Slave-child in the Promised Land

By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Feb 12, 2013 - 9:16:19 AM

When I rode north from the hilly land of Vicksburg, Miss., on Highway 61 and rolled down into the Mississippi Delta for the first time in January of this year, my heart skipped a beat (smile).

Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

My mind’s eye could see why the so-called Jews would consider this their “Promised Land.” Most depictions of slavery, like in the movie Django Unchained, would leave you to believe that the plantation owner was at the top of the economic food chain in the cotton business. However, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2 (TSRv2), explains how a whole community of Jews migrated from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France to just feed off cotton production in the fertile Mississippi Delta. They were major landowners, landlords, cotton brokers, financiers, and masters of the wholesale and retail dry goods trade. TSRv2 documents their dominance in trade and banking throughout the South such as in Vicksburg, where, according to one Jewish eyewitness, “[t]here is not one retail dry goods [business] carried on by a Gentile.”

Like the Delta region of Egypt, which the so-called Jews have always coveted since they first laid eyes on it, this land is flat, wide, and fertile and has plenty of water to irrigate the crops. My mind’s eye could see into our future and envision Black people owning this blood-soaked fertile land and making it the base for food production, cotton production, and economic development that would put the once slave-child in this hostile land back on top of the world, a position their ancestors once held. Ancient Egypt, or Kemit, was the capital of the ancient world, not because of her military, but because of her mastery of the Nile Valley and Delta. She fed and clothed the civilized world then, as America has done today.

The European Jews made their fortune from financing cotton production and controlling the processing, manufacturing, and distribution of all goods made from cotton. They saw the wealth-making potential in this vast stretch of flat land—4 million acres—which has an annual rainfall of about 45 inches in the northern Delta to 60 inches in the southern Delta. When they saw this vast flat land dotted with mounds that looked like man-made plateaus, they knew what they were looking at. They could compare this with the Nile Delta in Egypt as described by Amelia Edwards in 1888: “There are probably fifty such mounds, none of which have been opened, in the Delta alone; and it is no exaggeration to say that there must be some hundreds between the Mediterranean and the First Cataract.”

These flat-topped mounds, some covering 12 acres, were used for the same purpose by the Native peoples in the Mississippi Delta as they were used by the Ancient Egyptians in the Nile Delta. Both rivers had a regular pattern of flooding each year, so the inhabitants would all move up to the top of these mounds to escape the floods. When the floods receded, the people would come off the mounds to cultivate their fields, which would now have a new deposit of minerally rich topsoil captured from the flood waters. In Ancient Egypt, as in pre-European America, the indigenous farmers in the Mississippi Delta built small levees about three feet high across their fields to slow down the flow of the flood waters to capture more of this topsoil. Neither of the ancient cultures wanted to stop the floods, but each designed a system to survive and take advantage of the floods.

When the Europeans came to the Mississippi Delta, they found a “Mound Civilization” of millions of indigenous peoples stretching from the beginning of the Delta at Memphis downstream for a distance of 250 miles until it ends at the hills and bluffs of Vicksburg, where the Mississippi funnels back into a narrower bed on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, the Nile Delta of Egypt stretched from its ancient capital at Memphis for 100 miles until it falls off into the Mediterranean Sea, where it broadened to 150 miles wide. Both of these deltas are considered two of the most valuable strips of farmland in the world.

After the Indigenous Nations in this area, like the Choctaw Indians, were decimated by European diseases and genocide, the European Jews brought in slaves from Africa to make this a virtual replica of the prosperous agricultural region of Egypt. They used slave labor to increase the three-foot levees that they found there to levees of 30 feet in height in their attempts to control the floods instead of manage the annual floods as the civilization that they destroyed. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has taught us that the farm is the engine for our national life. With this knowledge, one can understand the need for the White man to set up the most brutal form of slavery in the history of the world. He needed the labor and skills of a people who knew agriculture, but he could not afford to ever allow them to use that skill to carve out an empire for themselves from this fertile soil and warm climate.

Even after slavery the White man had to make sure that the Freedmen would not enjoy the use of this fertile land in the Mississippi Delta for their own economic prosperity. Instead they burned, lynched, murdered, and terrorized Black people to accept working for White people or accept buying poorer land. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us in Message to The Blackman, “The slave-master passed laws limiting the so-called Negro in land ownership or limiting the areas in which such purchases or even rentals could be made.” The Blacks were left with the worst land. “All of this is part of the clever plan to discourage my people from wanting to own producing land for themselves and to cause a great dislike within them for having anything to do with tilling, cultivating, extracting and producing for themselves as other free and independent people,” so teaches The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Even after all this injustice and pain, the followers of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan have no need to seek the type of revenge like that of “Django,” who winds up killing a lot of White people whom he sees as responsible for his enslavement, but not the ones that ran the slave markets or financed the cotton industry. We in the N.O.I. have no fear of White people because we believe there is a man-made wheel in the sky that will fight our battles—if we are attacked by our enemies. Unlike the hero in the movie Django Unchained, which was staged in 1858 in this same Mississippi Delta, we do not feel the need to kill White people when we learn the history of what they did to us and come to the understanding that they cannot be lived with in peace. The children of America’s slaves, like the Biblical Children of Israel, just need to separate from Whites, build a new reality in this “Promised Land,” and allow God to take care of executing revenge against both our seen and unseen enemies.

(Dr. Ridgely A. Mu’min Muhammad, Ph.D. is an Agricultural Economist and member of the Nation of Islam Research Group. Visit them online at http://www.noirg.org and join the conversation on FaceBook.com/NOIResearch and Twitter @ NOIResearch.)

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