The Final Call

This Controversy: The True History of Slavery in the Americas

By the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan | Last updated: Nov 30, 2010 - 9:51:22 AM

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[Editor's note: The following article contains excerpts from a message of the same name delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan on the campus of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, March 9, 1994. To order this message in its entirety, please call 1.866.602.1230, ext. 200.]

In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.

It is our duty to tell the truth because in this day and time, everybody that had a hand in bringing this people to slavery has to have a hand in helping us up, or God will punish all.

The time that we live in is so strange, that those men and women whose ideas some disagree with, and whose persons are not loved by all, are a target for assassination. It is so shameful that when we disagree, the only way we have to settle disagreements is through assassinating someone with whom we disagree. That means you don't have confidence in your truth, because as sure as light vanishes darkness, Truth vanishes Falsehood. If truth is with you, then you have nothing to fear from anyone who comes bringing darkness and falsehood, so the assassination of such person is unnecessary for Shining The Light is sufficient.

But of course, if you have been made to believe that you have light, while in fact you are in the dark, then anybody who comes shedding light on your darkness will vanish the false ideas and concepts that you hold true; that enslave you to those in power whose aim is to control your lives and your destiny. Then there is a real threat to those in power who fear your ideas.

Why “the furor over Farrakhan”? What is “the great controversy”? Those in the media who wish to paint a picture of me in your minds have had the freedom with their big brushes to paint me as such. But now is my turn to ask: “What is the problem?” The problem is the fear on the part of those in power of The Rise of Black men and women to The Destiny that Almighty God has called us to. The fear is that after, now, 450 years of evil mistreatment, injustice and inequity, somebody is going to come along and turn these young and older Black men and women into an army of revenge against a society that has set them at naught. That is the fear. And that fear is the same as it was with Pharaoh.

Those of you who read scripture, Pharaoh feared the multiplication of The Children of Israel. He feared that they might join themselves on to an enemy and come against him. He knew the evil of him and his people against The Children of Israel. Was his fear justified? Not really, but the guilt of The Guilty makes them always feel that their wickedness is deserving of the punishment that they know should come.

But Moses was not a vindictive man, neither was Aaron, neither Jehovah. The idea was to give Pharaoh a chance to repent and do justice by The Children of Israel, that Egypt and Pharaoh might avoid total destruction. But because of Pharaoh's fear of a Spokesperson rising whom The Children of Israel would listen to that may change their religion, change their way of thinking, change their way of believing; Pharaoh decided to “Let us put a double burden on them”: Let them make bricks out of straw; spare their women, but kill all of the male children.

And today in America, the Black male is under siege. Today in America, because of hate not taught by Farrakhan, but hate that has been bred into Black men and women for self and for their own kind and for their origin in the world, we have been made to hate ourselves, our color, our hair, our features, our origin. To destroy one another is to destroy what we “hate,” so that today, Black young men are the number one destroyers of self. White folk are not doing to us what we are now doing to ourselves.

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As a human being, I would love to see all human beings act as human beings and get along as human beings. Reality says that there are about 10 percent of the human family that control the lives of 85 percent of the human family. There is about 85 percent which is the mass of every race that is unlearned, especially when it comes to The True and The Living God and The Nature of The Law of Cause and Effect. This 85 percent are mis-taught by 10 percent who know the truth, but hold the truth as their private domain and use their knowledge of truth to mislead the masses, so that the masses become slaves to this 10 percent. So the 10 percent are considered the “blood suckers of the poor.”

No “race,” no “religion”—just a percentage that know what is right, but refuse to teach the masses what is right. And therefore when somebody comes to educate the masses who should have been educated by institutions of higher learning, then there is a hue and a cry by the 10 percent, because somebody is going to take away the foundation of their riches.

Now let me make it a little clearer: What would you think of me if I was a used car salesman, and I sold you an automobile that looked real good; and after I took your money and you got in it, I kept the key? So all you could do is sit in it, enjoy what it looks like, but you couldn't go anywhere with it? You would call me a pretty awful ugly fellow. You would bring me before the Better Business Bureau, you would accuse me of fraud and thievery, and you would want your money back, and you would be justified!

But what about making you pay for an education; and then at the end of your time you get a degree, but you are unable to use it to solve the critical problems of your day, your time, your society? I am concerned not only about my people, I am concerned about a country that is the greatest country on Earth that is on its way into the abyss of hell because leadership blinds the people to the real truth of what's going on in America; what is happening to this nation.

Educators: With all due respect, the country is in trouble and you have a responsibility to teach these young people and let them stand on the shoulders of your scholarship. Not to train them to think like you, but to train them to see beyond you, because if the problems of America are beyond your scholarship, then to train them to acquiesce to your scholarship is to train them to acquiesce to the prevailing conditions that they will never be able to solve with what you are teaching them.

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God says in the Quran when he sends a prophet to every nation, he teaches every nation a specific way of devotion. Suppose the Native Americans' way of devotion is not your way of devotion, or my way of devotion: Should we make mockery of their way of devotion simply because we don't understand it? Who arrogated to us the right to condemn others? Intolerance—but did Farrakhan bring intolerance to the American scene?

This great outpouring of so-called love by America and her presidents for Black people has caused us to live on one side of the track, and they on another. And while you act as though White and Black drinking fountains was a relic of the “ancient past,” that was just [40] years ago. I couldn't go in a Christian Church in the South except I went up in the balcony. Have you forgotten? We were fighting and bleeding and dying for a “democracy” that we didn't even know the meaning of, in a segregated armed forces. Was that love that divided us, or was it hate?

And now you say “Farrakhan” is dividing you. What are you doing with truth and justice to unite human beings of various races and creeds? You talk so hypocritically about a pluralistic society, but how can it be a pluralistic society with a Euro-centric education? The very Euro-centricity of it of the education, of the religion, of the politics, of the dynamics of the society, of its system of jurisprudence, says in its practice that there will never be equal respect for all of the various components that make up what is called “America.”

The Philosophy of Racism and White Supremacy has poisoned religion, education, economics, the social fabric and the system of justice. Until that philosophy that has created a White mind that feels itself superior because of its Whiteness, and a Black mind that feels itself inferior because of its Blackness is destroyed, and a Ideology and Philosophy given to the American people that will allow us to see each other as we really are, then the talk of a pluralistic society is blowing in the wind.

I suggest to you that it is deceitful language made by that 10 percent who want to keep the 85 percent believing that you are on the road to something that you don't have the mechanism to get where they told you, you were on the road.

So you are sitting in the car and it looks good and it feels good, but try to get it started to move you down the road to your goal: You are not getting there.

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In the publication The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume 1, The Nation of Islam's Historical Research Department unearthed the following fact from an unpublished doctoral dissertation of Dr. Harold Brackman written in 1977: It was certain Talmudic rabbis who invented “The Curse of Ham” myth about the origin of Black people; that through the eyes of these pseudo-intellectual anthropologists, the Old Testament teaches that Black people are called “The Hamitic People” (as though we waited around until Ham to come into existence).

This “Curse of Ham” developed by scholars and imposed on scripture use your love of God and your love of religion as a tool to defeat you. Surely if I am a child of Ham who laughed at his father's nakedness and drunkenness, and was cursed; and The Hamitic Curse is that we would be doomed by our Blackness to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for the other brothers, then that means that Black people should have a “servant” attitude and mentality.

See, if you are in that 10 percent, I can understand that you must be terrified that somebody knows the truth. But to the masses of you, the 85 percent: You should rejoice that somebody knows something to free your minds.

How can they know the scriptures accept they have a Preacher? And how can they have a Preacher except he be sent? The same people that put you in this condition, the 10 percent, are not going to send you a Preacher to free you from their grip. That is why nobody from America's educational institutions has been able to free the masses.

You would think with all of the degrees that you give out each year, you would be giving something out that the masses could go free, with this “fine education.” I suggest that something is wrong with an educational system that does not allow you to become a thinker, analytical and creative—but suppresses your creativity; and shapes and molds you according to books from scholars whose knowledge of the discipline is much less than absolute. Also, who will not allow you to rise in your time above the scholarship of the so-called scholars that you may write new text books that give a better view of life today than those who went before you.

You are being trained to be herded into a political and social dynamic, without being able to see it as it is, or correct it as it is, but to become tools of those who control it. And if you “get out of line,” whether you are White, Black, Hispanic, Jew, Gentile—it doesn't make any difference: If you get out of line with what those in power determine should be the way you think and act, then they find a way to break you.

That is why America is in the condition that it is in: It kills the best minds. It destroys those who would be thinking to lead us beyond.

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I have never been anti-Semitic, and I am not now. I have never been anti-Jewish and I am not now. But I recognize something, and what I recognize is that what is not in the best interest of Jews or Blacks, I have to speak against it. When I said that some Jews were involved in The Slave Trade, they attacked me so viciously like I said something wrong.

So when my brothers and sisters saw the attack on me, the Historical Research Department was formed, and they went digging not in our libraries, in yours; and they found Jewish historians, rabbis and scholars who confirmed what I had said and gotten attacked for: That Jews were heavily involved in the slave trade.

Yes, Gentiles, Africans, Arabs were involved; and yes, some Muslims were involved. Everybody of the world had a part in that Slave Trade. “Well then, why are you focusing on Jews?” Because in the books that we read, we always read it was Arabs, we always read that it was Gentile White people—but we never read where the Jews had a hand.

So it is our duty to tell the truth because in this day and time, everybody that had a hand in bringing this people to slavery has to have a hand in helping us up, or God will punish all.