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God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

By the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad | Last updated: Nov 30, 2016 - 8:46:08 PM

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It is almost unbelievable to see and talk with our people and find in their talk, in this modern rise of advanced education for all, that our very educators and intellectual people desire nothing more than to remain in the “free” mental shackles of slavery with nothing constructive for themselves and their people.

After 400 years (of which one hundred of these years the once-slave masters claim they have freed us), there has not been much of an effort on our part to go free in “deed.”

Imagine people out here with B.A., B.S., M.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees, still begging the White man to give them a job and to care for them as their fathers did in slavery times. This actually shows that the more highly educated and trained our people are, the more they want to be like White people and be recognized as one of them throughout the government of America.

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They are leading their poor brothers and sisters in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, and other southern states, as well as the northern states, into a more slave-like condition than our parents were in, because this type of slavery (mental slavery) is worse than physical slavery.

If you notice, in talking to most intellectual Black people, you can see readily in their conversations that they want to be members in the society of White people. They care not what happens to the poor man in the mud. We could do wonderful things for ourselves if we get the idea of social equality and integration with White people in their many societies out of our hearts.

Regardless of how disgraceful that society may be (and they have a society now going partly nude), some of our people want to be members of it. Imagine these intellectual people, preachers, and pastors of churches going into spiritual places for the worship of God with their wives and daughters wearing dresses up across their thighs.

What kind of God would recognize you in such a filthy and disrespectful manner of dress in a house called by His Name? God is not a God Who Will recognize respect of filth. He is a Decent and Intelligent God. Your wives and daughters go in a church, sitting, with such styles of dress on, facing the pastor on the speaker’s stand and he makes no objection to it whatsoever, but condones it.

We need a Divine Judgment for sure to check and bring to naught the disgrace of God and the worship of Satan (the devil).

Join up with me on the decent and sensible program beginning on page 223 of this book. Get business minded; get a creative mind. The degree of education we have today, given to us by the White man, can be used effectively to go for self, if we want to go for self.

You do not like doing right. You do not like doing something for self. You glorify begging the White man to do for you that which you can do for yourself. I warn you that the day is not far distant when you will be forced to do something for yourself, because the White man is bound to drop you. And that he knows, but he is not telling you. He is allowing you the chance to make a fool of yourself and be caught at that time like a grasshopper who enjoyed summer weather. But cold weather kills the grasshopper. It freezes him to death because he has no house to lodge in.

You do not want to be separated from your enemies, regardless of what kind of treatment you receive and they do not want you separated from them, as long as they can hold you with them. You serve as a protection for them and they know you love them and want to be like them. They will agree with you when you say separation will not settle the problem, while that is the main step to take from an enemy who will not do justice by you (leave and go for yourself).

We were not originally born with White people. We have just been among White people four hundred years. So why do you think separation is not the answer to your problem with your enemy? God Himself wants to separate from His enemy and you certainly are in the Divine plan to be separated.

You will not even go out of the enemy’s house; nor from the front of his gate to do something for yourself that he will allow you to do. We need, as a start, a hundred million acres of farmland. You say: “No sir! I do not want to farm.”

The White man is one of the greatest farmers there is on the earth. America’s farms can feed many nations and people—even you and me. Why should not we, here with such industrious people, learn to do the same for ourselves?

You have hundreds of millions of dollars laying in banks here in Chicago and in other banks throughout America. You put your money in the White man’s bank for him to use as he pleases. He gives you a little interest on it and you are satisfied.

I proposed establishing a Black national bank for ourselves. You cannot see yourself trusting your own self. If you would loan me a few of your millions that you have laying in these banks—not a hundred million, just loan me ten million—I would show you one hundred million dollars for the use of that ten million.

I have to turn to the White man for this loan. He probably will not turn me down because he is tired of taking care of you and having you jumping up in his face and lying down at his gate. He is tired of it, but he does not tell you. He will show you in actions. When he sics his dogs on you, turns his fire hoses on you and kicks you down in the streets, throwing you in his “lock-up,” he is telling you all the time: “Nigger, get away from my door.” But you are like it is written—you take all of this humiliation.

Just think: You have intelligent Black people disgracing themselves, begging the White man to create jobs for them and to accept them as his equal.

Christian preachers, pastors of churches, and other Black politicians are caught in this disgraceful begging manner.

In a time when we should be showing the world that after one hundred years up from slavery, we are leading ourselves out of that slavery mentality, put in us by the White slave masters, they are acting worse than our fathers did. Our fathers begged, but they begged to go back to Africa where the White man brought us.

You give the most ignorant and disgraceful answer, saying that separation will not settle or solve the problem of White people’s disrespect of Black people. I say you should suffer his disgrace of you, since he cannot get you to go from him, nor will you try and do something for yourself, without him doing it for you.

My followers and I, by the Help of God, and with the respect of the nations of the earth, are trying to do something for ourselves.

We thank the White man for freeing us. And we shall show him that we are intelligent enough to try now to stay free.

(Reprinted from “Our Saviour has Arrived,” 1974.)