On Sport & Play

by The Honorable Elijah Muhammad

How can we say that we are the civilized people of the world when to be civilized, as Allah has taught me, one must have knowledge, wisdom, understanding, culture and refinement and not be savage. America, more than any other country, offers our people opportunities to engage in sports and play which cause delinquency, murder, theft and other forms of wicked and immoral crimes. This is due to this country's display of filthy temptations in this world of sport and play.

Great sums of money are spent in sport and play, in games of chance and gambling, in the operation of sporting houses. Millions are spent on horse racing and numbers rackets and are a disgraceful publicity of indecent sport.

Hundreds of millions of dollars change hands for the benefit of a few to the hurt of millions of poor people in the bread lines, and suffering from the lack of good education, with their last few pennies they help the already helped to try winning with these gambling  "scientists"  who have prepared a game of chance that the poor suckers have only one chance out of nine hundred to win. Therefore, the world of sports is causing tremendous evils.

Think over the destruction of homes and families, the disgrace, the shame, the filling up of jails -- state and federal -- with victims of sports and play, the loss of friendship, the loss of beautiful wives and husbands, the loss of sons and daughters to these penal institutions. From dope, knives and guns, this evil is practiced under Christianity.

The poor so-called Negroes are the worst victims in this world of sport and play because they are trying to learn the white man's games of civilization. Sport and play (games of chance) take away the remembrance of Allah (God) and the doing of good, says the Holy Qur-an. Think over what I am teaching, my people, and judge according to justice and righteousness.

Almighty Allah, to whom all praises are due, did not raise me as a Messenger like the Prophets of old, but he raised me as a Messenger, a Warner and a Reminder to the Nations of that which was prophesied to take place in these last days.

We have come to the end of the Prophets and the end of the old wicked world. I am missioned by the Supreme Being to awaken my people (so-called Negroes) to the time in which we are now living.

It is my people who are more ignorant to the truth than any other people on the planet earth. It is my people, furthermore, who are in the house of their enemies whom Allah is ready to destroy by fire. And they must be warned.

Finally, I must warn you against the devil's temptations, for they are seeking to make you unfit for acceptance into Allah's New World of peace, happiness and unlimited progress.

They have made you drunkards from their wine, whiskey and beer and other intoxicating. They have made prostitutes of our women. They have caused some of our women to love other women and men to love men and practice sex relations with their own sex. They have our people addicted to the worst kind of filth. They have made you dependent upon filth and vulgarity for survival.

They have made us eaters of the forbidden and poisoned swine. They have made us to have wicked, swearing mouths against the Most High God, Allah. But Allah knows the guilty ones, and you shall soon see the reality about which I have been warning you for the past 31 years made manifest in this rich, wicked world of Satan.

(Reprinted from �Message To The Blackman," 1965.)