believe one of the worst developments for us is this motherland identity conflict. We just recently got to the place where we could say we are African-Americans. Before my father, the honorable Elijah Muhammad, Marcus Garvey introduced that term. He called us African Americans and they broke it down finally to Afro- American.
Why shorten it? No need to short it. Afro, African is not any longer than Spanish Irish, Italian. Those are long names. The Italian won't call himself it American. He's Italian or American. So why should we call ourself Afro-American? Because the whole word is too much for us. The white man had made our minds closed against identity with Africa. And even though Marcus Garvey struggled and worked hard to establish black dignity, the acceptance of black and black dignity, our people still wasn't ready for the whole word. So they cut it down to Afro-America. The Irish is Irish American. Italian is Italian American. They don't cut it short. Spanish is Spanish American, Jew is Jewish American, Jewish American. In fact that Jew, for some reason or another, he doesn't identify himself as an American. He simply say he's Jew.
I don't know why he never accepted America. Maybe because America had accepted him and he said he didn't have to accept America. I don't know what it was, but that's a peculiar situation. Dear beloved people, looking back at that continent and seeing what happened to it, and then looking here in America and seeing what happened to the children of that continent that was brought here, brought here. We didn't come here, we were brought here. And that's a part of the history in the past that we should never forget. A lot of us want to forget that. We want to think that we've always been American. You haven't always been American. And as soon as your child learn how to understand English, you should start telling your young babies. Say, look, you haven't always been on this continent. Let me tell you how we got here. That's what intelligent people do. They preserve their past no matter how hard it is to bear, because they know if they ever get cut off from it, they won't have any future worth a damn, be lost. Totally lost. Now people, Africa was a big continent there with many people living on it. It was not the black continent.
Now I'm using racist terminology. They're called black Africa, the black continent, meaning that it was undeveloped, superstitious, backwards. I'm telling you, and history, bears witness, that Africa was not a black continent when the white man went there. When the white man went to Africa, he found scientists among your black ancestors. He found the highest development of psychology on earth. He found it in your continent, the continent of your mothers and fathers. These are the facts. Now, you've heard a lot of blacks come up and talk to you about your past and lied to you, exaggerated the history, exaggerated your role in the earth and in civilization. I'm telling you nothing with an exaggeration. Everything I'm telling you is nothing but the plain simple truth. Unexaggerated, not exaggerated, no exaggeration. Black people had gotten into the sciences, they had developed psychology to such a high level that the psychology we have today, no more superior than what they had yesterday in Africa.
Now that is not to say that there was not the superstitious man. Certainly he was there. The primitive of man, he was there, the undeveloped man, he was there. But you couldn't say that Africa was a black continent as such because Africa had known development that Europe had not known. You say, well, Mr. what are you talking about Egypt? No, I'm not only talking about Egypt. Sudan. under Egypt, Ghana and many other places of Africa had experienced enlightenment before the white man experienced enlightenment. This is history. This is history. Now the white man, when he woke up, when he became enlightened, turned on to the sciences, it enraged him. It enraged him that knowledge has sprung up in the black people and had dignified them and hadn't come to him. A newly enlightened person in the sciences is like a small child.
And a small child is subject to be victimized by his own emotions. So mama, how come you gave him two pieces of bread and me only one? And that might disturb that child for the whole day. He might go to bed with that on his mind......else who had knowledge before him. So he went out like a wild beast making war on the cultural nations of the world. This is history. And he wasn't satisfied until he uprooted that culture, subdued them and uprooted their culture. Do you know? No, no, no. We have to watch the time.
Do you know Egypt has been dominated by foreign powers for 1900 years? That's a long time. It was just in 19, what was it, 52 or 53 that Egypt got its independence. 1952 or 53, somewhere around there that Egypt got its independence. Egypt was dominated by foreign powers, European powers, Mediterranean powers, and European powers for 19 centuries, 1900 years. And when the white man came to Africa, what was his thirst? What was his appetite? The knowledge that he found in Egypt. Oh, he became incessed (obsessed), he became, oh, I can't think of the word. Good .........., with the appetite to eat up the knowledge that was on that continent.
History tells us that Napoleon, the conqueror, he wasn't a scholar as such. Napoleon was a warrior. But Napoleon, when he went to Africa with his soldiers, he also took a big contingent of ............... This is history. And history also tells us that he turned his cannon on the Sphinx. Say is this Imam Warith Deen Mohammed? This is he. Same one. I haven't changed a bit. Don't intend to. I love truth. Alright, now he turned his cannons on the Sphinx. Why would he blast the Sphinx with cannon fire, with cannonballs? Jealousy. Jealousy. If that was a white man's image, do you think he would've fired a canon at it?
The Sphinx couldn't hit him back. It was just going to stand there. And the Sphinx wasn't the achievement of that centuries African. It wasn't an achievement of the Africans he found there. That was the achievement of Africans who had been there about 3000 and some centuries before he came there, long, long time ago. But he saw in the image of the Sphinx, the black man. That's why the Chicago Defender still has the Sphinx on his page, on his front page. Look at the Chicago Defender and you'll see a the symbol there. It's the Sphinx on the front page of the Chicago Defender to identify with the blacks. I have been to Egypt and I have looked at Sphinx from several directions. The Sphinx is Nubian man. Not only do I know he's black, I know the race. The Sphinx is a Nubian man. Nubian.
And let me tell you that Nubians, most of them are the color of these shoes. And I'm not exaggerating. Their color is that color. Most Nubians black, very black, smooth black skin, smooth black skin. They have round faces, round oval shaped faces, round faces, more round than long. That's the Nubians. If you look at what appears to be the Egyptian headpiece, and think about it, it's not the headpiece at all. It's that African's hair. His hair was like that. And the average one of us, when you comb our hair down, it looks just like that.
So why did Napoleon fire his cannon at the Sphinx? He wanted to destroy the sign of the black man's glory because he envied it. He envied it. He was a conquer. Conqueror, pardon me, conquering in the spirit of white supremacy, conquering in the spirit of desire for white domination. So he envied, he resented the presence of that sign of a black man that he had accomplished that great history, that great path that was on Africa, on African continent. He wanted to get rid of it. Now, I didn't invite any white people here, but if you are here, you are blessed too today.
Believe me, the white man needs to get his mind straight too. These lies of the history of the racists have given the white man an artificial mind and has given us an artificial mind. Everybody that bought the lies has an unnatural artificial mind. He thinks he's something that he's not, and you think you're something that you're not. We going to get it together. Oh yes, we've got to get it together. And believe me today, we can get it together. You hear what I said? Today, we can get it together. Its interesting how different terms for the same thing were given to the mother land and to the African man here in America. Now they say negro means black. And when you look up negro, it does, it's a Spanish word means black. In fact in Spanish and Italian and Spanish negro means black negro. Negro means black, negro. Now, we were told over here that we were Negro.
And I think that's why most of us got rid of that name Negro, because we know we didn't name ourselves that, we didn't give ourselves the name Negro. And at the same time, we were told or taught or influenced to identify the people on the mother continent as black. We didn't call them Negroes. We called ourselves Negroes and we called them black Africans. Now we are talking about developments in our past that we have to go back and think about, deal with, and if they have knotted up our senses, we are going to have to solve the problem. Now, if you can recall, and I'm sure some of you can, you look like you're as old as I am and I'm approaching 50.
In fact, I'm going to tell you, if you could look down on my head, I went to a meat market and the man said, have a seat. He said, have a seat. So I sat down and when he sat down, he looked, he said, oh, he said, the top of your head tells your age. Because when he looked down at the top of my head, he saw all that hair missing up there. He said that the top of your head tells your age. So I said, yes, its thinned out quite a bit. Anyway, getting back to this question about African now. If the African man was identified by us as black African, what effect did it have on us?
It had a way of getting us to reject the African man. We have to admit that it was only recent in the history of our history in America that we accepted the term Black. Marcus Garvey, he made a great effort, but he didn't succeed. Only a few people were calling themselves black. Noble Drew Ali, the honorable Elijah Muhammad. With the honorable Elijah Muhammad, the term was popularized. And I think perhaps the one who did it was James Brown. You see, when you got a visceral nature, all the common sense teaching is just like pouring water on the ducks back.
But if somebody can come along and do the boogie and communicate that through the boogie, the visceral dominated will hear the message. So James Brown with his, he worked up man, he worked us up and we heard it "Black and Proud, say it loud" black and proud, say it loud. After a while we got it, say it loud, we got into it, say black and proud. Yeah, we got into it. But getting back to that problem, we were not accepting black and the white man had conditioned us to not accept black, to hate black and hate to be called black. I'm not talking about all white people. I'm talking about those who masterminded racism.
So we would sit and look at the movies. I recall days when I've looked at the movies, saw an African scene, where Tarzan or some other white man was handling a black army of thousands single handedly. And the black children in the audience at the movie, were cheering the white man on. Cheering him as he was beating up and shredding up and tearing up the blacks of Africans, cheering him on. And I've heard youngsters come out the movie laughing and making mockery of the Africans that they saw in the movie. Cause the white man, he made it a point to present the Africans in the movie in ugly, distasteful image, silly, typical, culturally deprived, totally neglected Negro. That's what they would show us on the screen. And I had to grow up and get grown almost before I learned that most of those Africans we were looking at were from Harlem.
They picked them up from Harlem, carried 'em to Hollywood. So now we're addressing a scheme, a plan to divide the black man of the earth. Call one black so that he won't be accepted by the one that he's going to call Negro, the one that he calls Negro, he's going to make him think that he ain't all black, that he is mulatto and brown and yellow and different colors, you see? And going to finally call all of them colored folks. So even the blackest one among them won't be conscious of his blackness. Say, Hey, will you put your race on here? You forgot to put your race on. He puts colored, colored. You remember the Tribune in the want ads, the employment ads? Colored white, colored white. So we were conditioned to accept those terms. Colored man, white man, while at the same time calling ourselves Negro too. But with education, the white man, he pre- anticipated us, like he always does. He said, look, you know George, we got these niggas reading the Bible now and the Bible going to make 'em understand language.


