Dr. King’s & Min. Farrakhan’s Answer to Rep. Paul Ryan
Tingba Muhammad, NOI Research Group
(Final Call, March 27, 2014) – In a recent radio interview Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan said: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
After being roundly denounced as a racist, Ryan claimed his original statement was “inarticulate.” His clarification is worth examination: “We have allowed our society to isolate or quarantine the poor rather than integrate people into our communities. I also believe the government’s response has inadvertently created a poverty trap that builds barriers to work. A stable, good-paying job is the best bridge out of poverty.”
The substance of his observation is very near correct. But his suggestion that the condition he describes is the result of some sort of “inadvertent” collateral damage, rather than a well-documented specific design, is incredibly naïve.
In reality, Ryan’s original attack on Black people, and his more “articulate” clarification, can all be classified as political nonsense, unless he is truly courageous enough to act on his next statement:
“I have witnessed amazing people fighting against great odds with impressive success in poor communities. We can learn so much from them, and that is where this conversation should begin.”
In fact, the conversation has been going on for 84 years, beginning in the “inner-city” neighborhood of Black Bottom in Detroit, when a man named Master Fard Muhammad brought a Resurrection Teaching to a people who were suffering under the conditions Paul Ryan describes today. Within months 25,000 Black men and women had arisen from the ashes, taken on the names of God Himself, and committed themselves and their families to truth, hard work, and community regeneration.
Paul Ryan’s government—the one that he has pledged himself to, that he has taken an oath of allegiance to, the one that he now represents for Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district—used its arms and its treasure with the aim of destroying every last bit of Master Fard Muhammad’s life-giving work to uplift the oppressed Black man and woman. The U.S. government arrested law-abiding Muslims—not the Jewish bootleggers who had opened 25,000 liquor joints all over Detroit. Government officials shut down the schools and jail the teachers who were teaching Black children to overcome the “tailspin of culture” Ryan complains of today. Rep. Ryan’s government used tactics of harassment, slander, sabotage, and assassination to destroy every attempt made by the Muslims to establish industry, agriculture, and self-development of any kind. Even as narcotics flooded in to every American “inner city” by way of men like Arnold Rothstein, Dutch Schultz, Harry Bronfman, and Meyer Lansky, U.S. government’s top law enforcement officer, J. Edgar Hoover, was famously denying that organized crime existed at all in America .
Muslims under Min, Farrakhan formed the “Dope Busters” and took on these drug traders, who had lodged themselves in the housing projects of every major “inner city.” Rep. Ryan can read the Congressional Record, which outlines how Jewish “leaders” ran up into Congress and snatched the funds out of the budget that would have eliminated the drug trade, employed thousands of former gangbangers, and helped stabilize and regenerate the “inner city” communities.
And Ryan wants to “begin” the conversation now?!
Forever, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and now the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, have actually RUN the conversation that Ryan wants to now initiate. Min. Farrakhan speaks in riveting tones about the absolute responsibility of Muslims to follow Isaiah’s commandment (61:4): “They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.”
Rep. Ryan has a real opportunity to act on this Biblical imperative and take his Tea Partiers from their reputation as disgruntled race-baiting whites—an image he has just re-confirmed—to a reputation as true patriots and rebuilders of a community that he admits America “inadvertently” destroyed.
In 2013, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan assembled economists from diverse backgrounds from around the country to analyze the economic “Marshall Plan” for Blacks advanced by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. After that Phoenix conference, he launched Muhammad’s Economic Blueprint, which calls for people of all races, religions, parties, and cultures, to contribute just 35 cents a week to a treasury dedicated to true economic development and progress—a painless opportunity to unite as Americans to reverse the collapsing of America’s “inner cities.” And even if only Blacks participated, it would raise over $291 million in a single year—the money would be dedicated to reestablishing an economic foundation that has been systematically wiped out, and replaced with the predatory economy of lottery outlets, payday loan scams, crack houses, and prisons.
As the preeminent voice of the Republican Party and of the Tea Party, Rep. Paul Ryan can without delay adopt the “Blueprint” in the platform of his own party. Just as quickly as he unleashed his inarticulate “inner-city” rhetoric last week, he can reinvent himself with the words of Isaiah and the theme of “Economic Blueprint.” It provides a real opportunity to continue what Rep. Jack Kemp started years ago when he embraced the program of the Nation of Islam. Ryan—a former speechwriter for Kemp—can move his party onto firm and righteous ground that is fully consistent with his own private enterprise philosophy.
And as he considers the wisdom of embracing Muhammad’s Economic Blueprint for America, Rep. Ryan might also consider that the forces of negativity—the same ones who showed up in Black neighborhoods with narcotics, liquor, and political chicanery—will be showing up again to say that working with Farrakhan “is a slap in the face to the legacy of Martin Luther King.”
But in a recent speech, Min. Farrakhan reminded his audience that Dr. King’s prescription for an intransigent and racist America was also economically based, and, some might even say, economically aggressive. In his very last speech in a Memphis church the night before his assassination by the U.S. government, the Rev. Dr. King preached hard: 
Now the other thing we’ll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively…we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine.
Dr. King did not stop at simply identifying a dormant power that Blacks had been neglecting. He went on to explain how to wield that power in the battle against the enemies of the Black movement:
We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. …[W]e are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy Wonder Bread.
He said that when we Blacks feel pain, “we must kind of redistribute the pain.”
Dr. King apparently did not “love everybody,” as we have been told. But if he did, he was wise enough to know when and who needed tough love in the form of an economic beating.
Rep. Ryan, like all other leaders of white America, must now deal with the synthesis of Black ideologies they once thought were far, far apart. That schism allowed those white leaders to choose the policy direction that satisfied some Blacks but only confirmed the racist status quo. We are at the point now where Dr. King and Min. Farrakhan are speaking with one clear economic voice and pointing Black people in the same clear economic direction. One is pointing out a way for everyone to contribute painlessly, the other has counseled Blacks to “redistribute the pain” to their enemies. Both are very right.
The fact is, the Republicans, the Democrats, and their whole political system is “tail-spinning” painfully toward its own demise, even faster than is the “inner-city” gang culture among our Black youth. The Nation of Islam at least has a demonstrated record of reversing these negative trends, and if allowed into the schools and other institutions dedicated to our oppression, that record would be no less than miraculous. By contrast, white America’s record at fixing any of its myriad problems—current or past—is virtually non-existent.
While whites have chosen Paul Ryan to grapple with the darkness that surrounds America, let us thank ALLAH over and over again for the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, and for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King that Farrakhan introduced us to, both of whom have given us a brilliant light to follow.
Will Rep. Paul Davis Ryan be the first of the Gentiles to, as Isaiah says (60:3), lead the nation to the brightness of our rising?
Does he have any choice?
(Tingba Muhammad is a citizen of the Nation of Islam.)