Elijah Muhammad Speaks on the Importance of History
November 23, 1960, WNTA Radio, New York

Transcribed text from audio excerpt.

The American so-called Negroes are without the knowledge of their history, they know nothing about their history beyond the entering into slavery in America. They have no knowledge of their people's history. And therefore, without this knowledge of self and their own kind, and without the knowledge of those who have enslaved them-the white race-for the past 400 years, and without the knowledge of God Almighty whose proper name is Allah and His true religion Islam, this makes the American, so-called American, Negroes blind, deaf and dumb, as prophesied throughout the Bible and the Holy Qur'an. They are referred to as "blind, deaf, and dumb" and as "dead"-a mystery dead people because they know not themselves, nor anyone else, nor the God of Heaven and Earth, nor His real religion. So therefore, they have been brought up off of the teachings of their white slave-master and his children; and that teaching that was given to them by their slave-masters was to keep them enslaved. And the teaching that they get from his children, the slave-master's children, is to continue to keep the Negroes in dark, in ignorance to the knowledge of the truth.