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March 25, 2004

Farrakhan fires up crowd at National Black Agenda conf.

Jeremy Schwab

As he waited to hear Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan speak, Rev. Donald Luster, mayor of the Chicago suburb of Dixmoor, talked excitedly about the significance of the National Black Agenda Convention.

“The key to it is being unapologetically pro-black and pro-active,” he said. “We as a people have to start looking within and not looking for a handout. It has to start with love of self, and then you expand that to love others and you have a true coalition.”

The goal of the Convention, held last week at Roxbury Community College, was to create a consensus agenda — political, economic as well as spiritual — that blacks can unite around. Convention organizers state representatives Ben Swan and Shirley Owens-Hicks and former state Sen. Bill Owens plan to present the unified agenda that came out of the event to each presidential candidate.

The National Caucus of Black State Legislators, which endorsed the Convention, is also expected to debate and try to implement part or all of the agenda.

While state and local lawmakers, activists and religious leaders came to the five-day event to formulate an agenda through workshops and forums, they also came for the camaraderie and entertaining speakers.

Farrakhan’s speech rivaled that of any religious revivalist, with his trademark mixture of wit and cutting denunciations of the status quo.

“The history of this country has been written to make thieves and slaveholders look good,” said the 71-year-old minister soon after taking the stage as the keynote speaker Thursday night. “Now that the power of black people is awakened, you will never be able to rule us tomorrow like you ruled us yesterday.”

Farrakhan called for African Americans to unite and pressure the white establishment to give them their due.

“I wish before now and November we can force reparations into the national debate,” he said. “We shouldn’t give the Democratic Party our vote just because we don’t like President Bush. Ralph Nader jumped into the race. He represents about five percent [of voters] and they are worried about him. So they are going to go to him and say, ‘What do you want?,’” said Sharpton, mimicking a Democrat sidling up to Nader and whispering nervously in his ear.

“They ain’t going to ask you and that is because you already sold out,” he told the audience, to shouts of approval.

Farrakhan did not just target whites, but also so-called “Uncle Toms.”

“We have a bigger middle-class than ever,” he said. “There are millionaire and billionaire negroes, and they are scared and they are the buffer between the angry black masses and the whites who deceive and trick us on a daily basis. We have to calm [Uncle] Tom down. We need to take him around the corner and teach him a lesson.”

Farrakhan also denounced the public education system, whose tenets he noted were established by the thinking of people like John Dewey and Emmanuel Kant, whom Farrakhan called racists.

The minister mocked the value of a Harvard or Yale degree, saying that blacks who earn educations in America are simply being educated into the mind-set of a system which oppresses them.

“Malcolm [X] went through eighth grade,” he said. “He had no PhD. But I saw him handcuff white people in debates. That is because he could think outside the box, and they were in the box.”

Farrakhan spoke of the need for young leadership. He showered praise on Malik Zulu Shabazz, who heads the New Black Panther Party, a group which was highly visible at the convention with their all-black uniforms and calls for black nationalism.

“Those of us who don’t have as many tomorrows as yesterdays see in Malik Zulu Shabazz the strength and power and spirit that we need,” he said. “We need to put all we have at his command. History demands that elders know when to step back.”

Shabazz, whose secular-oriented group was founded in 1989 by a former Nation of Islam member and has since sprouted 40 affiliates nationwide, said he was humbled by the praise.

“It is clearly evident we have a common belief and ideology in a black agenda,” he told the Banner, in comparing his group to the Nation of Islam. “I’m very humbled and honored that the elder statesman of our movement would have such words.”

Throughout Farrakhan’s long speech, he was showered with applause. The native of Roxbury returns regularly to speak in his old neighborhood, where the Nation of Islam has set down roots in the form of Muhammad’s Mosque #11 in Grove Hall.

 

 

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