By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that "When you are looking at the Black man, you are
looking at God." Now was he exaggerating, being blasphemous or trying to make the downtrodden
once slave feel better about himself?

It is no doubt that back in the 1930’s when Master Fard Muhammad made his presence known in
Detroit, Mich. among an illiterate and backward population in the ghetto, talking this type of talk,
it caused an uproar. And in fact, within 4 years this stranger from the East had made 25,000
converts. One of them was the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, then known as Elijah Poole, a little Black
man born in Deepstep, Ga.

After Master Fard Muhammad left, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught that the Black man is God
and the white man is the devil. With this teaching he built the Nation of Islam, that by the early
1970’s had developed businesses, farm land and resurrected thousands of Black people to life.

When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad left and his son Wallace took over the leadership of the
Nation of Islam, the works of the Messenger was slowly taken down and the teaching of "the
Black man is God and the white man is the devil" was thrown into the waste basket as propaganda
that was no longer needed by a mature people who were ready for "Al Islam". I, like
thousands of others rejected this "old teaching" and went about my "new
African-American Muslim" way.

I went back to college and got my masters in Agricultural Economics, then went to Michigan State
to get my PhD. While there I began to re-evaluate the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad by
researching the books available on Ancient Egypt and Greece. As I contemplated the reasons for the
building of the pyramids in Egypt, a "revelation" came into my head in the form of one
word, "water". From this one hint of "water" I produced a new theory about the
pyramids which I published in 1988 called "Amen: The Secret Waters of the Great Pyramid."

This train of research reawakened in me the need to understand the teaching of "The Black
man is God and the white man is the devil." Now as we move into "Black History
Month", I felt that the question of "What is Black?" should be analyzed.

But before I get into the meat of this article, I have got to warn my plagiaristic, short sighted
and arrogant brothers and sisters about stealing "light". I give all credit for any light
that I may find and share to the source of my "light" and life and that is the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad. You might say, why not "God"? Well "God" had no time for a poor
Black boy like me until the Honorable Elijah Muhammad explained "God" to me. I thank God
(Allah) for him, because I know that I could have never reached the true understanding of God and
man without him. I am not so foolish as to think that I could have awakened from this 6,000 year
sleep with the power of my own ignorance.

Many of those who were touched by him, directly or indirectly through those who studied under
him, would have you to believe that they got their "light" on their own. Let me warn you
that the secret to understanding is based in truthfulness, love and respect. If you disrespect your
spiritual parent, your work and life is worth nothing and will soon be swallowed up by the
"true" inheritors of the light as we come into maturity.

Now, "Black" is neither a color nor a race. From black comes all colors and light. The
Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that the Black nation has no beginning or ending as does a
"race".

The dictionary would have you to believe that "black" is just a pigment. However, the
molecule that produces "black", melanin, is being analyzed in the white man’s
laboratories as a basis for a whole new era of micro chips and computers. Just as they try to make
you think that melanin has no useful purpose other than blocking ultra-violet radiation, they would
have Black people think that some how we need white people around to have a civilization. In the
meantime they hire us at below our market value, steal our ideas and creativity, then call us stupid
to the rest of the world. Many idiots accuse the Black Muslims of being "racist" because
we tell these truths. They say that we "don’t like white people". Those who say this
need to come with a list of reasons why we should like a people who have enslaved us, used us and
worst of all, lied on us to ourselves, our children and the rest of the world, so that we are the
rejected and despised of the planet Earth.

Many of the inventions and developments in math and science have been approbated to the European
race while they know that they stole many of them right out of Africa. In particular Kemet which
they call Egypt was where everybody went for advance studies. At those colleges which the white man
calls "temples" the students were taught geology, astronomy, agriculture, mathematics,
medicine, geometry, physics and a high level of chemistry. In fact the word "chemistry"
itself means "black science".

Europeans want to give credit to Pythagoras for the "Pythagorean theorem". However,
Pythagoras went to school in Africa at the great library in Alexandria. Have you ever wondered why
the Greeks had their major library in Alexandria on the other side of the Aegean and Mediterranean
Seas? Would it not be more convenient to have their major and only library in Athens or Sparta? Or
is it that their "library" was a place where they translated and stole the works of
Africans and put their names on it? This is the same thing that they did to their African captives
in America during and after slavery.

Now, let’s look at the many recent inventions produced by Black people in America after
slavery. We don’t have a record before slavery because Blacks had no legal rights to themselves or
their products. Before emancipation the "massa" took and claimed all. Below is a partial
listing of some of them:

Two years prior to the Tulsa Riot there was an outbreak of whites rioting or should I say
invading and destroying in 26 Black communities in the US. The time period from the 1890’s
through the 1920’s not only saw many race riots but America participated in a string of
lynching.

Below I have presented a chart plotting the number of Black inventions that I found on the
Internet from 1860 to 1939. On this same chart I have plotted the number of Blacks lynched from 1880
to 1929. To get the number to fit on the same graph I divided the number of Blacks lynched by 100.
So when you see in the decade of 1880-89 the number 6, that refers to 600 Blacks lynched.

We also have plotted the number of Black owned farm land acreage starting from the first national
census data that kept track of it starting in 1900. The acreage data is plotted in units of
millions. Therefore, "16" on the graph represents 16 million acres.

When I looked at this graph my mind was blown away with the level of creativity that Blacks
exemplified in the decades between 1880 and 1900. This twenty year period accounted for almost 70
inventions compared to less than 10 for the period between 1900 and 1920. What happened to dampen
this quick rise of Black creativity? The answer lies in the increased brutality and lawlessness
perpetrated against Blacks during this period.

After Blacks were sold out by the Republican Party after the 1876 elections which is known as the
1877 Compromise, the Northern troops were pulled out of the South allowing the KKK to have its way
with Blacks. A string of crucifixions called lynching reached a crescendo by the 1890s terrorizing
Black people literally out of their minds. The level of creativity dropped after 1900 at the peak of
the lynching. After then Blacks that dared to use their creative mind had to come back under the
ownership of the children of their former slave masters, now incorporated.