U.S. jail

 

View of a prison officer leading an inmate in handcuffs. Photo: 

Edric Wilson, a 47-year-old Black man, was jailed for 18 years without a trial. 

He was arrested in 2006 on charges of capital murder and aggravated assault and sent to Harris County Jail in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. The murder charge was dropped in August 2024, and Mr. Wilson pleaded guilty to the unrelated aggravated assault charge. He was released on parole in February 2025.

The Houston Chronicle shared that Mr. Wilson is one of about 230 people identified as having been in Harris County Jail for more than two and a half years, along with another 1,350 people who have been behind bars for at least a year.

“Harris County, we’ve been noticing in the past five years that there were an enormous number of complaints about court resets and lengthy pretrial detention. Just reset after reset after reset,” Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, said to The Final Call.

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A court reset happens when a court postpones or reschedules a hearing or trial. Ms. Gundu believes this usually happens to “coerce people into taking plea deals.” Outside of Mr. Wilson, she knows of one person who has been in jail for over eight years and another for over nine years.

But long jail times are not just a Texas problem. CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization, published an investigation in March 2021 on how 75% of California’s inmates were being held in jail without being convicted or sentenced for a crime.

At least 1,317 people were waiting in county jails for more than three years, and 332 people were waiting longer than five years. One man had been jailed for nearly 12 years.

Most of the defendants held in jail before their trials are Black and Latino, such as in San Francisco, where Black people are 5% of the population but make up half of the unsentenced inmates who were in jail for more than a year, according to the CalMatters story.

“People being held pretrial for hundreds of days is, unfortunately, not that uncommon,” Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, said to The Final Call. “I’ve heard about it in other places. … I’ve spoken to people about this in Detroit.”

Photo of prisoner behind prison bars. Photo Envato

Jail is supposed to be short-term. In its frequently asked questions, the Bureau of Justice Statistics defines jails as “locally operated short-term facilities that hold inmates awaiting trial, awaiting sentencing, or both, and those sentenced to a term of less than or equal to one year.”

It defines prisons as “longer-term facilities run by the state or federal government typically holding felons and persons with sentences of more than one year.”

From July 2022 to June 2023, people admitted to local jails spent an average of 32 days in custody before release, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2023 inmate report, published in March.

For experts in jail advocacy and pretrial reform, the factors that tie into longer jail time include being unable to post bail, backlogs in the court system, and the lack of social services.

The bail problem

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and the Nation of Islam have been longtime voices of guidance and warning, including in jail and prison reform.

In “The National Agenda: Public Policy Issues, Analyses, And Programmatic Plan of Action,” which was produced out of the Million Family March in 2000, called and convened by Minister Farrakhan, it outlines the issues related to America’s prison and jail system.

“The disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and others in the United States is a crisis of mammoth proportions that we must address.

In many places, up to 50 percent of persons from our communities are on probation, parole or jail. Our failure to address this crisis will greatly diminish our family power and voting power,” the agenda notes on page 39 in the chapter titled “Prison Reform.”

Wendy Shang, a senior consultant for research and resources with the Pretrial Justice Institute, shared her concerns about bail affordability. 

“In general, I think the issue that we’re concerned about that applies to a lot of people is when people are being held because they can’t afford bail,” Ms. Shang said to The Final Call.

“That is a major cause of people being held for excessive amounts of time, is because we’re not saying that they present a threat; we’re not saying they’re not coming back to court, but they just can’t pull the money together.” 

She explained that bail is supposed to be a “mechanism for release,” but instead, “it has gotten turned around where people envision bail as being something that only some people can afford.”

In a report titled “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025,” published on March 11, the Prison Policy Initiative presented data that most people in jail are awaiting trial due to being unable to pay bail.

Race also plays a role. In 2023, Pew researchers found that Black people made up, on average, 12% of their local community populations but 26% of the jail populations.

In 16% of jails, the share of Black people in the jail is at least three times their percentage of the local population, and in 29% of jails, the share of Black people is at least four times their population percentage of the community, according to a study by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization, published an investigation in March 2021, about California’s inmates were being held in jail without being convicted or sentenced for a crime. Graphic: calmatters.org

In addition, as of 2022, Black people were admitted to jail at more than four times the rate of White people and stayed in jail for 12 more days, or about two weeks more, on average. 

Other studies show that Black men are less likely to get a non-financial form of bail.

“There are different kinds of ways people can be released from jail. The one we’re most familiar with is the court sets a bond, and the person eventually posts the bond. But there are non-financial forms of release.

There’s something called release on recognizance, where you just sign a piece of paper saying you’ll come back to court. Or sometimes they’ll have something like, if you don’t come back to court, then you owe a certain amount of money,” Ms. Shang said. “Black men are much less likely to get non-financial forms of bail. They are more likely to get higher bond demands.”

She called it a snowball effect: an already higher contact with police plus higher bond demands equals more Black men in jail; being less likely to get out of jail leads to being more likely to get a sentence of incarceration.

Ms. Shang also described the harmful effects jail can have on individuals and their families. Individuals face the possibility of losing their jobs, homes and cars. In addition, their children are now having an adverse childhood experience, which can put them at risk for future physical and mental health issues.

Ms. Bertram pointed to cases being pushed back by courts as another reason for lengthy jail stays. “That’s often because courts have too many cases to manage or are not managing their cases efficiently,” she said. One of the other reasons for the court backlog is people missing court, she added, which leads to the creation of new hearings.

She listed several solutions to help: one, having policies that help people attend their court hearings on time, as most people do not miss court on purpose, including better reminder systems; two, having built-in services such as childcare and three, releasing people from custody before they go to trial as often as possible.

“Perhaps you have people who are in jail who, truly, the seriousness of their offense means they really need to be there, but there are also people who are sitting in jail pretrial with charges that are not even that serious,” she said.

One further solution she named is eliminating cash bail. Illinois was the first state to do so, with pretrial detention depending on the seriousness of the charges, she added.

“It could be that the solution to Harris County’s problems is very simple, and it’s just to release more people,” Ms. Bertram said.

Social services failures

As Mr. Wilson languished in jail for nearly two decades, he was also in and out of state mental hospitals, according to the Houston Chronicle. He was believed to be “incompetent to stand trial” and forced to go in and out of hospitals attempting to restore his competency despite arguing there was nothing wrong with him.

While there is still debate on whether Mr. Wilson was competent enough to stand trial, Ms. Gundu blamed part of the jail problem on the criminalization of mental illness. She described Texas’ county jail system as “the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in the state.

“And the reason that has happened is because the state has completely dropped the ball on building out a continuum of care in the community for mental health care,” she said. “We’ve just left them to the streets and the jails, because jails have become the easy button.”

Most defendants held in jail before their trials are Black and Latino, such as in San Francisco, where Black people are 5% of the population but make up half of the unsentenced inmates who were in jail for more than a year. According to CalMatters,

While only about 18% of the general population has a mental illness, an estimated 44% of those in jail have a mental illness, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. About 11% of 18–25-year-olds and 6% of those over 25 have a substance use disorder, but 63% of people in jail have a substance use disorder.

“People with these disorders have challenges in getting appropriate treatment and often incarceration exacerbates their symptoms. This can lead to individuals staying incarcerated longer than those without behavioral health concerns,” according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

“Because we’ve criminalized them for the mental illness and disability, then they sit there waiting for competency restoration,” Ms. Gundu said. “Competency restoration is not mental health care.

We just send them to the state hospital, or we have a jail-based competency restoration and we try to stabilize them so we can punish them for their disability. And all these different factors have led to the really long stays you’re seeing in the jail.”

Reforming the system

For Ms. Gundu, the change and reform of America’s jail system starts with building mental health care places that invite people in, where people can live with dignity and purpose.

“If we actually build healthy communities, the need for jails would be obsolete. You wouldn’t need such big jails,” she said. She believes fewer people would be touched by the criminal legal system if people had equitable access to health care, affordable housing and economic opportunities.

“People are more prone to incarceration when their basic needs are not being met—housing, healthcare, jobs, food. If that’s not being met, then they’re more vulnerable to incarceration.

And then once they have been incarcerated, they are even more vulnerable to future incarceration,” she said. “It’s such a vicious cycle, which is why we keep talking about front-end preventive investments.”

Ms. Shang believes in pretrial reform as a temporary solution for those currently in the system, but she also thinks a larger conversation needs to be had about what actually creates safety.

“Do we want people to be permanently affected by their experiences in jail?” she questioned. “We just really need to be thinking bigger about why we have mass incarceration. Why other countries, other developed countries, use jails at a much lower rate than we do and people are safe?

“We have this idea that jails create safety, and what the data is telling us is that it does the exact opposite,” she said. “How do we think better around that?”

The National Agenda offers additional insight and solutions. On page 39, it states: “Too often we allow our incarcerated sisters and brothers to be forgotten and disconnected from the community.

As we work to raise the cultural and political consciousness of our families in public housing and ghettos, and in the suburbs and upscale areas, we must also work to raise the cultural and political consciousness of our family members in the jail cells and chain gangs, and in the solitary wings and death rows.

“Federal, state, and local governments consign many of us to a life of prison numbers, overcrowded cells, parole hearings and disenfranchisement by planning to imprison us rather than planning to educate us.”

The National Agenda offers several recommendations, including:

Provide incarcerated persons with an avenue for community participation and support;

Raise the cultural and political consciousness of the incarcerated;

Prevent incarcerated inmates from being abused or lost in the system, as a result of their own actions or as a result of government neglect or misconduct;

Monitor the general treatment and parole status of those incarcerated from our communities.

More must be done to ensure people who endure unjust and unnecessary lengthy jail stays are not abandoned or forgotten.

Tensions

 

Shanghai container port in sunset, China. Photo: Envato

The tariff and trade war between the U.S., China, and other nations continues, bringing along with it chaos, confusion and escalating tensions. In response to what the White House called a lack of reciprocity between the U.S.

And its trading partners, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14257 and imposed across-the-board tariffs on imports. The president said he made the move as part of his administration’s effort to protect American industries, to increase domestic wages, and to decrease the U.S. trade deficit in a time of growing international conflict.

Billed by President Trump as “Liberation Day,” the April 2 fanfare encircling his tariff agenda, purportedly to increase domestic prosperity, diminished after his announcement triggered a steep drop in global stock prices.

The panic led to an amendment a week later relative to China under Executive Order 14259, and for other countries, including a 90-day pause for their implementation, under Executive Order 14266.

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As of Final Call press time, tariffs against various Chinese exports to the U.S. have reached 145% and for most other countries, a baseline of 10% will be added to their products imported after the pause.

Tariffs are defined as taxes on goods and services imported from another country to raise revenues, to influence the exporting country’s decisions, and/or to protect competitive advantages domestically.

However, these taxes are often passed on to consumers, leading to higher prices that may produce an unintended domino effect to no one’s advantage.

In a country where Black and Indigenous populations are often already struggling financially, rising costs on much-needed goods and services will be a hardship on millions of citizens.

Dr. Linwood Tauheed, Ph.D., is an economist and author of “100 Years of African American Economists: Difficulties and Prospects for Black Political Economy in the 21st Century.”

He told The Final Call that imposing tariffs and doing so during a time of growing international conflict is not without precedent and that what is intended to protect domestic economies often has the opposite effect.

“Tariffs have been in play in countries around the world for centuries and tariffs are used by countries to gain an advantage over other countries in trade,” Dr Tauheed said of the ideological agendas often behind a government’s desire to impose them.

“While Western countries declare themselves to be supporters of free trade, they have generally been engaged in tariffed or protectionist trade, and it usually goes in a one-sided way to protect their markets while they want the rest of the world to open their markets to them,” he explained.

“This goes back certainly to the beginning of colonization, so this is the way empires grew, and tariffs were a significant part of that,” Dr. Tauheed continued. He noted that before the federal income tax was established in 1913.

The main source of revenue for the U.S. government was from duties, fees and various other tariffs, but these were later found insufficient to fund the federal government as America’s power and influence grew into the 20th Century.

British tariff’s on imports and exports on the original 13 colonies that would eventually become the United States, was one of the grievances leading to the American Revolutionary War.

For example the Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed duties or tariff’s on imported goods like paper, lead, paint and glass.

These acts were imposed in order to generate money for the British government and for colonial officials. Other tariff’s were imposed that made the colonists pay higher prices for goods.

“They were called ‘import duties’ then, but they were the same thing—taxes on imports. This is what led to more than a decade of growing estrangement between Great Britain and some (though not all) of the North American Colonies, culminating in the Boston Tea Party

And, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence,” noted an April 9 article titled, “How tariffs helped spark the American Revolution,” published on cardinalnews.org.

Today, with America’s current challenges, how will other nations react to increased tariffs, a trade war with China, and the pressures these realities place on supply and demand, international trade and commerce, and America’s dependency on the global supply chain?

The moves the U.S. is enacting have also caused other countries to voice their anger and displeasure at the possible fallout from the Trump administration’s tariffs. America is consistently losing influence on the world stage.

The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, warned decades ago that, “The strong-hold of the American Government is falling to pieces.” He wrote those words in his seminal book, “The Fall of America,” in the chapter “Decline of the Dollar.”

“She has lost her prestige among the nations of the earth. One of the greatest powers of America was her dollar. The loss of such power will bring any nation to weakness, for this is the media of exchange between nations,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad wrote.

Elements for a perfect storm?

Stating that Russia is not the Soviet Union of 34 years ago, Dr. Tauheed said that regardless of sanctions and other attempts to isolate the former superpower because of its war in Ukraine, Russia’s vast resources, territory,

And highly educated population has enabled them to become self-sufficient and independent from other economies led by the United States, and with increased tariffs levied against China, Western policies are creating increased cooperation between the two dominant powers of the Eurasian continent.

“From Russia being able to become more self-sufficient, it increased its trade with China, and with India, and the fact that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is there, it creates a significant ability for those countries to respond to any sanctions from the West and the growing BRICS (aligned) countries that are able to become more and more self-sufficient,”

Dr. Tauheed noted. Western economies realize that they are much more dependent on non-Western economies than they would like to admit, he opined.

During an April 10 interview with Channel 4 News UK, the vice-president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, Victor Gao, said that the United States is making a mistake by launching a tariff or trade war with China.

“China is fully prepared to fight to the very end because the world is big enough that the United States is not the totality of the market in the world,” Mr. Gao said during the interview. “So, if the United States wants to go in that direction of completely shutting itself out of the China market, be my guest,” he continued.

“China has been here for 5,000 years,” Mr. Gao said. “Most of the time, there was no United States, and we survived. And if the United States wants to bully China, we will deal with the situation without the United States, and we expect to survive for another 5,000 years,” he said.

Mr. Gao also insisted that a trade war with China will harm the United States more because, for decades, America’s manufacturing base has been exported to foreign countries and because the U.S. makes up only a fraction of China’s export market. “

If China and the United States do not take major measures to direct all these tariff war(s) or trade war(s) launched by the United States, we will have a recession,” Mr. Gao said in part. The “we” Mr. Gao was referring to was the U.S. and possibly also China.

“President Trump needs to realize that Rome is not built overnight,” Gao continued. “To talk about millions of manufacturing jobs going back to the United States, relying on tariff(s) is a futile attempt,”

He said of the time it will take the United States to retool its factories, reeducate its workforce, and rebuild a diminished manufacturing base to standards needed to compete with China in the global market.

Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad is the manager for the Nation of Islam’s farm in Georgia and an agricultural economist. He agreed that a trade war resulting from tariffs will hurt American goods exported to China.

But he also stated they will have a significant impact on domestic food prices while undermining America’s exports of farm products to a market of more than one billion Chinese consumers.

“Now that they’re setting up this trade war, it’s going to affect the general public because the only thing a company is going to do is increase their prices to the consumer,” Dr. Ridgely Muhammad told The Final Call.

“They’re not going to lose, so if tariffs go up 100%, they’ll just double their prices and either you buy it or you don’t. China and all the big corporations don’t just depend on America, they’re worldwide,” he said, noting that nations of the Global South, or the global majority, will buy from China if the U.S. refuses to import Chinese goods.

“The super elite don’t need Black people anymore in America, and they don’t need White folks who are demanding a piece of the pie that they helped the elite to steal,” Dr. Ridgely Muhammad said. “So, in this tariff move, they don’t care anything about the American working class, the middle class, they won’t need them,” he said.

Political scientist, host of Connecting the Dots podcast and author of “Politics: Another Perspective,” Dr. Wilmer Leon, told The Final Call that the tariffs called for by the president appears to have more to do with Republicans supporting Mr. Trump than with traditional conservatives advocating for the positions of Reagan Republicans on free trade and open markets.

He said there is seemingly a blind loyalty to the current administration by political allies, but at the expense of the American economy.

Dr. Leon cited parallels between President Trump’s Executive Orders and the motivations behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 at the onset of the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929.

“President Hoover didn’t listen to his advisors in the same way Trump isn’t listening to those who should be advising him today, that’s the greatest parallel that I see,” Dr. Leon stated plainly.

“Economists and a number of very prominent businesspeople and financial minds they told Hoover this is not a good idea and Hoover ignored them.

Before the Great Depression, American industrialization was growing and things were going fairly well, but one of the problems today is there is not a lot of American industry to protect because we’ve outsourced everything,” he said.

The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, have taught and demonstrated the need for Black people to “do-for-self” and not depend solely on the American government to do what they can do for themselves.

Minister Farrakhan noted in a message, “Justice is the Joy of Freedom,” delivered on November 20, 2010, at the Coronado Performing Arts Theatre in Rockford, Illinois, that “Government shouldn’t have to do everything for the citizens, but government should create the atmosphere that the citizen can do for themselves.”

During his message, Minister Farrakhan spoke on conditions impacting Rockford and other cities that were once great hubs of manufacturing and industry. Smaller family-owned companies were acquired by larger companies, which then relocated products to lower-wage markets or sent them overseas to be manufactured, he explained.

“So what happens to the people of Rockford who are blue-collar workers? What happens to the people of Chicago or the people of the urban centers of America who looked to factories to give them a decent wage that they could feed their families?

Now that the factories have closed or have been relocated, the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are left in the lurch. And Blacks being the most unlearned, the most unskilled, the most dependent, unfortunately, are the worst off,” Minister Farrakhan said.

Many economists on various sides of the political spectrum have expressed doubt that the Trump administration’s tariff action will revitalize the economy, bring back America’s manufacturing and industry, or create millions of jobs for its people.

Divine guidance and a divine solution

The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught and demonstrated what Black people must do to address their economic situation. In his book, “Message to the Blackman in America,” he explains on page 195 that, “It is very hard for an economist to plan a wise program and see his plans carried out, because the so-called American Negroes’ economics are controlled by the White man.

The White man owns the country and the industry. Now, it is difficult to plan an economic program for a dependent people who, for all their lives, have tried to live like the White man.”

Nation of Islam Southwest Regional Student Minister Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad of Houston’s Mosque No. 45, who has a background in urban planning and environmental policy, told The Final Call that predictions of tariff-driven price increases, unemployment.

Budget cuts and austerity measures that have laid off or fired thousands of federal employees, may prove to be just the beginning of sorrows for both the American people in general and for Black people in particular.

“We have to go back and examine the cost of rejecting what God gave to the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. It’s all written in his book, ‘Message to the Blackman in America,’” he said.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said: “Our economic position remains at the bottom of the ladder because of this ineffective leadership and because so many of our people ignore the basic rules of a healthy economic life. We fail to develop self-leadership in economics.”

Student Minister Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad quoted from page 194 of “Message to the Blackman in America” and encourages people to read and implement the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s guidance as outlined between pages 194 through 203. In those pages, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad lays a base for how to make an economic program successful.

“Black people have to undergo a total and complete paradigm shift in our thinking to mitigate the fallout of what has begun and what is continuing to come as the days ahead become darker and darker,”

Student Min. Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad said. “What is happening with the tariffs, what is happening with the government, and what is happening with Affirmative Action, and so-called DEI?” he asked.

“All of this is for us to hit the reset button so we may know that Pharaoh has let us go and that now is the time for us to let Pharaoh go,” Student Minister Dr. Haleem Muhammad said. “We must get up and ‘do-something-for-self’ as the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan have taught us to do.”

Reflect Jesus

 

Our people need service. They do not need masters, they need servers, and I am honored that in my lifetime I am being blessed to see what I have longed to see since I was a little boy: the unity of us, as a people. How joyous my heart is to be with my Christian family. I told White Arabs that I would not jump over one Black Christian to find unity with a White Arab, even though they are Muslims and I am a Muslim.

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The church is my family. I had a Christian upbringing; I sang in the choir; I carried the cross; I know all the hymns of my church. Sometimes, on Sunday morning while I am changing channels on my television, I hear some of those hymns that I used to sing and I sing quietly to myself and the tears fall from my eyes, because I remember my church.

There is no power that will separate me from the church. Even though I say that I am a Muslim, without the church our people are lost. The church has been our comfort when we had nothing to hold on to. The corruptors are always busy corrupting the church, mosque and synagogue, so that the house of God is a divided house. Satan is really the master today of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

We hold up the names of Christ, Muhammad and Moses as a shield for the way we live, which is totally opposite of what these men lived and the life that they taught us to live—which says that Satan caused us to deviate even though we claim the great names of our prophets. So, religion, as Karl Marx said, did become the opiate of the people.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was the son and grandson of a Baptist preacher. When he would sit in the church in Sandersville, Georgia, listening to his father, he knew that one day he would preach something different, but he did not know what it was. When he met Master Fard Muhammad and heard what Master Fard Muhammad taught, he began preaching what is called “Islam.” His work in setting up mosques was a protest against the church. It was not that Jesus was off the mark; it was that we were off the mark in the name of Jesus.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan

He taught us wisdom and never allowed music in the temple; the music was to be the Word of God. He cleaned us up by teaching the Bible, not the Holy Qur’an. When we came to him, we were like everybody else—liars, thieves, adulterers, murderers and then some—but he used the Bible to call us to live a righteous life. He called us to live the lives of the prophets whose names we honored with our tongues, but our lives were far removed from them.

When I saw his temple and met Brother Minister Malcolm X, he became my mentor. He was one of the finest examples that I could have ever had in my beginning days in Islam. I never heard him curse. He was never late for an appointment. When I would sleep in his house, he would wake me up at 5 a.m. for Fajr prayer. He was an exceedingly disciplined man under the Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad never liked whooping in the church, so he made all of his ministers like professors; we had to teach and become lovers of knowledge, because our people are in their condition because of a lack of knowledge. Even though Malcolm X did not go beyond the 8th grade, he had genius sitting in his breast—as genius is in the breast of our people. They just need to be quickened to life. When Malcolm awakened, he began reading everything in the library worth reading, starting with the dictionary, from cover to cover.

Whenever I would sit to be taught by Brother Malcolm, he always broke words down into their meanings; he understood the root of words. He knew that, through words, you can either get tricked or you can be free. The first book he put in my hands was “100 Amazing Facts about the Negro” by J.A. Rogers; then “100 Years of Lynching,” then “17 Million Negroes, 17 Million Dollars.” I had to read all of those books, study my Lessons. Then, I had to read another book by J.A. Rogers, “From Superman to man.” Then, I had to study world history, under his direction. Then, he gave me the Holy Qur’an, the first one that I had ever owned.

100 Amazing facts about the negro

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad started a revolution in the church from his own rebellion against the way of the church. Because of him, a Black Theology emerged in the Christian house. Before the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was Black conscious. It was the church of Marcus Garvey and many of the revolutionaries. But when the Honorable Elijah Muhammad started teaching us that Jesus was our Brother because he was a Black man, then all of the White images of him came down and we began taking pride in ourselves.

I am so happy to be on the rostrum of this house of God with the head of the Interdenominational Theological Center, because for years we have been at odds, not because we have really been at odds, but because an enemy wants to keep us at odds. If we ever united, we know that the real revolution will take place.

Jesus was a revolutionary. He laid down the path of revolution, if you really understand him. He was not a milquetoast man who was sweet and nice. How can we represent that great man in a punkish manner? Jesus is the key to the freedom of every human being who lives on this earth.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is honored in Islam above all women and above the mothers of all other prophets. Why Mary? Her womb was blessed with a world saviour, a child whose destiny was to perfectly reflect the wisdom, mind, spirit and power of the Creator of the heavens and the earth. Jesus was the man who would once again lift the human from his degraded state to the exalted state that God created human beings to be.

We must understand Jesus the revolutionary because, if the Millions More Movement does not reflect Jesus the revolutionary, it will never be the effective tool for the redemption, reconciliation—of not only Black people, but all humanity—back to God.

From the time of the fall of Adam, the world has needed a human being who could connect mankind, or man, again with God. Adam’s death was not physical; it was spiritual. His fall represented the fall of all humanity. When the human falls, that human (male or female) begins to live in the underworld of his desires. When Adam’s eyes came open after his rebellion against God, his eyes became open to the world of passion and appetite from the navel down.

Once he fell down to live by his appetite, then greed, lust and covetousness began to take hold of the human mind to degrade the human into a being far less than what God created us to be. He created us in His image and after His likeness. The Holy Qur’an says that Allah (God) created us to be Khalifah, to stand in His place as His successor. You cannot succeed God if you are not god.

David the Psalmist said, “Ye are all gods, children of the Most High God.” But you first have to be His child. It is an error for preachers to say that we are all the children of God. We all have the capacity to be the child of God, but that is a decision that we have to make as to whose child we are going to be.

The Bible says, “As by one man sin entered into the world and death came by sin.” All men have sinned, so all are under death. The Bible also says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” What kind of death? Once human beings live in the flesh rather than in the spirit, they become dead to the real power of self. You do not need a television to see or a telephone to hear, when you are alive in the spirit of God as Jesus was, and is.

The Bible says that “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, did” He did not have to have a telephone to listen—like the government uses to listen; they are trying to imitate the natural powers of human beings who live in the spirit of God, but they cannot do it from their minds because they are too wicked.

God allows you to get hints of your powers; sometimes you can see an occurrence before it happens or hear something that you know you were not present to hear. The real ear and eyes are not physical. When your mind is lit with the light of God, you see beyond the eyes and hear beyond the ears. You are naturally endowed with those powers, but those powers have been put to sleep because we are following a people who live diametrically opposed to the way of the Creator.

In the scripture, Jesus says, “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death came by sin.” So by one man should all be made alive.

If you were the devil, the archdeceiver, and knew that Jesus was coming to defeat you and your underworld of transgression, who would you have to deceive the world about? Satan knows that Jesus is the end of his world and the beginning of a new world. Jesus is a door. He said, “If you enter into me, you will be saved.”

Jesus described himself in many ways:

• “I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman.”
• “I am the bread of life.”
• “I am the light of the world.”
• “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
• “I am the good shepherd.”

The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. A man like that is a man who the whole world needs. A man like that can raise us up out of the condition that we are in and raise us up again to become beings that reflect God. The human being is only a stage of development;

you have to grow from the level of an animal to be a human, which means that you have mentally evolved to be able to put the humus (the earth) under the power of a resurrected mind. But that process of evolution and development does not stop with a human being; it continues until you become a divine being reflecting the perfection of the Creator.

That is why Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am you may be also.” The Bible also says that “they will be changed in the twinkling of an eye” and “they will be like him, Jesus.” The Bible says that Jesus was exalted to the “right hand of God” and given power over everything except God, Himself.

Jesus serves as an example that a human being born of a woman could master the forces of the universe, in order to show us our possibilities, that we should never accept what the world has made us; we must be willing to accept what God wants to make us, through Jesus, a revolutionary.

A real revolution is not with the gun; a real revolution is to overthrow the government in your mind. You must ask yourself, who is the king in your dome? Then, you will know whose children you are. If we are the body of Christ, then our hands do the work of Jesus, our mouths speak the will and the word of Jesus, and our feet walk the path of Jesus. But whose children are we?

Satan has performed a magnificent act of deception. The Bible says he would make himself an angel of light. He knows God, because that is the only way that he can deceive us about God. You can be a dumb devil—and most of us are just dumb devils—but Satan is a devil-maker. He is wise becuase he knows how to manipulate people to make them think that they are on the path of God while they have actually strayed from the straight way. So, the Bible says that, “We war not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world and spiritual wickedness in high places.”

It would take years to fully teach this subject, because Jesus is so dynamic a human being. I walk in the path of Jesus. There is no other path for a true revolutionary. A true revolutionary rises up not necessarily from the finest of circumstances, for Jesus was born in an oxstall, so he was born among animals. I walk the path of Jesus, which is not an easy path. Who is arrayed against me?

We live in a modern Rome. Ancient Rome, Sodom and Gomorrah, Persia and Babylon are nothing compared to this country. The government of the United States has always been looking like Cain, after he slew his brother Abel. He knew that the blood of Abel was crying out for justice, so he said that “Every man who sees me will slay me.” That is the mind of a guilty person.

America has done so much evil that she sees death coming from everywhere. White people do not believe we have a heart for forgiveness because they know, that if they were in our shoes they would be plotting to kill them—like this govenment worked against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While they were talking to him in the White House, they were plotting to kill him.

When God gives you revelation, that is your test. If you use the wisdom of God according to the will of God, then you are a child of God. But if you use it to fatten your pockets, then you are the child of Satan, and maybe Satan himself. In the Bible, Revelations 2:9, it reads, “Those who say they are Jews and are not, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan.” This is referring to a specific group of people who claim to be Jews but they are not because they use the wisdom of God for wicked purposes. And there are Christians and Muslims who also use the wisdom of God for wicked purposes.

So, among all of the monothesistc expressions there is gross hypocrisy. Those who try to do what the prophets say are overshadowed by those who use the names of the prophets to shield unclean practice. In trying to walk this path of Jesus, I have angered that Satanic mind because I am pulling the cover off their deceptive practice.

The scripture says, “Let this mind be in you, the same that was in Christ Jesus.”

“Let” is a verb of permission, which means we have to accept an invitation. Christ Jesus had the kind of mind that God offered Adam in the Garden of Eden, which he rebelled against—the mind that Jesus offers us is the mind of God. In order to accept this mind that is offered to us, we have to permit the overthrow of the mind that is in us now. God is calling for a regime change—get rid of the mind of Willie Lynch and accept the mind of God.

Let the mind of Christ Jesus come into your life. If he knocks, let him in, for if you let him in, He will sup with you. This will make Satan angry, because Jesus came to meddle in the lives of people who thought that they had accepted him, but were actually following the mind of Satan.

If you let him in, you will be able to say, “Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world.”

Psalms 23 reads, “The Lord is my shepherd”—I have no leader but the Lord; “I shall not want”—for anyting that I will not be able to achieve because if He is my shepherd I can do all things in Christ; “he leadeth me besides the still waters, he restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his namesake.

Yea though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies. My cup runneth over, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

This is the Promise of the Lord; this is our inheritance. Let him in and there is nothing that we will not be able to achieve.

He Fears

 There is one thing a (narc)issist fears more than anything else.

If you think about it, you may come to the conclusion that this is the only thing he is afraid of.

The narcissist is afraid of rejection. It’s not about rejecting who he really is because the narcissist abandoned his identity long ago.

The fear is the rejection of his false identity, the role he plays, and the mask he presents.

A narcissist pretends to be someone he is not, and everything he does from the moment he starts devaluing you is a response to rejection.