May the peace that only God can give be upon you. Welcome to the American Muslim Podcast. I'm your host, Imam Tariq El-Amin. If you have not already done so, make sure that you subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and you can keep up with us on social media at the American Muslim Podcast on Facebook and Instagram. And you can also keep up with me at Tariq El-Amin on those same platforms. Today I am pleased to bring to you another great conversation. Our guest is Ayesha K. Mustafaa, editor of the Muslim Journal, an assistant professor of Mass communications and an absolute wealth of knowledge in history. So without any further delay, so, all right, so. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on to the American Muslim Podcast. Let's see where it all started at. Is there a moment that you can look back to, whether it be as a teen, as a child, uh, in retrospect, as being a formative part of where you are, uh, today?

Well, you know, of course, respectfully, and, and truthfully, I have to give credit to my mother and father, right? And, and mainly they gave me birth, but also they gave me a sense of responsibility. I, I grew up in a, uh, Mississippi family of civil rights activists and a mother who was a, um, career teacher, elementary school teacher, and she would always say, those formative years in your education is grade one through four. So that's what she said, you need to target. Your education. So my, my family background gave me a sense of stability as well as purpose. And even though they were staunch Christians, devoted Christians, uh, the, the responsibility to the community of course went outside the church because we lived in Mississippi and this is ground zero. And what happens to us resonates throughout the country. You know, we say, remember Emmett Till, you know

That's right.

Anderson died in Mississippi with Emmett Till. And just a little caveat, you know, before Emmett Till's murder was broadcast, uh, posted on the cover of, uh, jet Magazine, there was another murder in Mississippi that jet magazine's, uh, editors, Simeon Booker was down here to when the word broke out about Emmett Till's body being found and everything shifted to that. So that's the kinda environment. That I grew up in, came out of, and my foundation because, you know, you always had a sense of responsibility to this, this place. It was the harshest place on the face of the earth, but you still had a responsibility to it and you couldn't quite disconnect from it. So that's, that's the starting point. Then I came, I had siblings. I, it is eight of us. Mm. And, um, my older sister just passed and we just had her funeral. Mm. Uh, and the conversations about her, my, I was five years old when she went to college, so I just had a sense of awe about her, about, you know, the person who comes into our lives, and she's beautiful and all this, but my older sisters and brother said she was their mother. They said, our mother, the school teacher, she continued to work. She had children and her first daughter, Odessa raised us. She said, my mother. But have us, and Odessa would raise us. So she was raising babies when she was nine years old. She was the mother, you know? Mm-hmm. And with her, her funeral, just being fresh and looking at her life, you, you realize that there's a serenity. Even out of the harshest conditions, a person can maintain a certain certain sense of serenity and even handedness. She never came out of being a, a just person. She went into social work as a profession. And at her funeral, one of the, uh, foster children that she, uh, was, uh, assigned to as an adult came to the funeral and she said, Odessa Hawthorne was my agent. And when she was emancipated, she went into foster care at nine years old, and she was there until she was emancipated. And, and she said. When I was emancipated, I was able to go get my records as a foster child, and she could read the entries from, uh, her, her advocate, who, who was Odessa. And she said, I realized that she was always in my corner as bad a child as she could have been. She said Odessa was always batting for me. And she said, the other thing was you could read the, the date stamp and the, and the time when she was making entries. And she said would be in the wee hours of the night, one o'clock in the morning, and Odessa would be making notes in her records. And so we don't quite understand the impact that we have on people, and we may never understand because, uh, I don't know if she ever told USA that directly to herself, but she told it to us at her. I say janazah, she was Christian at her funeral. And, um, just, just some tidbits, you know, random thoughts. About growing up in the family that I came out of.

Mm. You know, the further away that we get from what we consider to be foundational events, particularly as it relates to the Civil Rights movement

mm-hmm.

The assassination of Medgar Evers, Mississippi, the assassination, um, the, the brutal killing of Emmett Till, as you just referenced. Mm-hmm. It becomes, I think, more difficult for younger generations to really grasp what that, that time looked like and what it meant. And you said something that has, uh, resonates with me, said this, this feeling of being accountable and responsible for a place that there's a lot of pain that's also associated with it.

Right, right, right.

And we don't necessarily have. Those same types of markers today, how important has that been for you in terms of the, uh, the work that you've done as the editor of the journal, as a professor and just as an intellectual? Uh,

well, bringing in the, the work of the Muslim Journal, a newspaper, um, uh, I think about obligation to record history, you know, like the Jet Magazine recorded the, the murder of Emmett Till and put Emmett Till's photo, his abused mutilated body on the cover of that Jet magazine. And that was called a turning point of the Civil Rights Movement. Once people saw that visual picture, uh, nobody was the same. Uh, the, the funeral was held at a funeral home in back in Chicago. His mother ma till brought him back to Chicago for burial and they had threatened her. Don't open that casket. And she opened the casket and the people came and they were lined up around the street. You know, there were lines and lines of people around the funeral home who came through there to see and witness Emmett Till's murder. So, um, those are markers. In terms of the Muslim John, we are always conscious of, this is history. We are recording, we live stories, but next year it'll be history. We are recording live stories. Two years from now it'll be history. And newspapers actually have a phrase that newspapers are the rough draft of history. Mm. If you go back and look at a lot of movies that have cropped up, they went back and researched newspapers. Even the movie Glory. Yeah. Uh, the, the 50 54th Massachusetts, I might say the name wrong, but it was the African American Free Slaves in Infantry in the Civil War, and I found out they want the first Black Infantry. They were the second. But their story, the character in the movie, Gloria Gloria that was played out by Morgan Freeman, he walks up to a war reporter and tells the reporter, please record what you see take place here today. Because they didn't expect to survive that battle, and a lot of them didn't. And that war reporter's responsibility was to, to, uh, report on that, that battle and how those men fought and how they died. The war reporter wrote the story, took it back to his newspaper. It was a page one story, but because of the time that it was in, they put it on the obituary page and people would go back and research. There was an in, there is another scenario here in Mississippi. I don't know if you saw the movie, free State of Jones.

I did. Matthew McConaughey. Free State. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, the, the character that he played, new Knight was a real person. New Knight was a Caucasian here in Mississippi. Who, uh, farmer who was frustrated because the Confederate army, uh, while they were fighting the union, but they were taking the resources of the poor Mississippi White people. They were confiscating products and, you know, they couldn't grow crop, they couldn't grow livestock. The Confederate would take it. So he got upset because they couldn't live. And so he eventually formed a army of this enchanted poor white people. And he was joined by runaway slaves, freed slaves from the plantations who had had nowhere to go. They formed the army and he literally fought, uh, in, in Jones County, Mississippi. And when he asked for help from the union, they told him they couldn't send him in. There was none. So he said, well, I'm just going to fight to free the state of Jones. So he had a whole war in and of himself to free one county in Mississippi, and it was called Free State of Jones. Hmm. And he still, uh, people may, you know, once the movie came out and people did more research, he still has a black family and a white family in that area. Jones County, people can, they still have stories about him, but these were things that were recorded historically most times, captured in, in newspaper writing as the number one reservoir resource for our history. So I feel an obligation to let our newer generations know that these are real characters. You know, we, we glorified them in movies, but these were real people who had real battles and they had real purpose. And we want John to acknowledge that, not just because it's, uh, uh, has, uh, an appeal for the storyline, but for the fact that somebody had to do these things. It, you know, somebody had to lay the groundwork. Everybody laid a, a footprint that we could walk into. Uh, that helped. Uh, till the soil, so we didn't get to where we are by ourselves. Uh, there was a lot of endeavor, a lot of death, a lot of sorrow, a lot of rejoicing, a lot of recovery. But, um, that's what kept moving us forward. All of those forces kept pushing us forward and, and we should, we should appreciate that. Mm. And once we lose that, then we stop moving forward. Mm. Yeah. And one of the ways that we show our appreciation is by continuing the work that has been done or we, we see ourselves as a part of that work. A few names come to mind. Well, one in particular the Ida B. Wells and how instrumental she was in spreading awareness about the horrors of lynching and for what she was able to document. We're talking over, was it over 4,000 lynchings? I believe that she was able to document, and we can only imagine how many more went undocumented, but she was able to bring this into the public consciousness. And, and she's a Mississippi girl. Oh, really? You know? Yeah. Yeah. Ida be she, she's, she's revered in Chicago, you know. Yes. They have monuments in Chicago for Ida B. Wells. Mm-hmm. And then we have to explain how she got to Chicago. Yes. Uh, but she was born in Holly Spring, Mississippi. Mm-hmm. Ida b well was born in slavery. She was freed at nine months old. Mm. And nine months being the year that they signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That's what freed her. Now she comes out of those circumstances and she becomes a young lady. Her, her parents are poor, her siblings are, are feeble. They're kind of like on the sickly side, and she ends up being the mother to them. Mm-hmm. She reminds me of my sister. She, her mother had 'em, and she raised them. Ia, be well raised them. But I, I still haven't tried, tried to figure out, someone tried to tell me her, her family tenacity. How did she become so strong out of those conditions? I mean, you freed, you, you were born a slave and you, and you rose for freedom. You were born in a family of illness and you were able to take care of other people. Then she rose the first African American, HBCU, uh, established in Mississippi. She helped form Rust University. We called it Russell University. Now, she had formed that, but she was such a, a figure to deal with until the, the president of Russ wanted her to go somewhere else. It was good to go with, you know, she always was a throwing on people side. Yeah. So she ended up going to FI in Tennessee. Mm-hmm. So she's in Tennessee and she, uh, is on the train going back and forth and just like, um, the Montgomery bus, uh, situation mm-hmm. Where you had to give up your seat for any white, anyone that white came on it. Right. Um, she was told to give up her seat for a white passenger, and she refused. And so they put her off the pla off the train. Ida be well, goes back and sues the, the, the railroad and she actually wins the lawsuit. But you know, Jim Crow being, what it was, they couldn't let a, a black woman stand that's gonna sue a major company. So they, uh, it was reversed in a, in a repeal. Her, her lawsuit was reversed. Yeah. But then she opened a newspaper in Memphis. Mm-hmm. And those lynchings that she was, uh, started to, uh, investigate, she started investigating them in Memphis. And she said, what, what good is freedom if we can't bring the justice these, these murders? And at the beginning she had three specific names, like people she knew that had been lynched. Yeah. And she wanted to know what happened to them. And she wanted those people to be brought to justice. Who murdered those men? Her newspaper was fire bomb. And we say she literally escaped to Chicago because they intended to kill her. And she began to write for the Chicago defender, and she ContEd continued her crusade. And these years later, you know, uh, the Bobby do industry, they actually have a memorial do for Ida B. Wells. Really? It's made, it's made like a reporter. She's, you know, she's dressed in, in long dress and stuff in that, that era. But she, she's, uh, she has a pad and pen. It is made like a report. It is a, a keepsake, it's like a, a, you know, a, a, a special, uh, segment because at the time they did that, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Ida B. Wills 80 years after she had passed. And the, and for those who don't know, the Pulitzer Prize is the highest awards you can get in journalism, you know? Mm-hmm. Be, uh, bestowed on someone. So she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and behind that, the Bobby do, uh, industry, what is it, Mattel? You can find it online. You can, uh, hopefully you can still order them. Uh, yeah. They, uh, but that's, that's another Mississippi girl, you know, this, this was fertile ground. Yeah. And the circumstances made it even more fertile. And, uh, we can just go on and on about the kind of people that came outta here. You know, another time we'll talk about people like BB King. That's right. We talk about, we talk about how Wolf, you know, we, we, yeah. And, and then we'll talk about, uh, um, is Muddy Waters from, uh, Mississippi? I, I think Mud Waters is. I think so. I think so. I have to look it up. I think he, he, he is, he was in that, uh, movie Cadillac Records. Mud Waters. Yeah. Him, howling Wolf is in there. Um, yeah, they Mississippi. Yeah, he's, he's Mississippi. But, but everybody needs to, um, Nina Simone. All people who are, who are of age. This is only if you are mature enough, you go pull up about Mississippi. Yeah. And um, I actually have a college class on rewrite Mississippi. Mm-hmm. And I, I asked, is everybody here age 18 and over older Then have to play Nina Simone's, Mississippi. Got miss. Yeah. Yeah. You know, her calling us out. Yeah. She said, we just going too slow. Too slow. Yeah. Uh, so you got your master's degree from Columbia in journalism, um, in Chicago. Yeah. What was it that drew you towards journalism? You mentioned earlier on seeing Emmett Till's face on that Jet magazine. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Was that, uh, an impactful moment for you in terms of maybe putting a seed in your, your mind with regards to journalism or was there, was there other things? Well, there, there were, uh, a mixture of things, you know, in the middle of all of that coming out of Mississippi. Uh, I first went to the school at, at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. That was my first experience outside of Mississippi. Mm-hmm. And, uh, in that process of, of going to Bucknell and graduating, and then I went to Atlanta, I actually converted to Alice Islam. So this is 74, 75. Mm-hmm. And so that's the, the, the, the second demarcation line in my life, next to birth was I'm going to be a Muslim. And remember, I come out of family of Christians. Mm-hmm. I'm one of the younger kids, you know, uh, southern families have a hierarchy. You don't break rank. Yeah. You know, everybody, everybody older than you tell you what to do. You know, my older sister had rank and then, but everybody else above me had rank too. So I go away to school. And I come back and I tell everybody I'm gonna be a Muslim. And they look at me like, who told you you could change your religion? You know, who told you to change your religion? So we, um, we go through that phase. I'm so adamant and embracing the faith that I wanna surround myself with other Muslims. So I, I actually moved out of Atlanta and I had an opportunity to go to Chicago to work with the community. We then, IMWD Muhammad was in office. He had just, that was 75. Iman Muhammad was taken office in February. I got into Chicago around June, July. Mm-hmm. Seven, five. So I'm, I'm working, I go to work for the community and there are many things, uh, you know, uh, tasks that we have. My first task was to record, was to transcribe the, uh, lectures of Al Muhammad to develop the MAMs kit. He was training the ministers to transition into studying as imams. Mm-hmm. So that was my first job. And I think it was one of the most pivotal puns for me, because I got a chance to be paid to listen to his lectures. Mm. And they were reports. I said, okay. And, and during that early transition of the Nation of Islam and into the community under Imal Muhammad, we had responsibilities and you had what we would call in the committees. And committees were set up the, to address d different facets of community life. And I was on the public information committee and in that, uh, public information committee, we started with a newsletter. And I was responsibility to, we did, uh, interviews and articles and get disseminate information. So from that, it really had me focus on. On media and journalism and basically getting the word out, just recording information, getting the word out, passing information on. Um, my original degree was in psychology and political science. My intent was to go into, I, I guess we would've been calling it at that time, criminology. Hmm. Um, when, as years passed in the newspaper, the editor became ill and there was a time where, uh, things basically were run out of the temple on, on Stony Island, and they were saying, what, what do we have to do now to, to fill that void that they see coming in with the editor passing? Um, and. It, it is kind of funny. Everybody look around and say, get Aisha. It's like, it's, it's kinda like, get Micah, he take, he didn't do anything. Get Micah, send him over. So you got drafted. He take on enter tag, you know, whatever you throw out him, they take it off. Yeah. So I, uh, they actually asked me out of the, out of the Mosco and Stone Island to go to the newspaper and take care of things and they really hadn't decided what they were gonna do in terms of leadership at the paper. And I was there about six months to a year where Mayor Muhammad may have talk down in Atlanta and said, looks, looks like she's doing a pretty good job. I don't see why they don't just leave her there talking about me in the position. Mm. And of course, after that, thumbs up, nobody could get me out the chair. Right. There was nobody in the chair. And, um, these many years later. But being in journalism, you, you always wanna be at the top of your field. So I went back into graduate school for journalism at, in Chicago, uh, Columbia. And I, I got my master's in journalism at Columbia, uh, because I wanted to really know how to push this profession forward. Hmm. You know, here I am now, and now I'm teaching journalism at Tougaloo College back in Mississippi. Mm. Full circle. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, back when you started. Yeah. What are some of the changes that you have noticed within journalism from the time you started to the present day? Oh, I, I, I think the, um, credibility of journalism is at stake, at risk. I think the credibility of the, the old time journalists, uh, you don't see those figures anymore. Like Walter Cronkite, you know, Walter is credited with bringing the, the Vietnam War in. Hmm. Because he was reporting on, uh, uh, scrapes and, uh, wartime things, soldiers coming back home and he didn't like what he was hearing. He didn't like what he was seeing. I said, I, I pictured in my own mind, Walter Re is not satisfied with what he's was being reported to him. So he gets up from his desk, he goes out to the airport, gets on a plane and flies himself to Vietnam. He looks around, he said, this ain't working. He comes back home, sits back at his desk in front of a mic, and he says, we can't win this war. Mm-hmm. And when he said that publicly, um, I think it was Johnson that said, uh, we can fight the vie Vietnam, but we can't fight Walter Ra. Hmm. And they brought the Vietnam War in, in essence, in a, in a state that the, the US didn't win. You know, we couldn't win that war. We were losing soldiers, everything they threw at it and threw at us in the meantime because, you know, our soldiers were subject to Agent Orange. They were trying to be foliage to the forest and, and make things where they could fight. But they, they were killing us too, killing us in that they were our men. Lot of African Americans fought in Vietnam, you know, and they were coming back with illnesses from age in orange and, uh, drug problems. And the sad part about it is our country didn't even give them a parade. They didn't come home, even acknowledge the sacrifices that they made. And you come across veterans to this day, still trying to get their benefits, uh, still trying to get their home loans that they were promised that they could get as a veteran. So it, you know, it, the tentacles just spread out of things. All these things that we need to address that, that weren't resolved. Uh. And you just make notes. You got notepads and notepads. I gotta get back to this. We need to talk about this. It it, it may not be addressed today, but it, it is, it's on the back burner, but it still exists. These are issues that need to, uh, be addressed. And so I have notebooks of things that I know I won't, I won't get through in my lifetime. I have to acknowledge that now. Um, God willing, we have some, someone we can pass those notes on to that can continue to continue the effort because the struggle hasn't stopped. You know, it takes new forms and new shapes, but we, one thing we realize is, uh, it's not a right. It, it's not time. It's no time to rest. Now, you know, the media, black media, uh, in, in particular historically, um, it has played a tremendous part in being able to create a collective sense of consciousness and awareness. Um, I was just watching a document. About how the, um, the brotherhood of sleeping car, porters, how they would take, um, the defender, Chicago defender was theirs. Yeah. Yeah. And they would take them into the south places like Mississippi Yeah. And share, you know, information. So people, they had a sense of, of, of, of connection. Now we are in a time, as you said, the credibility of journalism. And I would go a step further and say the credibility or the veracity of, of truth itself is under, is under attack. And I can only imagine what it, what it might have looked like if the same type of scheme were being deployed. Like what they could have done in terms of destabilizing folks. How does black media, Muslim media, black Muslim media, what is the proper response to pushback against what we're seeing right now? Let, let me give a little bit more historical background on what, how we got started. Sure. African Americans in the news. Mm-hmm. Uh, 'cause you mentioned the Chicago Defender. There was no small feat. No. Uh, but before the Chicago Defender, the first African American newspaper was called Freedoms Journal. Mm-hmm. And it was started by two freed slaves who, who mass head read for too long. Someone else has been speaking for us. Now it's time for us to speak for ourselves. And remember this is a people who, it was illegal to teach them how to read, to teach the slave how to read, could get a white person in trouble. You know, it was, it was an illegal act. So these men come out of a sense of slavery and write a newspaper, the word, putting a word on paper that appeals their own case. And they call it freedoms journal. After that, there are a few newspapers in between, but then called Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglas starts a newspaper called The North Star. Mm-hmm. And it's the abolitionist movement, uh, and it's time for people, the free slaves to start moving out of areas that they've been enslaved in. So he calls it the North Star, the North Star being the one point in the sky that would give you direction. And along with, uh, Harriet Tubman, that North Star was your direction north to be freed from slavery. And, and it has trickled down throughout the causes of having newspapers. John Abbott started the Chicago Defender. He came up out of Georgia into Chicago with his mother and started a newspaper on his mother's kitchen table, the Chicago Defender. He started on his mother's kitchen table. He would put the paper together, get it printed, and take it over to those, um, trains mm-hmm. And the porters, and give them bundles of papers. And they would take those papers on the train south with them and drop them off at different locations going south. The people would pick them up and they were reading them. And this actually con, uh, accredited will the great migration of African Americans movement. Mm-hmm. The greatest movement of people within this country. And one particular era was the great migration from the south to the north of freed African Americans coming outta Jim Crow. Abbott was telling them, you're still being lynched. Um, sharecropping is not working. You still not free. You can work all year long. You still don't have a dollar to your name from the sharecropping system. So he was talking to those sharecroppers just, just start moving north and the people literally started moving north from John Abbott's appeal in his newspaper. And there in Chicago over there like 22nd and King, right before you get to McCormick. Mm-hmm. There's a tall statue of a black man. And when you get up on it, you see that the, the, it is, it is a bronze statue, but it is, it is made up like, uh, uh, he's in a suit, suit, jacket, suit, pants. But when you get up, it's made like Shoe sos. The fabric is, is is designed like Shoe sos the bottom of your shoe sos He has a small short grm hat on. And I've seen my father wear those kind of hats. And I, you could actually see the sweat, you know, the hat has a sweatband. You can literally see the sweat in the sweatband in that stature. And he's holding a suitcase and the suitcase is halfway open in his, tied with a rope. And it is a, it is, it is a, it is a, maybe a harsh monument, but it was a monument to the African Americans who were coming into Chicago from the South with whatever little meese they had. And again, that was, that was the movement. Uh, John Abbott. Started with the Chicago Defend newspaper. Uh, I forgot what your other question was. Well, no, thank you so much for that, that history. No, I was saying, in your estimation, how should media, uh, and I'm situating this, uh, particularly with black Muslim media, Muslim media, uh, black media, how does it respond to the attack on just the foundational element of truth? You, you, you know, we got this new phrase now that I didn't have when I was growing up. I, I'd never heard it before. They call it fake news. Yeah, yeah. All of a sudden, all of a sudden we are in an era where there's a thing called fake news. And the funny thing about the term fake news, if somebody doesn't like what you are saying, uh, they can't deal with what you are saying. The, their defense is, that's fake news. Yeah. It, it could be true or not, but that's, that's the scenario now that we have to deal with. That's the, that's the pool that we have to swim in. We have to swim in a pool where we have to. Definitively define what is truth and what is fake. And for the Muslim, I, the truth just, just sticks in our car because, you know, we have the term El hot and we have the Quran that's el hot. And, and we supposed to have a, a dedication, uh, commitment to, and so in media, if you are a Muslim in media, you have to pursue the truth. And the court says whether it is for you are against you. That's right. You know, you have to pursue the truth. So we have to hold on to that concept of a hop and this pool that we are swimming in now called fake news. And I, I say it is critical times because all of it may not be fake news, but it's distorted. It's, we, we, we've lost a, a term that media used to glorify itself with call objectivity. Right? Now it is ownership who owns this. Therefore, I will report according to my owner's desires. I may not tell you a lie, but I just won't tell you the truth. I won't give you the whole story because I have a owner in the other room who says, I can't report that, and I'm not going to get into it in any detail. But anybody who's interested just go back and, uh, chronicle the coverage of Palestine and Israel and, and, and the things that are happening and understand what, what media's recovered is reported. What, just go back and look at a few media stories. You, you can see people literally dying and they will say, yeah, but Right it to what about Im, you know, well, what about ism? Mm-hmm. Because, you know, I see a baby starving. Are you sure? Starving? Yeah. No. Yeah. You want me to convince you that the baby's starving? They say that's doctored. So that photo's doctored or that video, that's not real. Yeah, it's not real. So that, that's the point. We are right now, the media and it is so prevalent and like everybody has access to getting a word out. So you really have to be careful. And now that we are entering into the arrow of ai, you have to learn how to even look at videos to tell whether they've been fabricated. Um, man manipulated, uh, there are too many people in that crowd for actually to be on that one. You know, you got a thousand people standing on a needle pen. It's, it is something wrong with this picture, you know? Right. Uh, so you have to, you have to train your own eye to catch, uh, and some people say, well, does the hand go with the facial or color? You know, so you have to do all these things. Now, the research to try to decipher fake news from real news and all the tools are given to everybody to use at will. So it, it is, it is a trying time. Uh, but I, you, you know, you have to say a prayer. Sometimes it has to be a, it, the heart, a prayer or, or a, I just, yeah. Gimme what I need. And if I'm asking for too, too much, forgive me. Just show me. Mm-hmm. You know? So we have to dedicate ourselves in our professions and in our religion, and un understand why it's important. Uh, because now we see that if we don't keep pushing forward, somebody would turn back the hands of time. I actually heard a person the other day say, you were born a criminal. I heard that same person. You can't do anything with them. They were born criminal. Yeah. And then after that they, uh, there was an incident with a young, uh, Ukraine lady was murdered on the train. Yeah. By a person of color with mental illness, a history of mental illness. Yeah. And then that, that's used as evidence. They born criminals. Mm-hmm. But three months ago, nobody said that Caucasian was born criminal, who killed four young white people in their dorms. Right. Stabbed them to death. Four, three beautiful girls and a young man, but nobody was walking around saying he was born. He was obviously insane too. You had to be insane to murder like that. Right. But nobody pulled it. Got this picture up and, and referred to it as you come from people who are born criminals. And so that, that's where we are now. Yeah. So no one can, we haven't arrived. The battle is there, you know, as the Quran tells us, they will come at you from your for forefront and from your back, from your left and your right. You know, all of those things represent different influences. You know, your left and your right, how they would, uh, seek into your, choose certain things, certain influences. Yeah. So we had to be on guard for all of those. But at the same time, we have to constantly be preparing someone to step up. No one person can do this alone. Mm-hmm. You know, this is not a, this is not a one person's race. You gotta be ready to, to hand off to somebody because you, you might get tired, you might get sick, you might get targeted, but you don't end the, you don't end the race. You just hand it off to whoever is ready. And that's where we are now. We are actually looking around and say who's ready that we can hand this off to. In my generation, that's, that's where we are. Anybody with some sense in my generation, you looking to hand off. Yeah. And whatever we can do to support, uh, uh, give them the background that they need or, you know, whatever, you know, I'll babysit for you. You know, I, I'll be the grandma. Do what you gotta do. I, I'll take care of the kids. Right. Gotta be ready to hand off. I like, just like I iby wills, you know. Uh, she just warms my heart because again, she's a Mississippi girl, you know? Yeah. And I would say to that point, if we have learned anything, uh, African American, black folks in, in particular, it's been that often our movements that have been headed by, uh, singular figures, they have not had the opportunity to develop a succession plan because they were assassinated. You think about, uh, Malcolm, you think about Fred, uh, Hampton, Dr. King was 39 years old, Dr. King. I think there's a lesson in that fuzz, not just individually, but also institutionally, if. We don't make sure that there's a succession plan in place, then the institution dies with one or two people. Well, let me make this, uh, for the benefit of our non-A speaking listeners, so Aha, that's the truth, or the Sure reality as we refer to, uh, also one of the names that we refer to, uh, the attributes of, uh, of, of God. Another thing was the fairness doctrine. If you're not aware of the fairness doctrine, its removal was pivotal and ushering in these polarized quote unquote news outlets, the bright barks and the, the foxes and all of them. So yeah, acquaint yourself with that. Do you own research? You think about how important it is, name recognition, and the trust that has been built up over time for people in a time where so much is questioned and people will get exhausted trying to figure out, you know, is this ai, is this, is this a lie? So, so institutions like the Muslim Journal Theater. Built up credibility, decade after decade, become that much more, uh, important. Can you, uh, yeah. Just kind of speak to, you know, what does that mean? How important is that to continue? Well, it is, it is important on a lot of levels, you know, not just the job that it performs of the, of the, the, uh, service that it gives. But again, what has been put into it to make it successful, uh, you know, the Muslim Journal is the success of the Muhammad Speaks. That's right. And Muhammad Speaks was, uh, initiated, started by Malcolm, and before Malcolm started the Muhammad speech, Malcolm was a newspaper man. He was a media man. Malcolm in the fifties gave speeches about support black media, and he actually gave, uh, uh, he, uh, wrote a article that was put in the other black newspapers where he called the media the big Guns, you know. Uh, and this was around an incident in New York where the Muslims were maligned and the mainstream media went against the Muslim. And so Malcolm was telling the black newspapers, y'all have to, y'all have to be our support. Y'all have to represent us. And he was telling the people, and y'all have to represent the newspapers, y'all have to buy black newspapers. He said, I don't care which one you buy, just buy a black newspaper every week. And he said, because when the big guns downtown, talking about the mainstream media turn against you, who's going to defend you? And he put into those black newspapers as their sense of their defense. And so he, he initiated that concern that we have a media responsibility as well as during Dr. King's era in the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement really didn't take off and get traction. One was Emmett Till, but the other one was when the media showed up. Mm-hmm. Like, uh, the Edmund Pettus Bridge and that, that stampede against the marches. The media were the ones that broadcast nationwide, worldwide. The Kennedys were in office, but the Kennedys had not done anything. They knew how brutal and harsh the South was. They hadn't done anything to change the conditions until the images of that brutal attack on those marches hit world news and was actually broadcast worldwide. And then they said, oh, they making us look like fools over here. They really making us look like a horrible people. And so then the Kennedys got involved and started moving that they do things different in South. Actually, there's a report that the Kennedys called, uh. Uh, the, the governor in Mississippi told him, told him, can't y'all just keep things quiet down there? Mm-hmm. And the governor told him, well, you know what I'm dealing with, you know, so it was the, the, the, the lens this, the, the light, the bright light of the media shining on those atrocities and showing margins being, uh, hosed down with powerful water hoses and, and, and, and do being unleashed on them. When those images began to break, it's when, uh, uh, the tide began to change against what was happening to African Americans in the South. And, um, that glaring eye of the media can be the difference. And when you have media blackouts, you really begin to worry about what is being done in the place of a media blackout when they start blacking out things, then. You don't know what's happening and what you will wake up to tomorrow. So the, the good thing about the technology that we have now, it is practically in everybody's hands. It makes it a little bit more dangerous for everybody if you really, uh, reporting on some serious things. Uh, but you may not have been professionally, uh, trained for the media, but you might have a professional, uh, a personal responsibility to record history as you see it unfolding so that it can be, uh, preserved. Another interesting, uh, report, um, in Chicago, the young African American brother who, what was his name? He was walking down the street with a knife and all these police Oh, yeah. Rolled up on him. Shout him. Laquan McDonald. Laquan. Yeah. Laquan was walking down the street. He was mentally disturbed. You, you could tell he had a mental problem. Yeah. All the cops are following him just to see, make sure he doesn't do anything. He has a knife in his hand. Then you have one officer that drives up around all those police officers that are behind. This young man pulls out his gun and emps it. 16 shots. Yeah. And you know, that's what they call the, the, the video about it. 16 shots into Laquan. Mm-hmm. And he lays down on the street. Your mayor at the time, your police off, uh uh, at the time, covered that up. Yeah. They literally didn't report what happened to that young man. They also knew it was a wrong for death. They literally paid off the family. His family, they gave them a settlement. I don't even think they had filed for a settle. They just gave him a settlement because he had been through foster care. He had been in foster care. They gave them a settlement and told them to go on their way. They didn't even know how he had been killed. You had one freelance reporter, a freelance reporter in Chicago, was given a tip about how that murder, and it was murder, how that murder went down. He went to get the police reports and they wouldn't give it to him, which supposed to be public information, you know, police reports you can file for public information, and that's a tool that really, uh, broke the ice for us. The public information? Yeah. For you? Mm-hmm. Yes. He went to get the report. They wouldn't give it to him. He went to get the reports and they were empty. They had confiscated, the police officer had confiscated all the videos along that street. They had pulled up all the videos from Line the street, so it wasn't no videos that they could get. He went to court. This was a freelance writer went to court. He didn't have no institution behind him. We didn't have the big papers behind him. And, and one, the appeal that made the police department hand over those records. And that's when it came out how that officer had pulled up behind him. And then it was after then that they filed murder charges against that officer. And I heard that he only did so many years and he's up for seven years, I think. Something like that. Yeah. He's up for parole and he's gonna be on the streets with somebody else's kid. Mm-hmm. So it just again, shows the, the, the responsibility and the weight to, to, to be a witness as, as a reporter, you're basically being a witness, fight yourself out against yourself, being a witness and, and, and speaking the truth. Yeah. You know, division has always been a part of, uh, control. Uh, but mm-hmm we find ourselves now in a hyper polarized environment. And a lot of that at its root, it is how the media has been manipulated, how cultural expression has been manipulated. And we have something, of course, you know, familiar with, uh, confirmation bias. You know, people are looking for things that confirm what they, what they thought, right. What they've been programmed to think. Uh, some of our listeners may be aware of this and some may not. We are reflecting on 50 years of Imam Martin Muhammad's leadership, and one of the things that I look at as a tremendous achievement was his ability to reconcile nationality, ethnicity, and faith. It's an opportunity for America to be able to overcome some of these divisions, all of that to say what do you see as a potential opportunity, opportunity within Muslim media to. Help to develop or promote a collective consciousness, you know, which I kind of referred to earlier on, in, with, with black media. Is there an opportunity to do that? Yes. And, and tying into our, our lady, maam, WD Muhammad, I, um, one of the greatest things that he did for us was, showed us a way to live in this country that we've talked about all these terrible things that have happened to us, but he showed us a way to navigate this landscape and still move forward. And I used to say, uh, when he came in the office and you listen to other speakers, we had, we had all these issues and these concerns, but the ma never, uh, rub salt in our wounds. Mm. You know, he didn't, he didn't inflame us. He didn't, he didn't keep us so, so upset with the country and with ourselves that we couldn't, we got blinded by hate. Mm. He didn't, he wouldn't let us get blinded. A sidetracked by what we really should have been angry about. You know? And some people said, well, that that's a detriment. It's not a detriment if you're trying to advance forward. You know? And, and like the prophet told us, do not get angry. You know, when the prophet said it, he just said it just like that. Do not get angry because you can become consumed in anger where you, you will not advance. And the amount put us on that trajectory to not let your anger consume you. And then the other thing he did was find a way to, uh, use the word manipulate this country where it'll benefit you. And the one thing he pointed to was the constitution. You, you, the thing the men around you may disappoint you. The leaders around you might disappoint you. But there's a piece of paper that's been written that it had to be God's will that was directing the hands that wrote it. 'cause yes, we know the founding fathers had slaves. Mm-hmm. But they wrote that all men are born free. With a creator. Mm-hmm. So it was, it was God's will that they put that the paper and that we can still refer to it. And I always say now, if they started changing the Constitution, then we gotta go back to the drawing board. Yeah. So when you have that, uh, that, uh, those first amendments, uh, and they give you all these rights and, and the Declaration of Independence, uh, all these things are given to you and it's written in the, in the way that this constitute, this, this, this country is to be constituted. That gave us opportunity. If we didn't have the freedom of religion, I wouldn't have been able to change my religion. If we didn't have a free press, we couldn't have a independent newspaper. And, and if we didn't have the right to, uh, protest, we couldn't get out on the street with our signs and, and protests. All the Freedom Rights movement was protests. We wouldn't be able to do those things and draw attention to the injustice. And it was the amount that brought us back, you know, being quote unquote, quote unquote black Muslims who were originally taught, um, we gonna separate, just gimme six states and we we'll take care of ourselves. You know, I'll be like, right, I'll solve your black problem. Just gimme six feral states. I'll take all the black people with me over here in these six states and we'll solve our own problem. Uh, the amount said is he, he actually said once he knew his father was laughing because he said, remember the white man killed each other before they let this, this country be divided. You know, the Civil War, what you had 50,000 white people killed each other mm-hmm. Uh, before they would let this country be divided. So he say his father knew that wasn't gonna happen. That was his, that was his stance, you know? Right. Just gimme some states and we'll, we'll go away. Right. Uh, but the amount showed us how to keep moving forward with all the hate. And experiences that we had that should have, should have shaken us to our court and, and hold onto the democracy in its purest form that was, that was etched on the pages of the Constitution that they could not have written without God's hand being on their hand because everything they did was contrary to what they were writing. Yeah. You wrote this as, as all men are created equal while you got slaves, it is God's writing you, you can on it, you can put all the signatures and the John Hancocks behind it that you want. That was God's hand on the hand of whoever was writing that. Yeah. And so it's left a, for us, as the mouth show to look and identify what we have and work for that. And he also know as a world traveler that there was some benefits here that we weren't gonna get anywhere else. There were countries that were not going to give us our freedoms. Were not gonna give us access. And so he felt that our best opportunity to still advance was here in the United States. We are angry with the US now for a lot of things, but still, I'm not gonna give up my citizenship. That might hurt some people's feelings. I thought you were going to gonna throw it away and, and, and walk away. Now I'm gonna fight with it. You know, this, this gonna be my, my shield and my defense. Mm-hmm. If they start changing the Constitution, then we gotta talk. Right? I, I, I, I've done my ancestry test, so I know where I came from. So we might have to do a reverse ship. Right. It would be time to move out. They changed the constitution. You got a whole different story going on. You know, you hear now, this is a Christian nation. It don't say that in the constitution. No. You got all these special things, all these special caveats. Now, that ain't what the constitution say. You change the constitution, you change the country. But right now, we still got something to work with. One of the other things that the mam urged us to do, he said, work with like minds, find like minds. And he said, that is not exclusive to Muslims or to African Americans. He said, find like minds people who have the same ethical, uh, and moral sensitivity that wanna see good being done and are considered about the whole of society. Can you give me, uh, an idea of what that means institutionally? What are your thoughts on that? Well, the, the first thought that comes to mind is the Quran says that the closest to you are the Christians. Mm-hmm. And he said, because they stand up in the middle of the night and call on their Lord. And you see tears coming from their eyes that they mention of God. So we can say a lot of things and we, we, us we come from Christian families, you know. That's right. Muslim convers. But we all came out of, out of a church experience, you know, so I understand that sincerity, uh. And we might think that they are missing the mark in many ways. I, you know, the, the, the Jesus factor of identifying, uh, Trinity and all that. But we know that going back to the civil rights movement, some of those diehard Christians were the staunchest fighters on, on the battlefield for, for justice. Mm-hmm. Case point, Dr. King. So we, we acknowledged that we were waiting on all the Muslims to get together. We weren't going make it, we weren't gonna get to the front of the, the front of a lot of these things that have taken place without this Christian movement. So the number one was the crime said the Christians are the closest to you. Mm-hmm. And so you have to look around and say, who among these other religious groups have my same ideals and my same convictions? And willing to put that all and all on the line. Like we are willing to put our all and all on the line. And it didn't just start when we were, we converted to Islam. You know, other things, other factors moved us towards Islam. But the conviction was there. It was even born with us. And you can go way, you can go further back than just more than day. I always talk about when I'm, when I'm, we talk about Newt Knight mm-hmm. As an unlikely, uh, hero in the African American history, being that he was a southern white farmer who fought against the Confederate all by itself. But I go back further than that and I think of John Brown. That's right. And John Brown was a devout Christian. John Brown's, um, mutiny per se, Harpers Ferry, Kansas, they began to call Bloody Kansas because he was so convinced that slavery was wrong until he put all of his resources into the revolt. His sons, his property, his own life, and he was going to fight the fight. The free slaves himself, his sons were killed, his property was taken. He was, he was captured and later be, uh, hang. But he, um, gave a, a warning that resonated throughout the country that you can even find in movies, just, just the census, John Brown. And it is also said that Abraham Lincoln would not have had the fortitude to start a civil war had it not been for John Brown having the fortitude to, to, to break the ice with his revolt and his losses. Uh, so we, I know that we can't just do it by ourselves as, as Muslims. Uh, and then there's so many others that are so seasoned in the fight that we have to look around. But, um, and it's historic. It's not just this era. It's, it's historic and people are conscious. We realize that people have a conscious that you will find, some of 'em don't even express religion. That's right. You know, they may not even have a religion, but you see that they have a sense of conscious and a sense of right and wrong, and those are the ones that you look for and you forge relationships with because they, they will be the ones that, that will help you, uh, carry forward. As we should also be their defendants. You know, we say Muslims are the friends, the Muslims and the, and the supporters for Muslims when the Muslim is there. Mm-hmm. But if Muslim is not in place and not there, then you look for who can you form a relationship that can help you get through these hard times. And if they're having a hard time that you can back up also and, and they're endeavor and in their fights. Mm. To luck. Um, I want to ask you to complete this prompt. Uh, the one lesson I keep learning is, well, well, actually, the one lesson I keep learning is, is not about me. Mm. It's one lesson. This ain't about, it ain't about you. And I, I, I look back through history, you know, 'cause sometimes we want to, we want to get props and we wanna get pats on the back and we want to get accolades and we get upset when we don't get them. And then you have to remind yourself it isn't, it is not about you. You know, that's all well and good, but, um, a lot rewards whom he pleases. You may see your rewards and you may not see your, your rewards. So you have to get over yourself, you know? Uh, get over yourself. Yeah. You know? And then when you start looking back in history, it's not about you. There are prominent figures. And one that I look to all the time, I realize it is not about you, it's John the Baptist. Hmm. I only did John the Baptist live in his ministry. Think back, I think it was about three years as an adult, John the Baptist. He, his ministry was about three years long and his ministry was for, to direct through one thing, the coming of Christ Jesus. His baptism of Christ was his sole purpose. Yeah. But it was a very important link in the progression of humanity. And then, you know, we talk, we think about the, the prophets ascension, the night ascension. Mm-hmm. When he, he, uh, visits all the prophets and he comes down the chain, each one of them had a responsibility to fulfill. And each one of them passed on and the link continued. And you realize. We, we love them. We remember them, but it was not about, we didn't stop there. You know, we don't stop. We, we revere and love Abraham, but we don't stop there. We love Moses, but we don't stop there. We love Jesus Christ, but we don't stop. We keep moving forward. We keep moving forward. And then of course they tell us the prophet is the last one in the chain. So the responsibility on us is we really have to push this forward. And in the prophets, um, last sermon when he looked out at the believers and he said, I want you to take this message and deliver it to those who are not here, and perhaps they will understand it better than you do. Mm-hmm. And about us is we are the farthest outposts from the prophet. And I say that physically, mentally, historically, we African Americans who were enslaved people. Who would thought that we were dead. People thought we were just mentally dead. Called us three fifths of a man. Mm-hmm. They thought we had no coming back. We woke up to our genetic memory. The man was called it genetic memory. Yeah. And Dr. Sierra Lincoln outta Duke University called it genetic memory. Mm-hmm. We woke up to our genetic memory that had Islam in it, and we began to rekindle our faith and our growth. We were resuscitated and our Islam after all of that 300 years of slavery where we didn't even know our names. And, you know, you can go back and look, the movers with Come to Kente. How they beat the name out of him. Yeah. To, until he couldn't do it anymore. How, uh, they switched us up from our mothers and slaves and put you on another plantation. They had slaves who, they switched them up so they couldn't speak the same language. Humiliated us, tried to put fear in us. And they thought they had killed our souls with that one little inkling of fire, that little burning shoot that came back up in, up in your genetic memory reminded you that once you heard this wrong, you said, oh, that's what it is about. Mm-hmm. Oh, I, I remember. And, and here in Mississippi we had, uh, the slave, um, that was on Natch Plantation. Uh, Ibrahim Abdulrahman. Abdulrahman Ibrahim. I might put the first name. First to last. Abdurahman Ibrahim was a slave, was made a slave on a plantation in Natch, Mississippi. He was well versed in Arabic. He was a hot culturalist. They say that plantation thrived because of his knowledge of how to grow things. He made appeal after an appeal to be returned to Africa. And actually one of the slave ship captains was in the area and he recognized Abdul Rahman Ibrahim. And he knew his father back in Africa. And he said the slave, uh, captain, uh, ship captain said Your father treated me well. And he was gonna work to get him back to Africa. He actually went to DC to make a pill on Ibrahim's behalf to take him back to Africa. They gave him his freedom. They told him you could leave. Uh, when he got ready to pack up and leave, they told him, uh, but you can't take your children. They property you can't take, you know, family. They a property. They have to stay here. They say if you want them, you have to purchase them. So you're telling a slave that you gotta come up with money to purchase your own children. Right. And he worked to do that, but they, uh, it wasn't completed in his lifetime. He died before he could raise that money. I actually lived to see, uh, African family come from Africa. Two Mississippi down in Natchez, Mississippi looking for Ibrahim's offspring. Really? Right. They didn't come for any other purpose. It wasn't any fanfare. They said, we are coming to find, they knew the, the slave names that they had, they were under the names like Foster. Mm-hmm. He said, and they knew his mother was, their, their mothers were called Isabelle. So it was Ibrahim and Isabelle. We wanna find the, the, the lineage of Abraham and Isabelle. They were coming to look for those, those those names. Did they find 'em? And, uh, they, they found quite a few, uh, connections. I don't know the physical people, but that I didn't follow through since then. Yeah. Because they really didn't make it a lot of fancy about it. And it wasn't like, uh, we coming to, to, they came to the museum, the International Museum of Muslim culture. Uh, they came to the museum. And then they went down to Natches. And, um, after that, I haven't followed up on them yet, but their purpose was, we come, we come to find this lineage. They, they were the lineage from Abraham. So just, just sometimes quietly, I, I say to myself when I'm in the Natches area, I just wish, but I, I say to the, the, we speak out of the Muslim is dead, you know, so we say we are back. You know, we're back. I'm the lie. I'm, and we pray that they're smiling like that. We want them to have that kinda smile Yeah. On their face. Because speak out of the believers dead, you know. That's right. That's right. Hopefully we warm that heart that we are back. Yes. Um, well, sister Dia, I really appreciate you taking some time to, uh, have conversation and to share a bit of your journey, uh, and your insights. I hope to be able to talk to you again, um, because you just, you just mentioned at the very end we didn't even mention you serve on the board for the, uh, the museum. I'm on the board. Yes. I, I'm, I'm, I'm one of the latecomers, you know, the museum, uh, started and it's a very interesting museum because the, the co-founders of the museum, one is Palestinian American and one is African American. Yeah. So it's a, a very, very rich history. Uh, and the museum is, uh, is one of the special places. Mississippi. Mm-hmm. Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi. Yeah, we're back home. Yeah. So I'm gonna put links for the journal, the Muslim Journal as well. Alright. Thank you for joining us for this conversation with Aisha k Mufa, editor of the Muslim Journal and Assistant Professor of Mass Communications. That concludes our program for today, but we'll be back next week with another engaging discussion in s Shaah. With God's permission. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and stay connected with us on social media at the American Muslim Podcast and with me at Imam Tarin. I leave you as I greeted you as KU may the peace that only God can give be upon you.