FCNNEWSSOURCE
Originally Posted: March 10, 2000
What others have said..
Over the last 70 years, accolades and tributes to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have come from all quarters. Here’s a cross-section of how others have seen it.
Readers Digest magazine (reported in early 1960s)
“This mild-looking man is the most powerful Black man in America. He offers a new way of life. Muhammad prompts even his severest critics to agree when he says he attacks ‘traditional reasons the Negro race is weak.”
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A Man Mother Clara Muhammad Muhammad Speaks The Final Call Impact of a Nation Malcolm X: Imam W. Deen Mohammed Taking Message Farrakhan A nation can rise |
James Baldwin, author,
“The Fire Next Time”
“Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do. … He has done all of these things, which our Christian church has spectacularly failed to do.”
Jet Magazine
“Muhammad, a master psychologist, offers identification, definition and belonging to all those who seek it, and in return gets a loyalty, obedience and discipline which staggers the imagination.”
New York Times Magazine
“Alone of all the Negro leaders, Elijah Muhammad has a vivid awareness of the vital need of a new birth in any drastic human transformation, and he alone mastered the technique of staging a new identity. … It is worth remembering that what Elijah Muhammad is doing to the Negro is, in a sense, what America has done to the immigrant from Europe.”
Arthur J. Schlesinger, former presidential assistant and historian, writing in Esquire magazine
“Muhammad’s movement is unique in that it has thrived outside of the Christian tradition and the Protestant community. White Americans have brought this on themselves, and the responsibility can’t be evaded by attacking the Muslims.
Newsweek m=Magazine
“They (the Muslims) manage to do something that is beyond the grasp of most public schools in urban ghettos. Muslims schools have little trouble with drugs, truancy, or unruly behavior.”
Newsweek magazine 30 years later
“Still, Farrakhan can attract an audience like no other political performer. Many Blacks also credit Farrakhan with being a doer. According to them, he saves lost souls, launches Black businesses and chases drug dealers out of neighborhoods–all without government handouts. …”
The Washington Star News
“The Black Muslim Mosque has been called by high police officials a stabilizing influence in the community.”
Life magazine
The “N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League cannot match the impact of the … Muslims. Their leaders do not have the hour-by-hour contact with people who, like the Muslims, suffer the problems each and every day of their lives.”
Abdul Basit Naeem, former editor and publisher of Moslem World & The U.S.A.
“Despite Mr. Elijah Muhammad’s blunt techniques and a few controversial teachings about certain aspects of Islam, I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Moslem leader. I do indeed appreciate his efforts to bring the Black people of America back into the fold of Islam, which, in his opinion, as in mine, is the only solution to their basic problems. … Americans of African descent, I believe, should be grateful that the Message of Allah has, at last, been brought to them, through the person (of) … Mr. Elijah Muhammad.”
