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Malcolm X, “Literacy Behind Bars”

From his autobiography, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, (1965), co-authored with

Alex Haley.

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. 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. […]

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. […]

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….

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?