[Editor’s note: The following article contains excerpts from the keynote address delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan on the occasion of the 21st Anniversary of the Million Man March and Holy Day of Atonement held Sunday, October 16, 2016 at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. This message is now available in its entirety on DVD, CD and MP3 @ store.finalcall.com. Or call 1-866-602-1230, ext. 200 to order this vital lecture.]
In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.
I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, The Originator of the heavens and the earth. To Him do we submit and seek refuge. We thank Him for His prophets and messengers, and the scriptures which they brought. We thank Him for intervening in our affairs, for before His intervention we were lost, even though many wonderful men and women were risen among us to help us. After these wonderful men and women left the scene, the enemy destroyed their work and rocked us back to sleep. But we thank Allah for His intervention in the Person of One that has been prophesied of, Al-Mahdi (“The Guide”), coming out of the family of Muhammad The Prophet, peace be upon him.
But my wonderful brothers and sisters who are looking for Al-Mahdi to come in the East: He came from the East, and He came among us in the West in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad to Whom praise is due forever.
Master Fard Muhammad searched among us, and He found one worthy to place a burden on him that had never been placed on a human before him, and He gave him, according to Master Fard Muhammad, “the hardest job ever given to any human being”—and that job is the resurrection of the dead so-called American Negro who has been put to death, and has lived in America for 461 years, robbed and spoiled. But today, The Spirit of God is coming into the Black man and woman, and we are rising, never again to fall asleep in the dust. …
You are the beloved of God whether you want to accept it or not. He has chosen us out of the furnace of affliction; He saw in us the material necessary to build a brand new world—that world that Jesus prophesied of, and we in the church pray for every time we say The Lord’s Prayer, saying: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it in heaven. No politics can bring about The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth!
We have to deal with fear and cowardice, because we are being asked now by God to stand up for truth, stand up for justice, stand up for righteousness, and be willing to challenge lies and liars wherever they raise their head.
*********
Here we are now at the time of one of the most fateful elections in the history of America. … And here is “little negro” in the middle, watching them go back and forth. Bless your heart! Yeah, poor you; you know, brothers and sisters, you really, really, really are being used big time today.
The Bible teaches (Matthew 12:26): “If Satan cast out Satan, how then can their kingdom stand?” I want you to pay attention to the Wisdom of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad who wrote these words in the ’60s. In his book The Fall of America,on pages 36-37, he writes in the article “The National Election”: “Injustice, crooked politics, and the breeding of corruption under crooked politics have been practiced ever since Adam to the present day rulers. Adam was the first crook. There has not been justice for the Black man in this race of people, and this is why the race suffers from the effect of chaos today. There are Black politicians who would like to use their Black people for selfish greed and will throw them behind any crook with money. Black politicians of this type have sold their Black brothers to suffering and shame for self-elevation with the crook.”
“I never heard that before, that Adam was a crook!” Well let’s prove it. We’ve been dealing with crooks ever since Adam got here. Look at what the Bible teaches of Adam. God talked to that man directly: “Adam, eat from these, the fruit of all of these trees, but this one in the middle of The Garden, The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil, don’t bother with that one.” Now look, trees don’t have knowledge. They can teach you a lot if you study them; but they don’t have the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they just teach you from the nature that God gave to the tree. But Adam heard God clearly, and something came up in Adam. “Oh, it was a serpent; he didn’t bother with Adam, he went to Eve.” Poor sisters, how they drop that final sword of death on you, that you are the one tricking these men. But, they do call their women a “cute trick”… but Adam was a crook, because he rebelled against God. So the Bible teaches, “As by one man sin entered into the world.” There is the crook: Sin came in with Adam. What is sin? Paul said, “Transgression of the law.” He disobeyed God. What did God do? Put him out of The Garden, and he’s been raising hell ever since. He brought in the first dysfunctional family, Cain and Abel, and we’ve been messed up ever since. The Bible teaches, “As by one man sin entered into the world and sin passed to all men, so death passed to all men. But as by one man sin came, so by one man shall all be made alive.” Who is that One Man? That’s The Christ! That’s Jesus The Messiah! So who the heck are you voting for?That’s not “Trump Jesus,” not “Hillary Jesus”—that’s Satan over there! The devil is a liar… Do they lie? And White people are suffering today; there is a lot of chaos among them.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad goes on to say, “This election … ” Notice how he was looking into the future.See, I have to talk about my Teacher because, what a Teacher! What a Man! And he is making me a Master Teacher like himself! He said: “This election is one of the most serious in the history of American government, because either party that seeks the office of presidency is faced with the problem of saving the lives of the people of America. If the present party (Democratic) remains in office”—that’s talking about Barack way down in the future; it’s not talking about Congress yet, it’s talking about if the present party remains in power in office—“you know the answer.”
Wow … You’re putting the answer on us (“You know the answer.”). I’m going to ask you: What do you know about “the answer”? He continues: “If the Republican Party takes over, you should know the answer. There will be a lull before the storm.” It didn’t say you could stop the storm from coming, but you can “delay it.” Listen to this! He goes on to say: “The storm can be delayed and every hour and day that it can be delayed is to your benefit. The Black man should be very serious and careful about his voting because 90 percent of the Black votes cast are cast by ones who do not have the knowledge of what they are casting their vote for. … ”
But then the Honorable Elijah Muhammad concludes that paragraph with: “I still say, as I have said for many years, vote for Allah (God) to be your ruler and come follow me.”
*********
If I have to vote for Satan or Lucifer, I don’t have much of a choice there. I would rather vote for Christ. Listen to what I am saying; because “Christ” and “Al-Mahdi” is the same (I’m going to tell you about “Christ” and “Al-Mahdi so you will know what I am talking about). You look like the “Lost Sheep” to me: You’ve lost your way; and in truth, you kind of have lost your mind, because the mind that you’re looking at is the mind that the Caucasian slave master gave you. He educated you, and gave us his mind. Are you sure you are seeing well, since you “see” with your level of intelligence? … I’m not casting aspersions … but who did you choose for your wife or your husband? That’s the biggest choice you could have made in your life, and where is it now, down the tubes? How long did it last? … I don’t tell anyone who to vote for, that’s your business; I am not telling people to vote for “this one” or “that one.” … .
Mr. Trump, he’s like a gangster. He’ll say, “Just a minute! You know, if so-and-so does this, I’ll bomb the ‘you-know-what’ out of them! Yeah, we should just go into Iraq and just take the oil!” I said, “Man, this guy here.…” And you know what? He is real: Trump has tapped into the vein of the common White man. With Trump, what you see is what you’ve got.
White people are hurting because the rise of Black people is really shaking a lot of White people up. I mean, imagine if you owned a plantation and all of your Negroes on the plantation say every morning, “Yassa, yassa boss!” and all of a sudden, one day they say, “What?” That’ll kind of shake you up. Now they’re out there, “shook,” saying, “I turn on my TV and there they are, arguing with our police people. If they did that years ago we would have had them up in a tree or something.” So when Mr. Trump said, “Let’s make America great again,” they say he means “Let’s make America really White again,” “Bring back the great days.”
Confederate & American flags vs. The Flag of Islam: Under which can real freedom, justice and equality reign?
The Confederate Flag: “What a flag! What a flag. And look at what you said: ‘Take it down!’” What? And then the governor says, “Yeah, take it down; it’s insulting to Black people, because under that flag they were slaves.” And the South united for their form, and way of life, because agrarian economy was the heartbeat of economics in America (Negroes picking cotton for White folk, under that flag)—“And now these ‘people’ want me to take the flag down.” Do you know how much White people are hurting over that? You don’t even realize how upset they are. That’s a part of their history; and many White people from the South fought to keep you enslaved. And many lives were lost in The Civil War under that flag. It didn’t mean anything to us—but it meant something to them. And when you took it down, or had it taken down because you didn’t like it; and then some White folks said, “Yes, these Negroes are right: it’s a bad flag.”… Let me tell you something, this is real serious; because if you look at Trump’s followers, when he was in the primaries: All the Southern states went “red.”
The American Flag: The first line of “The National Anthem” states,“Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light …” Francis Scott Key was a racist; he was a hater of Black people. You should read the third stanza of what he wrote, because in the SouthmanyBlacks on the side of the South; others fled North, fought on the side of the North. And then in the war for America’s independence, 6,000 Blacks fought on the side of the British, and the British gave them refuge in Canada. So when Francis Scott Key saw the flag waving, he started talking about those Black folks that were fighting on the side of Britain against both of those flags. But now look at the American flag. … The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, a very Wise Teacher: He said we should respect that flag, because it is the flag of a sovereign nation—and that’s what we hope to be soon: a sovereign nation.
The Flag of Islam—The Sun, The Moon and The Star: This is a Flag that only God and The Original Man put up. The red stands for The Sun, the crescent stands for The Moon, the star stands for The Stars. Now, they can’t take that down—because they didn’t put it up. So when our Saviour came, He gave us The Best Flag, which represents Freedom, Justice, Equality! That is what Jesus taught! That is what the prophets taught! I like that Flag; I’ll pledge allegiance for that Flag! But I’m always going to respect the American flag.
“What are you respecting it for? It never respected us.” You’re right. We’re still suffering under the American flag. Now you’re not going to tell them to take the American flag down, are you? You might. Why not get some land of our own so we can put up our Flag, and guarantee to our people what America never guaranteed us: Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness? In order to do this, we have to start someplace.
Black people may not think we are able to govern. So when you talk about “going somewhere” where it’s all us, that might terrify them more than living under both of them flags. (Smile) Oh, because some of them tried living under us in church and mosque and synagogue, and they ain’t too happy. So there is something that we have to prove: That we can govern ourselves. Look at what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad writes in Message To The Blackman on page 226 in “Do We Have The Qualified Men And Women For Self-Government?”: “We have enough technicians, such as mathematicians, construction engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, physicists, chemists, educators, agriculturists, navigators and aeronauts, among the [now 50 million] of us. You will find scholars or scientists whom we can use in every branch of government; then there are our own independent people outside of this country who would be glad to help us get going in a country or state for ourselves. We do not expect to build, nor do we desire to build a government patterned after the order of the White race. Naturally we would need help for the next 20 or 25 years. After that, we would be self-supporting! The spirit of ‘doing for self’ is now fast coming into our people. They only need a new education of self and others.”
We must recognize that we are living under colonial status. What is a “colony”? It’s a separate condition where there is an aggregate of people with similar language, culture, history, but they are controlled from the outside. The Black community is controlled from the outside; and they control the Black community by politicians, preachers and business people who will sell out our people for favor with the people of power that want to control the Black community.
*********
We have to start somewhere, so if they are not going to give us some states that we can call our own we have to take control of where we live. In Message To The Blackman on page 220 under “The Unity of 22 Million,” the Honorable Elijah Muhammad writes: “What more do we need but unity of the whole for the whole? What actually is preventing this unity of [nearly 50 million] or more of us is the ignorance and foolish love and fear of our enemies in the professional and leadership class of this nation of [nearly 50 million] Black people up from slavery.”
If you’re a professional, a doctor, lawyer, teacher, all these professions: How do you feel about you not just doing well in your business, solely, but how do you feel about gaining control of where we live; with 1.) The politics controlled by us, 2.) The education controlled by us, 3.) The economics controlled by us? We can do this. If the White man is upset, why would he be? We’re not trying to control his neighborhood. But we must control ours.
Separate! Come out of her! There is no future in the illusion that is ‘The American Dream’
Abraham Lincoln said to five pastors: “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. … Your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. … If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated.”
We are going to have to be separated. There is no future for us in trying to make the American dream—which is an illusion—work for us. God wants to separate us and give us a land of our own, with Him as The Ruler. The scripture teaches, “For unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given, and a government shall be upon his shoulders, and he shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Prince of Peace, The Everlasting Father, and of the increase of his government of peace there shall be no end.”
So toward this end, we have to take over our own neighborhoods; we have to take over the education, because we cannot make our community a decent and safe place to live under White Supremacy teachings. You need a new education, an education of self and others. So we’re going to have to prove that we are worthy of self-governance by taking our communities over. … We need to set up our own political machine, the Justice Or Else Party.
*********
In closing, Jesus said: “I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” You are not living as you should; you are not living as well as you could. But the only thing you are missing is self-knowledge—and that we, the Nation of Islam, can offer you. And we will make better politicians, better police; give our educators a chance to make a curriculum that will play in all of the colonies of our people in America, and really throughout the world.
Come out of her, my people … “Come out of her, My people, for Babylon is fallen, is fallen. And she has become a hold of every foul and unclean spirit, and a cage for every unclean hateful bird.” America is like a golden chalice on the outside, but on the inside is filth and abomination of every kind. “Come out of her, that you be not partakers of her sins and her plagues, for her sins have reached unto heaven.”
