Malcolm x prison studies essay

“A Homemade Education” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

Background: 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.

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 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 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. [. . . .]

But I’m digressing. I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library.

Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books

these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my

life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I’m not

curious about. I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact,

prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently

and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there

are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.

Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely

sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day? [end of the chapter in the original.]

http://accounts.smccd.edu/bellr/readerlearningtoread.htm for the above excerpt up to the last

ellipsis (I added the last paragraph from the original). Much detail about what books Malcolm X

read and how that led to his broader understanding of the world is left out here. See this site for

an uncut version in PDF http://www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Homemade%20Education.pdf

http://accounts.smccd.edu/bellr/readerlearningtoread.htm
http://www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Homemade%20Education.pdf