“Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

MALCOLM X
Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X was one of the most articulate and
powerful leaders of black America during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of
robbery in 1946, he spent seven years in prison, where he educated himself and
became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. In the days of
the civil rights movement, Malcolm X emerged as the leading spokesman for black
separatism, a philosophy that urged black Americans to cut political, social, and
economic ties with the white community. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the capital of the
Muslim world, in 1964, he became an orthodox Muslim, adopted the Muslim name El
Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and distanced himself from the teachings of the black Muslims.
He was assassinated in 1965. In the following excerpt from his
autobiography (1965), coauthored with Alex Haley and published the year of his death,
Malcolm X describes his self-education.

It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to

acquire some kind of a homemade education.

I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I

wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah
Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there. I had
commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple
English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional. How would I sound
writing in slang, the way 1 would say it, something such as, “Look, daddy, let me
pull your coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad—”

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those

who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth
grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.

It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first
made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of
any conversations he was in, and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I
picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all
of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those
words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. So I had
come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions.
Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had received the
motivation that I did.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study,
to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to
improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was
both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some
tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

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 I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages.
I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to
learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet

everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything

I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own
handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely

proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written
words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also
could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose
meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right
now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a
long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites
caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page.
And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I
also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary
is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a
whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what
eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice
helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and
writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million
words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for

the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the
book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world
that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every
free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk.
You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr.
Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and
Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking
about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my
life.

The Norfolk Prison Colony’s library was in the school building. A variety of
classes was taught there by instructors who came from such places as Harvard
and Boston universities. The weekly debates between inmate teams were also
held in the school building. You would be astonished to know how worked up

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convict debaters and audiences would get over subjects like “Should Babies Be
Fed Milk?”

Available on the prison library’s shelves were books on just about every
general subject. Much of the big private collection that Parkhurst had willed to
the prison was still in crates and boxes in the back of the library—thousands of
old books. Some of them looked ancient: covers faded; old-time parchment-
looking binding. Parkhurst, I’ve mentioned, seemed to have been principally
interested in history and religion. He had the money and the special interest to
have a lot of books that you wouldn’t have in general circulation. Any college
library would have been lucky to get that collection.

As you can imagine, especially in a prison where there was heavy

emphasis on rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled upon if he demonstrated an
unusually intense interest in books. There was a sizable number of well-read
inmates, especially the popular debaters, Some were said by many to be
practically walking encyclopedias.

They were almost celebrities. No university would ask any student to

devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read
and understand.

I read more in my room than in the library itself. An inmate who was
known to read a lot could check out more than the permitted maximum number
of books. I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room.

When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten
P.M. I would be outraged with the “lights out.” It always seemed to catch me right
in the middle of something engrossing.

Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow
into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So
when “lights out” came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in
that glow.

At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I
heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as
soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-
glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard
approached again. That went on until three or four every morning. Three or four
hours of sleep a night was enough for me. Often in the years in the streets I had
slept less than that.

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been

“whitened”—when white men had written history books, the black man simply
had been left out...I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading

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about slavery’s total horror. It made such an impact upon me that it later
became one of my favorite subjects when I became a minister of Mr.
Muhammad’s. The world’s most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the
white man’s hands, are almost impossible to believe...I read descriptions of
atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with
whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be
seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave
catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns...

Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the
world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of
exploitation. I saw how since the sixteenth century, the so-called “Christian
trader” white man began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African
empires, and plunder, and power. I read, I saw, how the white man never has
gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true manner and
spirit of Christ’s teachings—meek, humble, and Christlike…

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I
knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.
As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving
to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college
confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me,
with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness,
dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long
ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was,
“What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a
free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to
help the black man.

1. How does learning differ from formal education for Malcolm X?

2. What else did Malcolm X teach himself while he taught himself to read?
3. Consider the sentence “In fact, up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life” (11). What
is the effect of this sentence on the reader? In other words, what is its rhetorical purpose?
4. How does Malcolm X develop a connection in the first section of the essay between books (and
language) and enlightenment?
5. This piece contains some strong viewpoints and connotative, emotional language. Pick two
examples and analyze the effect the examples had on you personally.
6. What is the tone of the essay? Can you discern an overall tone, or do you believe that the tone
shifts? Explain.
7. Is reading the most important skill for students in school today? Why or why not? What is
equally or more important? What skills should we be prioritizing?
8. Malcolm X writes, “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me” (22).
Using this as your opening sentence, describe a time in your life when reading made an
important difference in your perspective or awareness.

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