Malcolm x coming to an awareness of language essay

62 WRITING FROM RESEARCH

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COMING TO TERMS WITH LANGUAGE

Conain, to an Awaveness of Lan8Hag.e MALCOLM X

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, was shot t o death as be addressed an afternoon rally in Harlem. He was thirty-nine years old. In the course of his brief lqe, he had risen from a world of tbieving, pimping, and drug pushing t o become one of the most articulate and powerful African Americans in the United States during the early 1960s. In 1992 his lqe was reexamined in Spike Lee’sofilm Malcolm X. With the assistance of the late Alex Haley, the author of Roots, Malcolm Xtold hisstory inThe Autobi- ography of Malcolm X (1 964), a moving account of his search for fulfillment. This selection is taken @om the Autobiography.

All of us have been in situationsin which we have felt somehow be- trayed by our lanfluage, unable toofind just the rkht words t o express ourselves. “Words,” as lexicographer Bergen Evans has said, “are the tools for the job of saying what you want t o say.” As our repertoire of words expands so does our ability t o express ourselves-to articulate clearly our thou&ts,fielinas, hopes, fears, likes, and dislikes. Frustra- tion at not being able t o express himselfin the letters he wrote drove Malcolm X t o the dictionary, where he discovered the power of words. W R I T ~ G TO DISCO^^ Write about a time when,someone told you that it is important t o have agood vocabulary. What did you think when you heard this advice? Why do you think people believe that vocabulary is important? How would you assess your own vocabulary?

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64 COMING TO TERMS WITH LANGUAGE

I’ve never been one for inaction. Everything I’ve ever felt strongly about, I’ve done something about. I guess that’s why, unable to do any- thing else, I soon began writing to people I had known in the hustling world, such as Sammy the Pimp, John Hughes, the gambling house owner, the thief Jumpsteady, and several dope peddlers. I wrote them all about Allah and Islam and Mr. Elijah Muhammad. I had no idea where most of them lived. I addressed their letters in care of the Harlem or Roxbury bars and clubs where I’d known them.

I never got a single reply. The average hustler and criminal was too uneducated to write a letter. I have known many slick sharp-looking hustlers, who would have you think they had an interest in Wall Street; privately, they would get someone else to read a letter if they received one. Besides, neither would I have replied to anyone writing me some- thing as wild as “the white man is the devil.”

What certainly went on the Harlem and Roxbury wires was that De- troit Red was going crazy in stir,* or else he was trying some hype to shake up the warden’s office.

During the years that I stayed in the Norfolk Prison Colony, never did any official directly say anything to me about those letters, although, of course, they all passed through the prison censorship. I’m sure, how- ever, they monitored what I wrote to add to the files which every state and federal prison keeps on the conversion of Negro inmates by the teachings of Mr. Elijah Muhammad.

But at that time, I felt that the real reason was that the white man knew that he was the devil.

Later on, I even wrote to the Mayor of Boston, to the Governor of Massachusetts, and to Harry S. Truman. They never answered; they prob