My beloved people: I know your problems and your burdens; I know your problems and your burdens; I know what you go through; you don’t have to tell me ... for I have the ABSOLUTE CURE for all your problems and ailments. All you have to do is listen to what I say, and then jump up on your feet and follow me.
I don’t want you to be too proud, as others were in former times; they were too proud to follow the words of the prophets. I don’t want you to be like that. I want you to place more value on your life than they did. Think something of your future, and your children, and your people. Accept Allah and His religion and follow me and I will lead you to Him and to a heaven right here on this earth. Come and follow me, and you will not have to wait until after you die to see God, nor will you have to wait until after you die to enjoy a heaven somewhere up in the sky.
Beloved brothers and sisters: after receiving this Divine Revelation that I am teaching you from the Mouth of God, I have not stopped one day for the last twenty-nine years. I have been standing, preaching to you throughout these past twenty-nine years, while I was free and even while I was in bondage. I spent three and one-half years in the federal penitentiary and also over a year in the city jail for teaching this truth. I was also deprived of a father’s love for his family for seven long years while I was running from hypocrites and other enemies of this word and revelation of God, and which will give life to you and put you on the same level with all other civilized and independent nations of this earth ... and this is the greatest desire of Almighty God Allah and Elijah Muhammad. This afternoon I want to teach the so-called American Negroes the true knowledge of themselves that will lift them from the bottom and place them back at the top of civilization.
I know how you feel. I know how you think. You think as Ezekiel says of you. Ezekiel says, “This whole House of Israel, they say their hope was lost and they were cut off from their fathers.” You are a people who are all hopeless because you think there is no hope for you. You think that because you have been cut off from your own people for so long there is no chance of you ever uniting or of ever becoming anything but what you now are. I say you are wrong. The God of your Fathers, whose proper name is Allah, will strengthen you and cause you to stand upon your own feet as an independent people in the eyes of other people on this earth.
This Truth that I am teaching will raise you up from the grave, not out of the earthly grave, but out of the “grave of ignorance.” You just need the knowledge of yourself, your own God and your own religion. God has missioned me to give you this Truth: freedom, justice, and equality.
These are the things I must teach you about: freedom first, because you have never been free here in America. You know nothing about the pleasures or happiness of a free person. You know nothing about justice. You know nothing about equality, or being equal with other civilized nations of earth.
I know you and your thoughts about me and what I teach. Inwardly, some of you are with me 100 per cent, but outwardly you are not. Why? Because you have the greatest enemy over you a man can have, and that is “FEAR.” Fear is your greatest enemy. You were filled with fear of your slave master when you were little babies, over 400 years ago when our fathers were brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere on a slave ship that was named “The Good Ship Jesus.” The captain of that ship was an English Christian named John Hawkins.
The American white people had come to this country from Europe and had already begun to subdue the Indians. We were brought here to a people who could not speak our language nor could we speak theirs. Thus the language of our forefathers was soon destroyed, and you know nothing about it today. The language of the slave master was forced upon our foreparents, and they were brought up also wearing the names of the slave masters. Today, you are still speaking their language and wearing their names.
During 300 long years of slavery you were deprived of the privilege of even going to church, and there were no such things as schools for you in those days. Besides depriving you of education the slave master did not teach you about God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost that he is now teaching you about today. You were never allowed to sit with them in their churches until just a few years ago.
Beloved brothers and sisters, think over this: for over 400 years you had no knowledge of yourselves, no knowledge of your own religion, and no knowledge of the biblical prophecies and predictions pertaining to the “lost people” who would be on this planet until the last days, and whom God Himself would have to search for and then save them from the clutches of their enemies. You have never been given a knowledge of that because your slave master knew those prophecies were speaking about you (the American so-called Negroes).