At the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the effort to integrate the Black masses into the American society, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had an epiphany.
While talking to his confidant Harry Belafonte, King said: “We have fought hard and long for integration … but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid that America has lost the moral vision she may have had.”
When Belafonte asked Dr. King what should be done, the civil rights leader responded, “We’re just going to have to become firemen.”
Since our ancestors landed on these shores, the Black man and woman have suffered in the furnace of affliction—chattel slavery, stripping us of our names, language and culture, the breaking up of family, Jim Crow, sharecropping, segregation, discrimination in hiring and housing, and more.
We have struggled to become firefighters and are now exhausted from attempting to smother the flames of racism and White supremacy. Our political leaders have fought to pass laws to end injustice. Our religious leaders have preached love and called for a coming together of the Black and the White.
We have “turned the other cheek” and done everything that we were taught “good Christians” should do. Yet, we suffer the maladies of a dying society more than any other race or ethnic group.
According to the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts for 2022, Black median wealth was approximately $44,890 compared to $285,000 for White households and $536,000 for Asian Americans.
In 2023, life expectancy at birth for Blacks was 74.0 years compared to 78.4 years Whites, 85.2 for Asian Americans, 81.3 for Latinos and 70.1 for Native American Indians, according to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health.
Statistics show that Black men were victims of the new slavery—incarceration—in 2021 at five times the rate of Whites; in 2023, the unemployment rate for Blacks was 5.5% compared to 3.3% for Whites.
America is the greatest country in modern history. Her vast wealth, geographic location, and military prowess have allowed her, until recently, to gain the respect of other nations and their desire for friendship.
Now America is stumbling in the path of fallen empires with her eyes wide open. The branches of government that were supposed to be checks and balances on power and corruption have totally collapsed. Justice is couched in political decisions of the party in power.
Leaders, from the president to the halls of Congress, haven’t learned the lessons of ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, or the Ottoman and British empires, all of which boasted of powers not unlike America today. Like those former powers, America demonstrates excessive greed, moral decadence, unconscionable arrogance and vanity.
According to historycollection.com, signs of a collapsing civilization are widening wealth inequality, corruption in leadership, breakdown of trade networks, escalating internal conflict, excessive military spending, and natural disasters, among others, all of which America is experiencing.
The country’s debt of $38 trillion is higher than it’s ever been. Corruption is rampant. Recent changes in tariff relationships have created chaos and turmoil among America’s allies and racial and political acrimony is increasing.
Perhaps, the defining event that demonstrates the collapse of American “democracy” was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a treasonous mob, virtually every one of whose sentences were later pardoned or commuted by President Trump.
After bombing boats in international waters off the coast of Venezuela for allegedly carrying drugs meant for the United States, President Trump attacked the South American nation and kidnapped its president and his wife.
The administration crowed that the attacks were to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S., yet the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in U.S. federal court on drug and weapons charges recently was pardoned.
War seems likely as the U.S. launches missiles into Nigeria, Syria, Iran and the Trump administration threatens Colombia and even Mexico with military action.
Tensions with America’s neighbor, Canada, have heightened after President Trump threatened to “annex” the country. President Trump also threatened to take control of Greenland by force or through purchase, a territory governed by U.S.-ally Denmark.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, in his 2020 Saviours’ Day message, took up the subject, “The Unraveling Of A Great Nation.”
However, he has dealt with this topic and subject matter since 1993 in his book, “A Torchlight for America.”
In his book, he described America’s condition as being on its “deathbed,” and states the root of her suffering is “basic immorality and vanity, where greed, lust and inordinate self-interest have become a way of life.”
“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad pointed out to us that Babylon, that great and wicked city, could have been healed. She was not healed because she refused to listen to guidance coming to her kings from the mouth of one of her Hebrew slaves,” Minister Farrakhan writes.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, consistently warned Black America to separate from White America, as scripture warns. “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” (Revelations: 18:4 KJV)
In “The Fall of America,” on page 226, He writes: “America has been blessed ever since her fathers came across the Atlantic out of the confines of Europe until this day. Now for her evil done to her slaves, God threatens her with total destruction.”
The modern kings of the 21st century and the oppressed masses may choose not to listen to divine men in their midst, but we can’t say we were not warned.
When a fire rages out of control, firemen must get out of the house.
James G. Muhammad is former Editor-in-Chief of The Final Call and is currently a Contributing Editor