malcolm x homemade education

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the story Malcolm tells of his experiences and of his own growth. Alternatively, it is the story of his education. That education is not a standard one, with typical schooling. It is rather an education in racism, on the streets, and out in the world – but Malcolm is consistent in his efforts to learn from his experiences and to make an education, however informal, for himself.

As a child, Malcolm does very well in school, and he ranks among the top three students in his class. His dreams of becoming a lawyer, however, are blocked by his white teacher, Mr. Ostrowski , who tells him to set his sights more reasonably and pursue a career in carpentry. This marks one of the first times that Malcolm is acutely aware of being discriminated against because of his race, and he quickly drops out of school. More than teaching him subject knowledge, Malcolm’s official school career makes him aware of racism, of how official society represented by public schools both oppresses black people and justifies that oppression through its view of black people as being inferior – a viewpoint that at least for a time Malcolm internalizes.

Malcolm then turns to a life on the streets, where he receives a very different kind of education, as he learns to “hustle” and to make extra money wherever he can. As another hustler Freddie tells him, "The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.” This advice becomes a guiding principle of Malcolm’s throughout his hustling career and beyond, for both good and ill. On the one hand, Malcolm explains how it opens up his mind to see how so many relationships and moments which seem innocent actually involve some form of “hustle,” or some hidden play for money, influence, or power. However, Malcolm also explains how it presses him into a “jungle mentality” in which he can only think in terms of survival. Plus, hustling (in this case, burglary) eventually gets Malcolm sent to prison for seven years.

In prison Malcolm’s education shifts, especially after he gets transferred to the Norfolk Prison Colony, a progressive institution with regular lectures, debates, and a large library. With both time and resources that have previously been denied to him, Malcolm rediscovers his love of books and learning, becoming particularly interested in the history of Africa, the American slave trade, and religion. He stays so busy studying that “months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.” This education is freeing not just in that it helps Malcolm pass the time or do something he enjoys, but that it gives him an understanding of things that had previously been hidden from him. It’s freeing because it lets him see the lie in the racism forced upon him by his official schooling, and his own dignity as a black man, and it motivates him to join the Nation of Islam.

After breaking with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm characterizes that time of his life within the group as being “twelve years of never thinking.” But the Hajj to Mecca, where he must learn the beliefs and customs of orthodox Muslims, gives him a final education. The Hajj exposes Malcolm both to a wider world and his own ignorance. For instance, he finds that he does not even know the proper Islamic prayer postures, and his body aches under the strain of practicing them. This education is extremely humbling, especially for a man who has been leading a growing religious movement for years. As Malcolm puts it: “Imagine, being a Muslim minister, a leader in Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, and not knowing the prayer ritual.” By humbling him from the position of minister to just another man simply learning to serve God, this education contributes towards his more tempered views on the goals of social justice.

Malcolm never loses his reverence for education. In fact, as he reflects in the Autobiography shortly before his assassination, he says his only regret is that he never finished his schooling to become a lawyer. He understands that education has been an empowering force in his life, but the one time he was denied further access to it he was forced to learn a different, more destructive way to survive.

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Education Quotes in The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I looked like Li'l Abner. Mason, Michigan, was written all over me. My kinky, reddish hair was cut hick style, and I didn't even use grease in it. My green suit's coat sleeves stopped above my wrists, the pants legs showed three inches of socks. Just a shade lighter green than the suit was my narrow-collared, three-quarter length Lansing department store topcoat. My appearance was too much for even Ella. But she told me later she had seen countrified members of the Little family come up from Georgia in even worse shape than I was.

"The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle. So long, Red.”

Shorty would take me to groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks' and cats' pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings. That paragraph is deliberate, of course; it's just to display a bit more of the slang that was used by everyone I respected as "hip" in those days. And in no time at all, I was talking the slang like a lifelong hipster.

We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.

There I was back in Harlem's streets among all the rest of the hustlers. I couldn't sell reefers; the dope squad detectives were too familiar with me. I was a true hustler—uneducated, unskilled at anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits, exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything.

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.

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.

“Today's Uncle Tom doesn't wear a handkerchief on his head. This modern, twentieth-century Uncle Thomas now often wears a top hat. He's usually well-dressed and well-educated. He's often the personification of culture and refinement. The twentieth-century Uncle Thomas sometimes speaks with a Yale or Harvard accent. Sometimes he is known as Professor, Doctor, Judge, and Reverend, even Right Reverend Doctor. This twentieth-century Uncle Thomas is a professional Negro . . . by that I mean his profession is being a Negro for the white man.”

And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.

I told him, "What you are telling me is that it isn't the American white man who is a racist, but it's the American political, economic, and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man." He agreed.

He talked about the pressures on him everywhere he turned, and about the frustrations, among them that no one wanted to accept anything relating to him except "my old 'hate' and 'violence' image." He said "the so-called moderate" civil rights organizations avoided him as "too militant" and the "so-called militants" avoided him as "too moderate." “They won't let me tum the corner!" he once exclaimed, “I'm caught in a trap!"

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

The Education of Malcolm X

Relying on books, malcolm x gave himself a high school and college education—while locked behind bars.

When asked by a British writer about his alma mater, Malcolm X answered, “Books.” The response would have surprised anyone who knew him growing up—when he was still known as Malcolm Little, before he joined the Nation of Islam, before he went to jail.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm X spent his boyhood in and around Lansing, Michigan. Earl Little, a Baptist preacher and evangelist for Marcus Garvey’s message of black empowerment, was a stern and insistent father. Always agitating for his views, he was killed by members of a white racist group similar to the Klan when Malcolm was just a child. The official story was a street car ran him over, but the family knew better.

The Littles were already in difficult straits but had managed to stay strong. Earl’s murder pushed them over the edge. Eventually the kids were fostered out and mom, Louise, was committed to a mental hospital, where she stayed the next twenty-six years.

Between the murder and the collapse, Malcolm’s, older brother Wilfred began reading. “His head was forever in some book,” Malcolm X recalled in his Autobiography , written with Alex Haley from 1963 to 1965 and from which most of this account is drawn.

Louise, a radical in her own right , had encouraged literacy in her home, having the kids read Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World , aloud to her. But books didn’t appeal greatly to Malcolm X at the time Wilfred was burying his nose in them, nor could he have have imagined himself the subject of one. That honor would come only after—and because—he had learned to love books himself.

Cruel School

In junior high Malcolm X favored history and English, though he had no reason to favor his teachers. His history textbook contained only one brief passage on African Americans, and it was derogatory; the teacher laughed his way through reading it aloud to his students—all of whom were white but Malcolm. His English teacher, who otherwise seemed to have been helpful and decent, leveled an even harsher blow. He encouraged his students to think big about their futures, but when Malcolm mentioned becoming a lawyer the teacher told him to lower his sights.

“We all here like you,” he said. “But you’ve got to be realistic about being a n*****. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a n*****.” What should this bright and promising eighth-grader do instead? The teacher suggest carpentry.

“It was then I began to change, inside,” explained Malcolm X, who would never again agree to the dominant cultural narrative of black inferiority. When his half sister, a well-off African American woman, offered him a place to stay in Boston, he dropped out of school and headed east.

After a few years, Malcolm X settled in Harlem where the would-be lawyer expressed his disillusionment by breaking the law he previously imagined serving. Though he worked legitimate jobs, he gravitated toward crime: selling drugs, prostitution, theft, and even armed robbery. He was eventually caught. Before turning twenty-one, Malcolm X began a ten-year prison sentence.

It was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Prison Studies

By the time he entered prison, Malcolm X had forgotten much of what he’d learned in school. “I didn’t know a verb from a house,” he said. That changed when an inmate suggested he try some correspondence courses and make use of the prison library. Envious of the man’s knowledge, he followed his lead.

Malcolm X’s bookish older brother Wilfred also played a part. “I told him, ‘Don’t you serve the time, let the time serve you,’” he recalled several decades later . “While you’re in there,” Wilfred told Malcolm, “spend time in that library. Get into the classes where you can learn something and improve yourself so that when you come out, you’ll be able to do something other than the things that got you in here.”

So Malcolm X started reading, took an English course, and even began Latin lessons. “The mechanics of grammar gradually began to come back to me,” he recalled.

Two years into his sentence, Malcolm X was transferred to a prison with an enormous library packed with books on history, religion, and other heady stuff. Many volumes were above his level. To expand his vocabulary, he began hand copying the dictionary page by page. He seemed to have got the idea from his mother.

According to Wilfred, Louise kept a dictionary on the dining room table when the kids read the newspaper to her. “Whenever you made a mistake,” Wilfred said, “she’d stop you and make you go to that dictionary, look it up, ‘syllablize’ it, get the meaning of it, and that way you began to improve your vocabulary . . . I reminded Malcolm about this, so he started doing that in prison.”

The effect was profound. Malcolm X recalled,

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. 

Like his brother, now Malcolm X’s face was forever in a book. “You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge,” he said. He read as much as fifteen hours a day. At night he kept going by a stray beam of light that shone through his cell door. He eyesight later suffered, and he blamed the long hours and poor light for the glasses he wore the rest of his life. The trade was worth it.

Malcolm X read history, philosophy, science, mythology, and more. He read, among many others, W.E.B. Du Bois, Will Durant, Immanuel Kant, Gregor Mendel, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Harriet Beecher Stowe, H.G. Wells, Carter G. Woodson, even Dale Carnegie. He called these “prison studies” his “homemade education,” and his voracious appetite for literature gave him the sense, sound, and style of someone who stayed in school well past the eighth grade. 

I have often reflected on 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.

Working for the Nation

During this same period, encouraged by his siblings, Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam. It’s where he got his name. Upon release from prison, he swapped his surname for X (repudiating the legacy of slavery inherent in his family name) and put his learning to work.

Thanks to his reading, Malcolm X became a fierce advocate for fellow blacks and a harsh opponent of what he called “the racist malignancy” in white America. “My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was affecting the black race in America,” he said. 

Malcolm X became the primary spokesman for the Nation of Islam and easily the most recognizable radical civil-rights proponent of the era, often at odds with the mainstream civil-rights movement. Malcolm X believed leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. were delusional about integration. His reading of western history reinforced the Nation of Islam view that whites would never embrace true equality but rather use integration to co-opt black liberation. Against MLK’s call for nonviolence, he advocated armed self-defense.

While his determination remained unchanged over time, his views, particularly on Islamic orthodoxy and the possibility of racial harmony, did evolve. After more than a decade as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, he was edged out of the organization. During the period, he converted to traditional Sunni Islam. While on pilgrimage to Mecca, he encountered positive racial pluralism he’d never experienced in America. Though he preferred to work with blacks within his own organization, he now welcomed the support of whites and others outside.

Malcolm X’s new direction was unwelcome within the Nation of Islam, and he’d heard there would be an attempt on his life. He knew his time was short and poured his heart into his work with Alex Haley, finishing his autobiography. “I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form,” he said, and he was right. On February 21, 1965, he was assassinated on stage while speaking.

Never Done Learning

He worked on his book to the end, believing it had “some social value.” His homemade education was on his mind then. Few could match Malcolm X’s ferocious literary habits. He read and read and read. Still, as a necessary autodidact, one of the greatest of the mid-twentieth century, he regretted never finishing school:

My greatest lack has been, I believe, that I don’t have the kind of academic education I wish I had been able to get—to have been a lawyer, perhaps. I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer. I have always loved verbal battle, and challenge. You can believe me that if I had had the time right now, I would not be one bit ashamed to go back into any New York City public school and start where I left off at the ninth grade, and go on through a degree.

There’s a sadness in those words, but it’s also worth recognizing no schooling would have been ample or extensive enough for Malcolm X. He was never done learning.

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Julian Conor Reid

Personal development, culture and health, homemade education: malcolm x in prison.

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? Malcolm X

I have recently taken the opportunity to revisit several books which I read when I was younger. Taking advantage of an Audible 2 for 1 sale, I purchased The Autobiography of Malcolm X, narrated by Laurence Fishburne. One of the most important books of the 20 th Century, when I listened to it last week, The Autobiography’s impact on me was every bit as profound as it had been the first time that I read it. Fishburne’s performance is exceptional.

In the words of Kevin Young, Director of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: ‘People’s lives aren’t linear, they’re messier than that… but writer Alex Haley sought to create a narrative of Malcolm’s personal development marked by clear epiphanies that signal either complete or critical breaks with a previous stage of himself.’ It is this aspect of the book, the chronology of change, which I have always found to be most inspiring. Whilst Malcolm’s indomitable spirit is evident throughout almost every stage of his life story (regardless of whether or not he was playing the role of Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Satan, Malcolm X or El Hajj Malik el Shabazz), his mental, physical and spiritual development is continuous and subject to constant re-evaluation.

Because of my work as a Drug and Alcohol Worker at a Public Prison, I am particularly interested in two episodes from The Autobiography: Malcolm’s awakening in prison – and his description of the ‘Muslim six-point therapeutic process’ for treating drug addicts. This article features extracts from the chapter of The Autobiography which concerns Malcolm’s time in prison.

MCI-Norfolk was founded in 1927 as the Norfolk Prison Colony, a “model prison community” conceived by sociologist and penologist Howard Belding Gill (Harvard 1913, M.B.A. 1914), who was appointed its first superintendent in 1931. It was built on the philosophy of keeping incarcerated people engaged with, rather than removed from, the world. It had dormitories, not cells, a school, a quad, an auditorium.

Malcolm X was incarcerated at Norfolk, and he attended the prison school, where he furthered his education far beyond the eighth grade. The prison school and library are where he picked up his love of reading and where he learned how to articulate and debate his points in an argument, as he was part of the Norfolk Debating Society. He has even stated that he began his education here by copying down an entire dictionary word for word, learning the words and refining his handwriting the whole time.

During the 1950s, the Norfolk Debating Society, a team consisting of prison inmates, beat a number of university teams including the Oxford Union at Oxford University.

An extract from The   Autobiography  of  Malcolm X. 

From chapter 11 – ‘saved’.

The first man I met in prison who made any positive impression on me whatever was a fellow inmate, “Bimbi.” I met him in 1947, at Charlestown. He was a light, kind of red-complexioned Negro, as I was; about my height, and he had freckles. Bimbi, an old-time burglar, had been in many prisons. In the license plate shop where our gang worked, he operated the machine that stamped out the numbers. I was along the conveyor belt where the numbers were painted. Bimbi was the first Negro convict I’d known who didn’t respond to “What’cha know, Daddy?” Often, after we had done our day’s license plate quota, we would sit around, perhaps fifteen of us, and listen to Bimbi.

Normally, white prisoners wouldn’t think of listening to Negro prisoners’ opinions on anything, but guards, even, would wander over close to hear Bimbi on any subject. He would have a cluster of people riveted, often on odd subjects you never would think of. He would prove to us, dipping into the science of human behavior, that the only difference between us and outside people was that we had been caught. He liked to talk about historical events and figures. When he talked about the history of Concord, where I was to be transferred later, you would have thought he was hired by the Chamber of Commerce, and I wasn’t the first inmate who had never heard of Thoreau until Bimbi expounded upon him. Bimbi was known as the library’s best customer. What fascinated me with him most of all was that he was the first man I had ever seen command total respect. . . with his words. Bimbi seldom said much to me; he was gruff to individuals, but I sensed he liked me. What made me seek his friendship was when I heard him discuss religion. I considered myself beyond atheism – I was Satan. But Bimbi put the atheist philosophy in a framework, so to speak. That ended my vicious cursing attacks. My approach sounded so weak alongside his, and he never used a foul word. Out of the blue one day, Bimbi told me flatly, as was his way, that I had some brains, if I’d use them. I had wanted his friendship, not that kind of advice. I might have cursed another convict, but nobody cursed Bimbi. He told me I should take advantage of the prison correspondence courses and the library.

When I had finished the eighth grade back in Mason, Michigan, that was the last time I’d thought of studying anything that didn’t have some hustle purpose. And the streets had erased everything I’d ever learned in school; I didn’t know a verb from a house. My sister Hilda had written a suggestion that, if possible in prison, I should study English and penmanship; she had barely been able to read a couple of picture postcards I had sent her when I was selling reefers on the road. So, feeling I had time on my hands, I did begin a correspondence course in English. When the mimeographed listings of available books passed from cell to cell, I would put my number next to titles that appealed to me which weren’t already taken. Through the correspondence exercises and lessons, some of the mechanics of grammar gradually began to come back to me. After about a year, I guess, I could write a decent and legible letter. About then, too, influenced by having heard Bimbi often explain word derivations, I quietly started another correspondence course – in Latin. Under Bimbi’s tutelage, too, I had gotten myself some little cellblock swindles going.

For packs of cigarettes, I beat just about anyone at dominoes. I always had several cartons of cigarettes in my cell; they were, in prison, nearly as valuable a medium of exchange as money. I booked cigarette and money bets on fights and ball games. I’ll never forget the prison sensation created that day in April, 1947, when Jackie Robinson was brought up to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson had, then, his most fanatic fan in me. When he played, my ear was glued to the radio, and no game ended without my refiguring his average up through his last turn at bat.

Norfolk Prison Colony represented the most enlightened form of prison that I have ever heard of. In place of the atmosphere of malicious gossip, perversion, grafting, hateful guards, there was more relative “culture,” as “culture” is interpreted in prisons. A high percentage of the Norfolk Prison Colony inmates went in for “intellectual” things, group discussions, debates, and such. Instructors for the educational rehabilitation programs came from Harvard, Boston University, and other educational institutions in the area. The visiting rules, far more lenient than other prisons’, permitted visitors almost every day, and allowed them to stay two hours. You had your choice of sitting alongside your visitor, or facing each other. Norfolk Prison Colony’s library was one of its outstanding features. A millionaire named Parkhurst had willed his library there; he had probably been interested in the rehabilitation program. History and religions were his special interests. Thousands of his books were on the shelves, and in the back were boxes and crates full, for which there wasn’t space on the shelves. At Norfolk, we could actually go into the library, with permission-walk up and down the shelves, pick books. There were hundreds of old volumes, some of them probably quite rare. I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose.

Many a time, I have looked back, trying to assess, just for myself, my first reactions to all this. Every instinct of the ghetto jungle streets, every hustling fox and criminal wolf instinct in me, which would have scoffed at and rejected anything else, was struck numb. It was as though all of that life merely was back there, without any remaining effect, or influence. I remember how, some time later, reading the Bible in the Norfolk Prison Colony library, I came upon, then I read, over and over, how Paul on the road to Damascus, upon hearing the voice of Christ, was so smitten that he was knocked off his horse, in a daze. I do not now, and I did not then, liken myself to Paul. But I do understand his experience. I have since learned – helping me to understand what then began to happen within me – that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus could not help were the Pharisees; they didn’t feel they needed any help. The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth. Not for weeks yet would I deal with the direct, personal application to myself, as a black man, of the truth. It still was like a blinding light. Reginald left Boston and went back to Detroit. I would sit in my room and stare. At the dining room table, I would hardly eat, only drink the water. I nearly starved. Fellow inmates, concerned, and guards, apprehensive, asked what was wrong with me. It was suggested that I visit the doctor, and I didn’t. The doctor, advised, visited me. I don’t know what his diagnosis was, probably that I was working on some act. I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.

Regularly my family wrote to me, “Turn to Allah . . . pray to the East.” The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying. You understand. My comprehending, my believing the teachings of Mr. Muhammad had only required my mind’s saying to me, “That’s right!” or “I never thought of that.” But bending my knees to pray – that act well, that took me a week. You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone’s house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before. I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up. For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world. It’s easy for me to see and to say that now. But then, when I was the personification of evil, I was going through it. Again, again, I would force myself back down into the praying-to-Allah posture. When finally I was able to make myself stay down – I didn’t know what to say to Allah. For the next years, I was the nearest thing to a hermit in the Norfolk Prison Colony. I never have been more busy in my life. I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life’s thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof. It is as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime. I would be startled to catch myself thinking in a remote way of my earlier self as another person.

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 conversation 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.

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.

When I discovered philosophy, I tried to touch all the landmarks of philosophical development. Gradually, I read most of the old philosophers, Occidental and Oriental. The Oriental philosophers were the ones I came to prefer; finally, my impression was that most Occidental philosophy had largely been borrowed from the Oriental thinkers. Socrates, for instance, traveled in Egypt. Some sources even say that Socrates was initiated into some of the Egyptian mysteries. Obviously Socrates got some of his wisdom among the East’s wise men. 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?

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[…] Worker at a Public Prison, I am particularly interested in two episodes from The Autobiography: Malcolm’s awakening in prison – and his description of the ‘Muslim six-point therapeutic process’ for treating drug […]

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‘This is what my school was missing’: A dual enrollment course brings Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to under-resourced high schools

If Lerone A. Martin , the faculty director for Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute , harbored any doubts about teaching his popular undergraduate course via the Internet to high schoolers in Los Angeles, they vanished when the results of a student survey arrived midway through the semester. 

When asked about the class, Between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Freedom , three of the students answered:

• “I've had great discussions and learned so much more about Malcolm X and MLK than I've learned over my entire life. It's very interesting.”
• “I love this class. It's almost like this is what my school was missing, a course actually dedicated to the color of people that attend my school.”
• “My favorite parts are seeing Prof. Martin being passionate, telling us these great people's stories that are not so much in the spotlight. I feel that I relate more with Malcolm and Martin at this point.”

Martin, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences , is among the first faculty members to work with Stanford Digital Education to adapt a Stanford undergraduate course for a younger group of learners. His course, which more than 90 Stanford students took a year ago, is now underway in classrooms in seven Title I high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. (Schools qualify as Title I if 40 percent or more of students come from low-income households.)

This novel effort in hybrid learning — a combination of recorded lectures by Dr. Martin, live discussions over Zoom with Stanford teaching fellows and in-person sessions with local classroom teachers — was made possible through Stanford’s collaboration with the nonprofit National Education Equity Lab , which connects a dozen universities, including Stanford, to more than 300 Title I high schools in 29 states. 

The high school students who successfully complete Dr. Martin’s course will earn credits from their high school and from Stanford, just as high school students in other Ed Equity Lab courses may earn credits from Stanford or other schools giving the courses as well as from their high schools. Between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of five dual enrollment courses that Stanford Digital Education has helped to develop with Ed Equity Lab.

The course is organized around the question: “How did Malcolm and Martin understand the causes and solutions to racism and inequality?” Students answer that question by examining the two men’s personal biographies, speeches, writings, FBI files, news coverage, critiques of their leadership and other materials. Martin shared his thoughts on why the topic and curriculum resonate with today’s high school students. 

*          *          *

Question: Why target high schools with a course about Malcolm X and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King?

Lerone Martin: Malcolm and Martin are great conversation partners for young adults trying to make sense of the world around them. The students explore how these two would speak to the current circumstances they find themselves in. Both men diagnosed the causes of injustice and offered solutions to the failures of American democracy. They are historical icons for their engagement in this struggle. 

It also helps that Malcolm’s and Martin’s respective journeys as young adults are very relatable. Both encountered tremendous obstacles that shaped their pursuits for justice, though they came from very different backgrounds. Malcolm grew up in poverty, amid social chaos, dropping out of school at age 15 and later educating himself while serving time in prison. Martin grew up privileged, skipping two grades in high school and enrolling in Morehouse College at 15. I’m writing a book about MLK’s adolescence; his struggle to discover purpose in life is a struggle I believe many young adults experience. 

Q: You taught an in-person version of this course a year ago to Stanford undergraduates. How does that course compare with the course that the high school students are taking? 

LM: The course being offered in high schools is largely the same, except it is remote. High school students are floored, flattered, and excited to know that they are doing the same work as Stanford undergrads. These kids are 16, 17, and 18 years old, and it’s hard work. They are taking a course at Stanford. They should be applauded.

While the material is the same, the high school course is distinguished from what I taught on campus in two other ways, in addition to being remote. We provide some of the high school students with support to improve their writing. We also have expanded the role of the teaching fellows (TFs) — they are essential to the course’s success. The TFs, who often are Stanford students or alums, meet with the high school students synchronously once per week. They review the readings, lead discussions over Zoom and provide robust feedback to students on their ideas. They collaborate with the local classroom teacher at each high school as well as working closely with course administrators at Stanford and with me.

Q: I understand that you have personal experience with dual enrollment — a course like this one in which students can earn both high school and college credits.

LM: I am a first-generation college student. I took a dual enrollment course in high school. It changed my life. It helped to convince me that I could indeed succeed in college. It changed the way I viewed myself. It expanded my world and what I believed was possible.

Q: Any thoughts about the course’s future? 

LM:  I have two items on my bucket list. I would like to visit students in person during the course, and I would like to bring them to campus for a summer intensive experience. I am hopeful that I may be taking a step toward achieving the first item next month. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be flying to Los Angeles to lead a discussion with the students in the Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets classroom. It will be great to meet them face to face.

Q: Is there anything about the current political climate that led you to offer this course? 

LM: This course is very important as communities across the country ban books and prohibit discussions regarding race in American history. History is a powerful weapon. It helps to explain the present and can help inform our efforts to shape a better future. Robbing students of history, no matter how unpleasant, circumscribes how we understand the world and our options for making it better. Introducing students to Malcolm and Martin as conversation partners will help students understand racism in American history and how to talk about and cultivate the ability to have conversations across difference.

Jonathan Rabinovitz is communications director for Stanford Digital Education.

Follow Stanford Digital Education:  Sign up for Stanford Digital Education's quarterly newsletter,  New Lines , to learn about innovative research and teaching in digital spaces, as well as our team's initiatives.  Subscribe to New Lines .

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Malcolm X -A Homemade Education

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