When the Word is Given... / A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World

by Louis E. Lomax

The character of this work demands that we examine the impact of Islam on the black Africans, particularly on those of the West Coast, if we are to understand and evaluate the current preachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.

Dr. John Hope Franklin feels that influences of the religion of Mohammed on the African way of life have been exaggerated. It seems certain that Mohammedanism had little influence upon black Africans prior to the fourteenth century. As early as the seventh century the Moslems swept from Arabia over into Egypt. Subsequently, they moved into North Africa with great success. But when they attempted to penetrate the land of the black African below the Sahara, they encountered complex resistance from the kingdoms of Ghana, Melle, and Songhay, where thriving cultures were already in operation. Some Negro monarchs accepted Mohammedanism for economic or political reasons, but their subjects clung to their tribal religions. The Moslems were never able to win over the peoples of Melle, Hausa, Yoruba, and Susu despite the fact that Negroes were accepted as their equals. And when invited to enjoy both the economic and cultural advantages the religion offered, the masses of West African Negroes rejected Islam in favor of their own tribal way of life.

It is of singular significance that Christianity was already entrenched in North Africa when Mohammedanism made its appearance there in the seventh century. The two faiths became locked in a life-and-death struggle for the control of North Africa. But in West Africa, the region from which the bulk of the Negro slaves were taken, Christianity was all but unknown until the Portuguese and Spanish set up their missions in the sixteenth century. Almost from the onset Christianity was beset by moral ambivalence; on the one hand the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries espoused a doctrine of equality and brotherhood while on the other hand Spanish and Portuguese slave traders were seizing thousands of Africans and shipping them off to the New World to become slaves. It was thus aboard “The Good Ship Jesus” that the first slaves arrived in America. As John Hope Franklin comments, “If the natives of West Africa were slow to accept Christianity, it was not only because they were attached to their own particular form of tribal worship, but because it was beyond the capacity of the unsophisticated West African mind to reconcile the teaching of brotherhood and the practice of slavery by the white interlopers.” The European Christians, however, found no conflict between Christ and slavery and by 1860 the twenty Negroes who landed at Jamestown in 1619 had become four million.

The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land

The literature of the American Negro rumbles with the controversy over the transplantation, or lack of it, of African culture. Some Africanisms have survived in the New World, particularly in the West Indies and in Haiti. But the impact of the New World culture upon the Africans—who were already culturally diffused—was decisive.

What happened to the African is exemplified by the pious captain who held prayer service twice a day on his slave ship. After the prayer services were over, he retired to his cabin and wrote the now-famous hymn which begins “How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear, it quells the sorrow, drowns his fears, and drives away his tears.” Further evidence of the complete Americanization of the African lies in the fact that descendants of the first Negro slaves—Negro Christians born in Spain and Portugal—settled in the New World long before the Mayflower came. These Negroes were explorers, not slaves. Some of them accompanied the French into the Mississippi Valley, and others went with the Portuguese into South America. Thirty Negroes were with Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean, and several were with Menéndez as he marched into Florida.

The bulk of the Negroes in America are descendants, at least partially, of Africans who arrived in this country first as indentured servants and who were then lowered into slavery. It was under the aegis of slavery that the black American accepted Jehovah as his God. It is this ignominious first meeting between Jesus and the black American that Malcolm X probes so accurately and exploits so effectively.

Christ and His Cotton Curtain

When the Black Muslims call upon American Negroes to forsake Christianity and return to Islam, they not only flirt with historical inaccuracy, but they declare open war against the Negro church, which has been properly described by E. Franklin Frazier as the most important institution the American Negro has built. That the Black Muslims have had remarkable success in leading thousands of Negroes out of the Christian church and into the temples of Islam is clear evidence that somewhere in the history of American Christendom faith failed the Negro. And when it is realized that the Black Muslims are able to attract three times as many fellow travelers as they do members, the failure of Christianity becomes even more pronounced. How and why that failure came about lies deep in the swamps and plantations of the South, and we must return there and examine the record of that failure if we are to grasp fully the meaning of Malcolm X when he says, “Christianity is a white man’s religion.”

Every people has a sense of the past, the handed-down record of what has gone before, the Ark of the Covenant, as the collective experience of a people. For the American Negro this sense of the past begins in America, not Africa, for it was in America that the American Negro was forged into a people. Under the tutelage of white plantation masters the first slaves discovered a common language that made it possible for them to communicate with each other and thus make a collective expression of their resentment of the peculiar institution known as slavery. The white slave owner was Christian, and despite some efforts to prohibit Negro exposure to the Bible, most slave masters or, more particularly, their wives—saw to it that the slaves heard the gospel. One of the moving scenes of American history is that of slave and slave master gathered together in church on the plantation to hear the gospel of a Christ of brotherhood. Most plantation masters saw to it that the minister kept his sermon confined to such texts as “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters” (Ephesians 6:5). There was a deeper meaning for the slave in the religious life of the plantation. Strangely enough, it was the Old Testament with its rich history of the Jews and their bouts with famines, pestilence, idolatry, and slavery that attracted the imagination of the religious slave. Working in the field by day, having his wife sold away from him down the river to another plantation, seeing his son stripped naked to the waist and given a hundred lashes for being “uppity,” the Negro slave found a cruel parallel between his life and that of those who begged favor to let them return to their homeland and who finally were delivered by God, who visited a series of disasters upon the slave master. Here in the Negro plantation church—called by scholars “The Invisible Institution”—the Negro began to translate the history of the Jews into words of deliverance and hope. It was thus that slaves began to translate the social history of the Jews into Negro spirituals: