The Final Call

The ugly truth about the Southern Poverty Law Center

By FinalCall.com News | Last updated: Apr 1, 2015 - 11:39:45 AM

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Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

(FinalCall.com) - The Southern Poverty Law Center has once again released a report about hate in America and placed the Nation of Islam and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan in a catalog of odious characters devoted to defaming, destroying and devaluing others.

The vast majority of groups named by the center are devoted to opposing the interests, progress and existence of Blacks in America—the very group the Nation of Islam was raised to save and to serve.

Besides vicious and defamatory name calling the center offers no evidence the Nation, nor its members, are involved in depriving anyone of their rights, threatening lives or restricting anyone’s freedom.

The major thing that appears to make the Nation eligible for this list is its demand for a separate state or territory where the descendants of America’s once-slaves can live in peace. With endemic police brutality and rampant disrespect of Black life, the center seeks to name the Nation as a hate group because we desire to leave those who have never accepted nor will ever accept us.

Marc Morial, president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, recently pointed out a harsh racial reality: “I must use the word crisis. Crisis, we face a crisis.” What is the crisis? According to the Urban League’s 2015 State of Black America, the standard of living for a Black person is 72 percent of the standard of living for the average White person. Black income is $35,000 versus $58,000 for Whites, and the Black unemployment rate is more than double the rate for Whites. “The world watched as non-indictments of the police officers responsible for the deaths of unarmed Black males including Eric Garner, Michael Brown and John Crawford signaled that police accountability for taking Black lives was reaching a modern-day low,” the report added.

Blacks saw the erosion of voting rights and Blacks have a median wealth of $6,314 versus Whites who have $110,500, according to the report. This means the median Black household has 6 cents in wealth for every dollar of White household wealth. Segregated neighborhoods persist with the accompanying burdens of fratricidal violence, failing schools, food deserts and environmental hazards.

Yet it wasn’t the police department in Ferguson, Mo., which targeted and extorted money from Blacks that was called a hate operation, it was the Nation of Islam, whose members go into America’s teeming ghettos to deliver words of life, light and power and serve a suffering and self-destructive people.

Blacks get virtually no assistance and little sympathy these days as our suffering seems to only sink deeper and deeper.

Should we stand and beg White America for salvation like little children when reality and God Himself says we must go for self?

The question is not how close we are in proximity to White bodies or social interactions but how close we are to developing our God-given gifts and using those gifts to serve our own needs?

If the desire to be separate qualifies the Nation as a hate group, then the Southern Poverty Law Center should add beloved U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to the roster as these two major historical figures favored the repatriation of Blacks to Africa or elsewhere outside of America.

“It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race,” slaveholder Jefferson mused in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in the late 1700s.

His words have proved nearly true with Blacks on the brink of all out extermination and suffering disproportionately in any category one can name.

Are we to linger in this detestable state forever? Are we to forever lie at the feet of our oppressor like a dog whining for a scratch behind the ears or a table scrap? We are treated worse than dogs, who may find solace and assistance among the Caucasian people, while we find no refuge, no harbor from their abuses and no limit to the depths of their hatred and cruel mistreatment.

How do victims of hate become haters? How do the abused become the abusers?

It is because truth is present and White supremacy—whether the outright bigotry of the hooded Ku Klux Klan or uniformed police officers or the soft bigotry of educators, social workers, or bureaucratic workers—is condemned by the truth. Black America doesn’t need paternalistic glad handing or fantasies of America’s golden promise of a better day for the good Negro. Black America needs the truth.

“First, ‘hate’ is always manifested not just with words but with deeds; (Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center) and they out of their hatred for us have made books that they put in schools saying that the Nation of Islam is a hate group,” said Minister Farrakhan in a 2013 appearance on the Rock Newman radio show in Washington, D.C.

“They have made films and they put it before police departments that we are a hate group. They are the purveyors of hate against the Nation of Islam,” the Minister noted. “If we are haters, why can’t you show me some hateful act that we have done other than our telling the truth that exposes your lies and your deceit?”

The Nation should consider taking Mr. Potok’s group and Jewish organizations to court to force the attackers to prove their innuendo and vile talk, he added.

“We can prove what we say about you but you cannot prove what you’re saying about us. Maybe we’ll iron this out before your courts. We won’t get justice but the truth will come out,” the Minister said.

The truth will come out and we will be the winners.