Speech of Khalid Muhammad

Khalid Abdul Muhammad

This speech given by Khalid Abdul Muhammad at Kean College in New Jersey on November 29, 1993, drew widespread attention from the media and thrust NOI's campus activities into the national spotlight. But rather than damaging his speaking career, the controversy that surrounded the speech has elevated Muhammad's celebrity status among radicalized Black students.

Transcript from the speech:

We don't owe [the whites] nothing in South Africa . . . we give him 24 hours to get out of town, by sundown. That's all. If he won't get out of town by sundown, we kill everything white that ain't right (inaudible) in South Africa.

We kill the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill the blind, we kill the crippled (inaudible), we kill 'em all. We kill the faggot, we kill the lesbian, we kill them all.

Mohammad went furtherby calling for the death of every white person in the state of South Africa by claiming that God Almighty would, some day, grantenough power so "everything white" might be killed.

"We kill the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill the blind, we kill the crippled, we kill 'em all. We kill the faggot, we kill the lesbian, we kill 'em all."

DEATH OF BLACK BIGOT ENDS LIFE OF HATRED

WASHINGTON — Khalid Abdul Muhammad died an angry man.

The one-time member of the Nation of Islam and retro leader of the New Black Panther Party passed away Saturday in an Atlanta hospital. The clinical cause of his death is thought to have been a ruptured brain aneurysm, but I suspect Muhammad was overcome by the hatred he spewed. "I was born to give the white man hell," Muhammad said during a 1995 speech. "And I will give him hell from the cradle to the grave."

While it's not certain when the fiery black nationalist — who was born Harold Moore Jr. in 1948 — first turned his wrath on whites, it's clear he took his rabid dislike of them to the grave. Those who mourn his passing view Muhammad as something of a black messiah. Fortunately their numbers are small.

Khalid Abdul Muhammad was a bigot. When it came to whites and Jews, he didn't see individuals; he saw a monolith. Just as white racists lump all African Americans together, Muhammad crammed all whites and Jews into a single cubbyhole. He is best remembered for the 1993 speech he gave at a New Jersey college.

In that racist tirade, Muhammad lashed out at whites, Jews and the black athletes and politicians he accused of being their puppets.

Muhammad referred to the pope as a "no-good cracker" and called on all whites to leave South Africa voluntarily within 24 hours of the outcome of the 1994 election that made Nelson Mandela that country's first black president. If they didn't, Muhammad said they should be massacred.
"We kill the babies. We kill the blind. We kill the crippled," he urged. Following this outburst, Muhammad was fired from his position as national spokesman for the Nation of Islam.
Several months later, Muhammad was at it again.

"Never will I say I am not an anti-Semite," Muhammad told an audience in Baltimore in February 1998. "Whatever he (the Jew) is, goddamn it, I'm against him. I pray for my enemy all the time. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth."
Weeks later during a speech at Howard University, Muhammad lauded the actions of Colin Ferguson, a deranged black man who killed five whites and an Asian on a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993. Ferguson was simply doing God's will, he said caustically.

"Catch the train. Catch the train," Muhammad told students God had commanded the crazed gunman.

In the few years since this glut of hateful talk thrust Muhammad into the national spotlight, he quickly sunk back into the bog where David Duke and the legions of the Aryan Nation dwell. He surfaced briefly in Dallas during a 1996 public school controversy and advocated the creation of a separate school system for black students in that city.

By that time Muhammad had morphed into the leader of the New Black Panther Party, a black-nationalist organization loosely patterned after the 1960s-era group led by Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. But unlike the old Panthers, the organization Muhammad commanded attracted few followers and scant attention.

The first Million Youth March he organized in 1998 drew about 6,000 people. The following year the next one he called attracted a third as many people. Muhammad's last Million Youth March was attended by barely 100 people.

By the time he was admitted to an Atlanta hospital last week, Muhammad's comings and goings — and his venomous talk — hardly made the radar of those who monitor this nation's hatemongers.

But a hatemonger he was.

"I am a truth terrorist," Muhammad once said of himself. "I am a knowledge gangster. I am a history of black hit man. You better watch out. I'm going to be a roughneck."

More accurately, Muhammad was the flip side to Bull Connor. The alter ego of a grand dragon. He was the mirror's image of generations of white bigots who irrationally painted all African Americans with a single broad, racist stroke. And as with the passing of all of his white counterparts, I offer Khalid Abdul Muhammad a simple eulogy.

Good riddance.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/wickham/2001-02-19-wickham.htm