In 2015, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan organized a "Justice or Else" rally on the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, DC to mark the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. A month before the rally, Mr. Farrakhan was interviewed by Roland Martin,NewsOne Now’s Roland Martin. In the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the year before, Mr. Farrakhan called for "10,000 Fearless Men" to help end violence in the black community, by going "into Black neighborhoods [to] stand between Black people aiming guns at other Black people." However, Mr. Martin told Mr. Farrakhan that "a number of conservative sites are suggesting that you are calling for the killing of police[.]" In his lengthy and rather rambling answer, Mr. Farrakhan clearly went beyond the pacifist-like mission he seemed to be describing earlier:
"Yes, white folks jumped all over that and said Farrakhan is calling for 10,000 fearless black men to go out and kill white people. Now I'm passionate, but I'm not stupid. To call for 10,000 black men to go out and kill white people, what would that bring on us? Can we stand that kind of heat? Where are the weapons? Who has the weapons? This is a well-armed country. 350 million guns among the American people. How many black people are allowed to have guns legally? And most of the guns in the inner-city are illegal. No I'm not calling for that. So they rushed to say I'm going to kill white people, but here's what I really meant. You know and I know and black people know that white policemen kill us, the prosecutors are liars, the judges are liars, the forensics specialists... all are conspiratorial in getting a white people off. They have killed us, but they've never had to pay the price. The law of retaliation that's in the Bible and in the Koran says, it is a prescription. You don't go to the hospital or the doctor with a malady and he doesn't give you a prescription? A prescription for us is, those who kill us and seem to get away with it, we cannot allow it to continue. We must rise up and kill those who kill us outside of the law of justice and when they feel death like we feel death, when they feel pain at the burying of their dead like we feel it, then maybe we can sit down to a table and act like civilized people. That's why I said if the federal government; that's the monster, the federal government has never interceded to see that black men and women tried and killed get justice so when we come to Washington, we're not coming to play with the government, we're not coming to play with the forces that take take life out of us, but neither are we going to play with the life in the black community that's killing us, so I said I wanted 10,000 fearless, we're going to be inside our community, standing between the guns of the gangs. We're asking for 10,000, but you got to accept to be trained by the Nation of Islam and the fruit of Islam so that we can teach you how to be with your people. We are not killers of our people. No Nation of Islam member carries a weapon. We don't believe in the carnal weapons of this world. However, we have to be trained to go into our community with the love that we have for our own people and stand in the gap. But I tell you brother Roland, when we go in our community to stand in the gap you will find there are rogue policeman that suck the life out of our community. Now the police department, you know this, and if you don't know it, you will know it, because all the rogue cops want to be in the black community. Darren Wilson didn't want to be in the white community, policing white people. He wanted to be in the black community where the action is. Police know where the drugs are, they go in and raid; there may be $200,000 on the table, and they take $160[,000] or $170[,000] and put $30,000 back in the police thing and then they divide the money up. They kill are people too, they put our young people out there to sell drugs as well."
This is the man many politicians and progressive activists are struggling to avoid having to denounce and cut long-standing ties with. See my two commentaries in the Wall Street Journal for further details.
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