Minister Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, challenged a group of African-American spiritual leaders Thursday to do more to end religious divisions and focus on practical problems of poverty and despair.
“That’s the failure of religion,” he admonished. “You have a book, but you don’t make the book relevant to the struggle.”
Farrakhan’s hourlong speech to a crowd of about 1,500 at Cobo Center on Thursday morning came at the beginning of Freedom Weekend, four days of events focused on the social, cultural, economic and political issues facing Metro Detroit’s black community.
Farrakhan said attempts at racial integration are failing, and endorsed temporary separation. He assailed President Bush and warned that blacks need to seek a stronger voice in the nation’s political system. And he said blacks still face political and social struggles to achieve the equality religion assures.
“There is equality in the universal law of God. But what about where we live?” he said. “There’s no such thing as equality before the law and after the law.”
It was a message not lost on Debra Moss.
“When you hear about him, there’s usually a negative stigma behind it,” said Moss, who lives in Detroit. “But I was really impressed with what he said, especially the unity, that he’s trying to pull us all together.”
Farrakhan reserved some of his sharpest words for Bush. “President Bush is a blind guide, and in his blindness he’s leading a blind nation into the ditch of hell,” he said.
But he also cautioned that the black community shouldn’t give Bush’s Democratic challenger, John Kerry, “a free ride.”
Freedom Weekend continues today with a labor leaders’ breakfast, a morning discussion of race and politics and a diversity job fair. It ends Sunday with an annual NAACP dinner at Cobo Center. U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is the scheduled speaker