Excerpt from The Time and What Must Be Done – Part 33, 2013 Lecture Series
[Section Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, August 1, Thermo Fisher Scientific, the biotechnology company, came to a legal settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, that had her cervical cancer cells taken without consent over 70 years ago during her treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. The settlement acknowledges the unjust treatment of Black people in America for research purposes, an issue the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has exposed and condemned for years. The following contains excerpts from the Minister’s message from The Time and What Must Be Done, Part 33 titled, “Tuskegee University: The Seminal Fluid of The Kingdom of God.”]
When I spoke to the students at Tuskegee University on March 22, 2013, I said: “You are more than who you think you are… Because of ‘who’ you are, you are in danger. So tonight I want to expose the danger, and by God’s Grace, give you the guidance to be exactly what I said you are: ‘The Seminal Fluid’ of The Kingdom of God.” Tuskegee University has received high amounts of government funding for research and experimentation, the most recent being the HeLa, or “immortal cells” (the oldest, most commonly-used human cell line), which are cancer cells used in testing and creating vaccines!
I said at Tuskegee: “Your former slave masters don’t give you money without another purpose beyond what they tell us! …You have to remember history to guide you in the way you think! It’s all right to think that people have ‘changed’—but you cannot go to sleep; you have to watch to see if the change is real.” For example, in the 1940s the U.S. government experimented by infecting the people of Guatemala with syphilis and gonorrhea and sexually transmitted diseases! The government has now acknowledged this; On October 1, 2010, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, apologized in a statement with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding this HeLa experimentation.
And, brothers and sisters, this is what I’m afraid of; that with the research that is going on in Tuskegee with the HeLa cells, now The Enemy has created genetic weapons that are designed specifically for certain genetic groups—and they are designing different drugs for that same purpose! Dr. Jonas Salk used the HeLa cells in producing the polio vaccine; but yet, a contaminant was introduced into the vaccine! Also, it was this HeLa cell that was the carrier of the cancer that was introduced into “SV40” (an abbreviation for “Simian vacuolating virus 40” or “Simian virus 40,” a polyomavirus that is found in both monkeys and humans) into the polio vaccine; and that’s why the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, in the ’60s, forbade his followers from taking the polio vaccine.
Now they say that 2,000 pounds of HeLa cells have been produced… And they’ve gone all over the world! So instead of these immortal cells being used to curb the rise of cancer, the opposite is true: Cancer is proliferating all over the world, especially in Third World countries—and especially among the Black man and woman in America. Is this an “accident”?
Why, in the scheme of things, was the syphilis experiment “so important”? Why is the HeLa experiment and research “so important”? Why, in the scheme of things, was this experiment to start at Tuskegee, in Alabama, where Booker T. Washington established the principles 1.) self-reliance, 2.) self-help, 3.) commerce, 4.) industry; and 5.) agriculture—and where George Washington Carver was? And they even told George Washington Carver that he should not marry; that he should not have any children, because these oppressors did not want to see another “Carver” in a future generation that their children would have to contend with! My question is: What type of research is this, and how will this research benefit us as a people?
Scientists took these cells without asking for permission, and have made millions of dollars off of these cells. And the woman—the Black woman, Henrietta Lacks, from which this immune cell, this great cell was taken—has not received anything, though the world is benefiting from this HeLa cell.
Why Tuskegee? Well, Tuskegee is like a “manger.” A manger is like a trough; it’s a feeder that is made of carved stone, wood or metal construction, and is used to hold food for animals, as in a “stable.”
Jesus was born in a manger… It is not an accident that such greatness has come out of that little city! Tuskegee is a “manger,” it’s a place of feeding ground—a “feeding place” for a people that have been made savage; that from such an institute, which is now a university, can come that which will civilize not only the Black man and woman of America, but from it, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad saw “a world institution.”
