Autobiography of Malcolm X Notes

Summary:
The 1st chapter begins by retelling an event prior to Malcolm X’s birth where the KKK
went his family’s home and threatened his mother. What follows from that is the description of
Malcolm’s family and his early years as a child in his family. His father was a preacher who
advocated for separatism. The father was described to look like a big brute, who was also
violent with his family, but yet still protective. His mother was a half white, educated women
from Grenada. She would often clash with Malcolm’s father and would suffer beatings, as
would the rest of Malcolm’s siblings. When his family moved to Lansing, another group of
white supremacists burned down his house, teaching Malcolm one of the many lessons he would
learn early in his life. Black success was not on the same level as white success in any way,
shape, or form. The odds are against him. He also learns, after having a fit at home, that the way
to get something is to demand for it. His father dies when he is 6, and his family cannot make
enough on welfare while no one around them is willing to help. Eventually, his mother gets sent
to a mental hospital and his siblings break up completely. Malcolm puts the blame on the state
welfare agency for what occurred.
The 2nd chapter describes Malcolm’s surroundings and situation. He get adopted by a
white family yet feels like a pity mascot more than a human. School is tough on him as a black
even though he was successful academically. Malcolm comes to terms with the fact that even
well-meaning white people still hold some prejudice in their hearts against black people. As he
grows up, he grows more and more frustrated at the racial discrimination around him. He visits
his family when he has time. He dances to swing music at bars. Malcolm spends his summer in
Boston with his half-sister Ella whom he eventually moves in with when he can’t handle the
frustration anymore. He is glad to have moved away or else he would have ended up like the rest
of the black people in Lansing.

Analysis: The language wasn’t particularly meant to tailor to a specific group of people. I felt
that the audience was the general public, and as such he used words that people, as long as they
had English education, could understand what he was describing and somewhat feel what he felt
in the events told. A lot of the description of the events were dark. He focused much of details
on the emotions the people involved felt, more so than the actions done. Malcolm also held
strong attitudes towards things he felt needed to be cared about, which probably was why he felt
that the racial barriers affected him so much. His descriptions were outright crude with his
description of his family, the chicken head that got pulled off, as well as other things in his
retelling. It felt like he wasn’t tried to hide anything details or hold back. He told his story as is.
Malcolm’s experiences with racial prejudice from both whites and blacks were very telling of the
times he lived in. Whites felt that blacks were still much like pets, allowing a certain degree of
freedom, before “punishing” them for going too far, such as in the father’s preaching, or
Malcolm telling his teacher of his dreams of being a lawyer, or even how his mother suffered
from being part black and part white and being excluded from both groups. Malcolm was being
forced to grow how society wanted him to grow and he wasn’t one to let it happen, which is why
he did what he thought best, to go away to a new place and build himself from there. Malcolm X
did not want to be held as a mascot on how blacks should act within a white society, to the point
where he felt stripped of even his masculinity.

Notes:
In chapter 1 Nightmares, examples of how X utilizes dictation are:
 The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town
because “the good Christian white people” were not going to stand for my father’s
“spreading trouble” among the “good” Negroes of Omaha with the “back to Africa”
preachings of Marcus Garvey
 Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were reviling him as an
“uppity nigger” for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro district,
for spreading unrest and dissention among “the good niggers.”
 I can remember hearing of “Adam driven out of the garden into the caves of Europe,”
“Africa for the Africans,” “Ethiopians, Awake!” And my father would talk about how it
would not be much longer before Africa would be completely run by Negroes—“by
black men,” was the phrase he always used. “No one knows when the hour of Africa’s
redemption cometh. It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here.”
 the people chanting after him, “Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!”
 my mother gave me more hell for the same reason. She was very light herself but she
favored the ones who were darker. Wilfred, I know, was particularly her angel. I
remember that she would tell me to get out of the house and “Let the sun shine on you so
you can get some color.”
 My father was well up the road when my mother ran screaming out onto the porch.
“Early! Early!” She screamed his name
 mother began to buy on credit. My father had always been very strongly against credit.
“Credit is the first step into debt and back into slavery,” he had always said.
 She was the one who, years later, would tell me something that I remembered a long
time: “Malcolm, there’s one thing I like about you. You’re no good, but you don’t try to
hide it. You are not a hypocrite
Examples of Tone are:
 Even at that young age, I just couldn’t believe in the Christian concept of Jesus as
someone divine. And no religious person, until I was a man in my twenties—and then in
prison—could tell me anything. I had very little respect for most people who represented
religion
  I have never understood why, after hearing as much as I did of these kinds of things, I
somehow never thought, then, of the black people in Africa. My image of Africa, at that
time, was of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles
 She screamed his name. She clutched up her apron in one hand, and ran down across the
yard and into the road
 Wilfred sprang up from his chair and he shooed the fly away, and he came groping back
to his chair—there were folding chairs for us to sit on—and the tears were streaming
down his face
 They acted as if they owned us, as if we were their private property.
Examples of imagery:
 When the state Welfare people began coming to our house, we would come from school
sometimes and find them talking with our mother, asking a thousand questions. They
acted and looked at her, and at us, and around in our house, in a way that had about it the
feeling—at least for me—that we were not people. In their eyesight we were just things,
that was all.
 But after that money came, and my mother had paid out a lot of it for the funeral and
expenses, she began going into town and returning very upset. The company that had
issued the bigger policy was balking at paying off.
o This is setting up society to be the bad side of the narration because of how they
treated his family and ruined it.
 But they exerted their right to come, and I have many, many times reflected upon how,
talking to us children, they began to plant the seeds of division in our minds. They would
ask such things as who was smarter than the other. And they would ask me why I was “so
different.

In chapter 2 Mascot, examples of how X utilizes dictation are:
 The teacher, who was white, ordered me to keep the hat on, and to walk around and
around the room until he told me to stop. “That way,” he said, “everyone can see you.
Meanwhile, we’ll go on with class for those who are here to learn something.
 Mr. Swerlin, as nice as he was, came in from Lansing, where he had been through the
Negro section, and said to Mrs. Swerlin right in front of me, “I just can’t see how those
niggers can be so happy and be so poor.” He talked about how they lived in shacks, but
had those big, shining cars out front.
 And Mrs. Swerlin said, me standing right there, “Niggers are just that way….” That scene
always stayed with me
 “Malcolm, we’re just so proud of you!” Mrs. Swerlin exclaimed
Examples of Tone are:
 I noticed again how white people smelled different from us, and how their food tasted
different, not seasoned like Negro cooking
  the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry
Negroes, about their “liberal” white friends, these so-called “good white people”—most
of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always
remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his
own kind. He may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down,
you’ll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious
conviction that he’s better than anybody black
 It was the first time I’d ever had any money to speak of, all my own, in my whole life. As
soon as I could afford it, I bought a green suit and some shoes, and at school I’d buy
treats for the others in my class—at least as much as any of them did for me
 Mr. Williams, was a great one for “nigger” jokes. One day during my first week at
school, I walked into the room and he started singing to the class, as a joke, “ ‘Way down
yonder in the cotton field, some folks say that a nigger won’t steal.” Very funny.
 I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it.
I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a
mistake, that was all there was to it.
 I gawked out of the window at white man’s America rolling past for what seemed a
month, but must have been only a day and a half
 The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just
kept treading around in my mind
 I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent
enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be
Examples of imagery:
 I noticed again how white people smelled different from us, and how their food tasted
different, not seasoned like Negro cooking.
 his expression approving, like he was examining a fine colt, or a pedigreed pup.
 It was fine working there. Every Friday night when I got paid, I’d feel at least ten feet
tall. I forget how much I made, but it seemed like a lot
 Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his
hands behind his head …. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you
plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work.
 There, the white people just sat and worshipped with words; but the Boston Negroes, like
all other Negroes I had ever seen at church, threw their souls and bodies wholly into
worship