Time correspondent Sylvester Monroe talked with Farrakhan for 2 1/2 hours last week at his mansion in Chicago. Excerpts:
Q. TIME: What is the message that the Nation of Islam is imparting to African Americans?
A. Farrakhan: That God is interested in us, that God has heard our moaning and our groaning under the whip and the lash of our oppressors and has now come to see about us. That's the appeal.
Q. TIME: How does the Nation of Islam take a person who has hit bottom with drugs or alcohol or crime and remake that person?
A. Farrakhan: Well, we can't do it without the help of God, and we can't do it until we can reconnect that person to the source of truth and goodness that is Allah.
So once we can reconnect him to God and show him his relationship to God, then you give him the knowledge of himself, his history. So by teaching us our history beyond the cotton fields, beyond our slave history in America, and teaching us our connection to the great rulers of ancient civilizations, the great builders of the pyramids and the great architects of civilization and teaching us our relationship to the father of medicine, the father of law, the father of mathematics and science and religion, this makes us desire now to come up out of our ignorance and achieve the best that we possibly can achieve. And this is what begins to transform the person's life.
Q. TIME: It has sometimes appeared that you were building this sense of self- esteem by putting down another people.
A. Farrakhan: Now the truth of the matter is that white supremacists built a world on that ideology. If that system of white supremacy is based on falsehood, then the truth will attack that system at its foundation and it will begin to tumble down.
Now the truth of the matter is, whites are superior. They are not superior because they are born superior. They are superior because they have been the ruling power, that God has permitted them to rule. They have had the wisdom and the guidance to rule while most of the dark world or the darker people of the world have been, as they have called it, asleep.
Now it's the awakening of all the darker people of the world, and we are awakening at the level that the white world is now beginning to decline. And this is what Brother Khallid was talking about in his speech; I could not say he's a liar, ((that)) he's wrong. But this should never be taught out of the spirit of mockery.
And so to tear down another people to lift yourself up is not proper. But to tell the truth, to tear down the mind built on a false premise of white supremacy, that is nothing but proper because that will allow whites to relate to themselves as well as to other human beings as human beings.
Q. TIME: So what Khallid did, was that wrong?
A. Farrakhan: To me, it is highly improper in that you make a mockery over people. So why should we mock them? Why should we goad them into a behavior that is so easy for them to do harm to black people? And that's why I rebuked him.
Q. TIME: Have Khallid's remarks damaged your relationship with the mainstream black civil rights leadership?