The Nation of Islam, despite its seeming impracticalities theologically and economically speaking, is also an institution that incites great positive change amongst its congregation. Before the Nation there was no organization that vocally reinvested a foreword, immutable thrusting sense of racial esteem, knowledge, or pride in self-defense in the blacks of industrial cities and beyond. There was no such institution in the Civil Rights movement that shamelessly put on a red cape and to refute a billy club from making contact with a black cranium. Super Man never saved any Black people but the Nation has:

Elijah Muhammad [and the Nation have] been able to do what generations of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do, to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and female with a pride and serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light. He has done all these things which our Christian church has spectacularly failed to do. (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, pp. 51)