Minister Farrakhan Re-Writes The History of the South

By Tingba Muhammad -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Apr 13, 2012 - 1:29:53 PM

(FinalCall.com) - The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Southern tour of our great Black colleges is imbued with great historical significance. There is no region on earth that has had more influence over all that we see, all that we know, and all that we are, than the American South.

In fact, the wealth extracted from that region turbocharged the economies of not just America, but whole European countries, keeping them afloat for centuries. Europe was so dependent on the South that she slaughtered every Red man who lived there just to get her hands on it!

This fertile blood-soaked soil of the South birthed an entire industry—the slave-shipping business—which sent an army of Whites across an ocean to invade a continent of Black human beings to enslave them in the very region that The Minister will be touring.

Why this extraordinary investment in this tiny area known as the Mississippi Delta? Because of one single crop—cotton. For a solid 150 years cotton was to the world what oil is today. Exxon-Mobil makes $500 billion per year; Shell and BP are close behind. Cotton dwarfed that. Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention, the cotton gin, more efficiently removed seeds from the fiber and caused cotton to explode in value—the whole world wanted to be clothed in cotton. One historian was unreserved in his assessment: “[C]otton was the leading determinant of American history in the 19th century. It prolonged slavery, and slave-produced cotton caused the Civil War. Cotton spawned two revolutions: the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War. ...[It] was the first sophisticated global business…”

And the one place on earth with the perfect climate and soil to grow cotton of the highest quality was the Mississippi Delta. And that, of course, is where we come in. Black Africans in huge numbers were shipped into the region to till the soil, to plant, cultivate, irrigate, fertilize, pick, process, and bale (wrap up into 500 lb. bundles) the crop, and to load and transport the bales down the Mississippi River to the trading ports. And we did all this for FREE. Other Africans were forcibly imported to other regions of the South to grow miles and miles of corn and wheat just to feed the Africans who worked in the cotton fields and their White oppressors. Still other Africans built the housing needed, the barges, the tools, the ports, the rail systems, the roads, the bridges and all the infrastructure needed for but ONE purpose—to get OUR cotton into THEIR world market.

The Minister will be in Alabama: Cotton was so profitable that the notorious investment house Lehman Brothers began as cotton sellers in Montgomery. The city of Mobile lived and breathed cotton and was described as a place where “the people live in cotton houses and ride in cotton carriages. They…think cotton, eat cotton, drink cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children.”

The Minister will be in Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, the state where the Ku Klux Klan, fathers of domestic and world terrorism, was formed after the fall of slavery for the sole purpose of violently forcing free Blacks to return to the cotton fields.

The Minister will be in Arkansas, where gigantic cotton firms, founded by men like Adolph Hamberg, Jacob Goldman and Julius Lesser, gathered and shipped millions of bales of OUR cotton around the world—cotton they robbed from oppressed Black slaves and sharecroppers

And driving all this commercial activity were the department stores that grew to incredible size and wealth, including such well-known retailers as Neiman-Marcus and Zales, which originated as tiny retailers in the Jim Crow South

The Minister is now returning to the land that shaped the Black diaspora in multiple obvious and hidden ways. He has asked, “Don’t you want to know what happened to us?” Providentially, The Minister can show us how this Southern land, where Black Africans suffered centuries of unrelenting earthly hell, can actually become our “Promised Land.

Our young students, in their desire for a TRUE education, are KEY to our HISTORIC revitalization! We have many Black graduates of all America’s colleges, yet, since the end of slavery, our educated class has been unable to lift the masses of our people from poverty and dependency. Our dedicated students must open their hearts and minds to hear a word from our most powerful truth teller, The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, who can provide the essential knowledge that explains why we are in a grievous condition and awaken us to how we can produce jobs for ourselves—through creativity, unity and hard work. We can, today, write a NEW HISTORY for our people and for America—and it starts with true education.

(Tinga Muhammad is a citizen of the Nation of Islam.)

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