There is a moment in all of our lives when you are working on something and you just can’t seem to get it. And then all of the sudden it clicks, just like that. I can’t remember the first time | could read words out of a book, but I remember I suddenly loved to read, and when this happened I was pretty young. Malcolm X on the other hand was older when he finally took an interest in reading, but no matter what it is, and at what age you are, that you finally get it, it’s one of the best things you can accomplish. You can do anything.
In Malcolm X’s autobiography “Learning to Read,” published in 1965, Malcolm X, a street hustler that was sentenced to seven years in prison, and went on to become a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, talks about how he self educated himself in his years in prison. Malcolm spends endless days copying words from the dictionary, and reading every chance he gets. He talks about the amount and collection of the types of book available to the inmates. And how in these collection of book, he learned of the wrong doings to his people.
He also tells of how he would read in his own isolation and how he in a sense decided to dedicate his life to becoming better by being educated. In saying this he is informing all people that it is up to you to change your life for the better. Malcolm X discusses how and when he learned to read, and then talks about how whites treated African Americans. Malcolm X “acquired a kind of homemade education”,(1) he starts with this so you can get a glimpse of how little he did know. He told us “he was the most articulate hustler out there, but he wasn’t even functional when it came to writing simple english”. 1) He wants you to feel a sort of sympathy for him.
And most of us do. We are all good at something at some point in our lives and right when we get comfortable we get thrown into the real world, and then we are suddenly not so good at whatever it was we excelled at. He wrote this to all age groups and races, and his purpose in dedicating it to everybody it to teach us all something. He is first telling us that you can do anything you want with your life. He was imprisoned, which most people would think that was all they would ever be, but he showed us by learning to read that we are so much more than what others think of us.
Malcolm even states that he “would have quit these motions, unless | had received the motivation that I did”. (1) He wants us to see that even he was going to give up, but he didn’t. Malcolm X then goes on to talk about how “when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out”. (3) His purpose for this is to inform the black man about what we have done to them, and to make the white man feel guilt. I agree with Malcolm completely, but is that what most white men feel when they first read this? I believe not. People don’t like to be blamed for what their ancestors did, even if it is written in books.
So after reading this, I think most of us would be mad. But maybe we should be the ones to step back and really listen to what Malcolm was trying to say. I don’t think he was necessarily hating on us, but maybe trying to get us to think that we were in the wrong. I think one problem this story may have raised is what people say and how they react after reading it. Malcolm maybe could have tried to make everyone understand that what happened was wrong, but that we as a whole, can fix it. His writing bashes on whites, even though he is right, he could have taken a bit of a different angle so people wouldn’t be offended.
If he would have taken a non accusing view, more people might take a step back to think that it wasn’t right then, and it’s definitely not now. After I read Malcolm X’s autobiography it made me think a lot about different things. I first tried to think back on when | learned to read, but I realized I don’t remember anything from my childhood until I look at pictures. So like I said, I don’t really remember anything. I then thought of him being imprisoned. I of course have never been to prison but I can relate to this in a way. High School for me was a sort of prison.
It was the same routine everyday, same people, same story over and over. || could leave at the end of the day, but I as well spent hours on end reading alone in my room. The last thing I thought about after reading this, has probably affected me the deepest. He talk about the sufferings we put on all the other races of the world. And most of the time we don’t think about stuff like that, because it happened so long ago that it doesn’t even seem real. Even when this was being written Malcolm X states” The world’s most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the white man’s hands, are almost impossible to believe”. 3)
This made me upset because I can’t imagine why someone would ever do this, or how we could do this. It makes me think we had no morals, and even now with racism, it seems like we have a mind set that we are better than everyone. Malcolm X covered many important things in his article; he discussed his adventure as he learned to read, and some of the unexpected truths of our world. Malcolm X was assassinated right before his autobiography was published but it alone has made an impact on many people’s lives.
