God
helps those who help themselves!
by The Honorable Elijah
Muhammad
It
is almost unbelievable to see and talk with our people and find in
their talk, in this modern rise of advanced education for all, that
our very educators and intellectual people desire nothing more than to
remain in the "free" mental shackles of slavery with nothing
constructive for themselves and their people.
After 400 years (of which one hundred of these years the once-slave
masters claim they have freed us), there has not been much of an
effort on our part to go free in "deed".
Imagine people out here with B.A., B.S., M.A., M.S., and Ph.D.
degrees still begging the white man to give them a job and to care for
them as their fathers did in slavery times. This actually shows that
the more highly educated and trained our people are, the more they
want to be like white people and be recognized as one of them
throughout the government of America.
They are leading their poor brothers and sisters in Mississippi,
Georgia, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, and other southern states as
well as the northern states into a more slave-like condition than our
parents were in, because this type of slavery (mental slavery) is
worse than physical slavery.
If you notice in talking to most intellectual Black people, you can
see readily in their conversations that they want to be members in the
society of white people. They care not what happens to the poor man in
the mud. We could do wonderful things for ourselves if we get the idea
of social equality and integrated with white people in their many
societies out of our hearts.
Regardless of how disgraceful that society may be (and they have a
society now going partly nude), some of our people want to be members
of it. Imagine these intellectual people, preachers, and pastors of
churches going into spiritual places for the worship of God with their
wives and daughters wearing dresses up across their thighs.
What kind of God would recognize you in such a filthy and
disrespectful manner of dress in a house called by His Name? God is
not a God Who Will recognize respect of filth. He is a Decent and
Intelligent God. Your wives and daughters go in a church, sitting,
with such styles of dress on, facing the pastor on the speaker's stand
and he makes no objection to it whatsoever, but condones it.
We need a Divine Judgment for sure to check and bring to naught the
disgrace of God and the worship of Satan (the devil).
Join up with me on the decent and sensible program beginning on
page 223 of this book. Get business minded; get a creative mind. The
degree of education we have today, given to us by the white man, can
be used effectively to go for self if we want to go for self.
You do not like doing right. You do not like doing something for
self. You glorify begging the white man to do for you that which you
can do for yourself. I warn you that the day is not far distant when
you will be forced to do something for yourself because the white man
is bound to drop you. And that he knows, but he is not telling you. He
is allowing you the chance to make a fool of yourself and be caught at
that time like a grasshopper who enjoyed summer weather. But cold
weather kills the grasshopper. It freezes him to death because he has
no house to lodge in.
You do not want to be separated from your enemies regardless of
what kind of treatment you receive and they do not want you separated
from them, as long as they can hold you with them. You serve as a
protection for them and they know you love them and want to be like
them. They will agree with you when you say separation will not settle
the problem, while that is the main step to take from an enemy who
will not do justice by you (leave and go for yourself).
We were not originally born with white people. We have just been
among white people four hundred years. So why do you think separation
is the answer to your problem with your enemy? God Himself wants to
separate from His enemy and you certainly are in the Divine plan to be
separated.
You will not even go out of the enemy's house; nor from the front
of his gate to do something for yourself that he will allow you to do.
We need as a start a hundred million acres of farmland. You say:
"No sir! I do not want to farm."
The white man is one of the greatest farmers there is on the earth.
American's farms can feed many nations and people -- even you and me.
Why should not we here, with such industrious people, learn to do the
same for ourselves?
You have hundreds of millions of dollars laying in banks here in
Chicago and in other banks throughout America. You put your money in
the white man's bank for him to use as he pleases. He gives you a
little interest on it and you are satisfied.
I proposed establishing a Black national bank for ourselves. You
cannot see yourself trusting your own self. If you would loan me a few
of your millions that you have laying in these banks -- not a hundred
million, just loan me ten million -- I would show you one hundred
million dollars for the use of that ten million.
I have to turn to the white man for this loan. He probably will not
turn me down because he is tired of taking care of you and having you
jumping up in his face and lying down at his gate. He is tired of it,
but he does not tell you. He will show you in actions. When he sics
his dogs on you, turns his fire hoses on you and kicks you down in the
streets, throwing you in his "lock up," he is telling you
all the time: "Nigger, get away from my door." But you are
like it is written. You take all of this humiliation.
Just think: You have intelligent Black people disgracing
themselves, begging the white man to create jobs for them and to
accept them as his equal.
Christian preachers, pastors of churches, and other Black
politicians are caught in this disgraceful begging manner.
In a time
when we should be showing the world that after one hundred years up
from slavery, we are leading ourselves out of that slavery mentality,
put in us by the white slave masters, they are acting worse than our
fathers did. Our fathers begged, but they begged to go back to Africa
where the white man brought us from.
You give the most ignorant and disgraceful answer, saying that
separation will not settle or solve the problem of white people's
disrespect of Black people. I say you should suffer his disgrace of
you, since he cannot get you to go from him nor will you try and do
something for yourself, without him doing it for you.
My followers and I, by the Help of God, and with the respect of the
nations of the earth, are trying to do something for ourselves.
We thank the white man for freeing us. And we shall show him that
we are intelligent enough to try now to stay free.
(Reprinted from Our Saviour Has Arrived, 1974) |