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What is wealth? The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that wealth was not your income, but what you saved out of that income. Although the median family income in 2000 for Black families was 61 percent of the income of White families, Black families only had 12 percent of the net worth or wealth of White families. Although many of us have high school diplomas and college degrees, it seems that we missed something along the way.
One of my undergraduate economics professors kept trying to inspire us to do better in class by telling us about the possibility of making $30,000 or $35,000 in wages once we graduated which was pretty good for 1975. After a few times listening to this, I asked him: “Respectfully Sir, can you teach me what that man knows that can pay me $35,000, because I want to be the one to do the hiring.” My professor was stunned and did not have an answer. So, although I was an economics major, I was not being taught how to create business and stimulate an economy. I was being taught how to get a “job”.
This question of why White folk get wealthy while Black folk stay poor is a nagging question in the Black community. It may give one the impression that something is wrong with Black people. So The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us: “Observe the operations of the white man. He is successful. He makes no excuses for his failures. He works hard in a collective manner. You do the same.” (Elijah Muhammad, 1965)
“The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” Volume 2 (TSRV2) goes a long way in solving this mystery by tracking the movements of European Jews as they interacted with Black people and grew to the pinnacle of financial success in America and the world. A common misconception about European Jews is that they landed in New York City, became merchants and clothing manufacturers and later, after the KKK and anti-Semitic feelings subsided in the South, they set up branches of their northern-grown department stores in the South. TSRV2 shatters this misconception.
Though a few Jews first entered the continent in New York in 1654 (then known as New Amsterdam), the largest concentration of European Jews in America before 1830 was actually Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston was also the initial slave trading capital and it is where Jews mastered this trade in human lives. The book released by Minister Farrakhan titled “Jews Selling Blacks: Slave Sale Advertising by American Jews” contains scores of Charleston newspaper ads placed by slave dealing Jews. Large scale immigration of Eastern European Jews to New York City did not start until 1880, before that time the Jews settled in small towns and rural areas throughout the South where they sold slaves, liquor, and other dry goods to the White gentiles. They even financed the expansion of cotton growing as it moved westward into Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The European Jews also brought their slave auction blocks with them as they waxed rich off of slave trading, cotton growing and world-wide cotton distribution,. As cotton and slavery moved West, new towns became centers of commerce like Albany, Georgia where the European Jews not only controlled the cotton industry but set up numerous stores and shops to supply the planters' needs in the 1800s before the Civil War.
So the Jews were not afraid to live Down South, and TSRV2 shows that they preferred to live close to their “goyim”, cattle. They sold Blacks as cattle to Whites and through their credit and loan policies, they kept their White customers in a controlled and corralled state of indebtedness. So here is a piece of the wealth building mystery:
1. Sell slaves
2. Grow cotton using slave labor and
3. Keep White gentile competitors in perpetual debt while extracting interest on the loans.
Many of the largest plantations in the South were owned by European Jews while many other plantations were completely dependent on them for dry goods, equipment, loans and markets for their cotton. Many borrowed money to buy land and homes, but when the Confederate soldiers returned in defeat to their farms and homes, they found foreclosure notices on the fences and had to pack their belongings onto covered wagons and move further West to find new beginnings. So the Jews became very large landowners after 1865 and put the newly-freed Black slaves on these lands as “sharecroppers”.
TSRV2 recounts the findings of W.E.B. DuBois as he studied the Georgia countryside. He made his way to Dougherty County where Albany is the county seat and regional hub and just 19 miles from where the Nation of Islam bought farmland in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. DuBois noted that Blacks outnumbered Whites by five to one, but found the immigrant Jews well entrenched in the affairs of this very Black Southern township. According to DuBois, Dougherty County during the Civil War was called the “Egypt of the Confederacy” because of the vast slaveholdings, the cotton for uniforms and food for the Confederate soldiers. DuBois charged that the Jews—as opposed to any other identifiable group of Americans—were the “heir of the slave-baron”.
When these additional lands fell into Jewish hands, they rented the land out based on “sharecropping” to the emancipated slaves who were deprived of the land ownership that was rightfully theirs based on their labor and suffering during slavery. Instead, Jewish merchants actually received the 40 acres and the mules—only much, much more. They not only took over the land by foreclosing on their former White gentile brothers, they helped to develop the Jim Crow Black Codes that prevented Blacks from competing with them in the marketing of cotton. Blacks could only grow cotton for the merchants who rented them the land and loaned them the money.
As stated in my previous article, “Sharecropping Cotton for the Modern Pharaoh”, whereas a Black farm family could only make a profit of $159 per year off of 25 acres of cotton, the cotton merchant would make a profit of $172 by doing nothing but loaning the farmer money, and buying back and reselling the farmer's cotton. Now, if this merchant had 400 such farmers beneath his belt and control, as did TSRV2's Mr. H. Hiller, he could make a profit of $68,800 per year. And this is when those Black farmers caught in this sharecropping trap were making less than $200 per year for their entire family. This amount of Jewish profit making each year entirely on the back of Black labor would go far in developing the amazing wealth of Jewish Americans. So, now the formula becomes: 1. Foreclose on the White gentile farmers that you lent money to; 2. Set up a quasi-slave system called “sharecropping”; 3. Lobby to pass laws to eliminate your competition (Black Codes) and 4. Control the wholesaling and retailing of a commodity like cotton.
And when the Blacks moved North so did the Jewish merchants. TSRV2 quotes Stuart Rockoff, of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life on just how dependent Jewish wealth was on Black farmers:
“The rural South started its decline around the time when African-Americans—the majority of whom had worked as agricultural laborers—began migrating to seek industrial jobs in Northern cities like Chicago. Because of their migration, economic opportunity for Jewish merchants—who had relied on African-Americans as customers—diminished too, and Jews started migrating to big cities as well.”
And of course a primary lesson to learn about gaining wealth is never allowing your prey to get away. Follow the prey to wherever you lead them and fleece them thoroughly. With this new wealth that you lifted from the Blacks, set up banks and investment houses to loan money to yourselves at no interest, and to White gentiles at ridiculous rates. Then have your various banks come together and set up the Federal Reserve, print the nation's money and take this country by stealth as you “mysteriously” grow in wealth and power. Mystery solved.
(Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu'min Muhammad, Agricultural Economist, National Student Minister of Agriculture and Farm Manager of Muhammad Farms. He can be reached at [email protected]. For more information on this topic, visit http://www.blacksandjews.com/ and join the conversation @ http://twitter.com/blacksandjews.)