Malcolm X was an African-American civil rights activist, writer, and speaker. Born in 1925, he was mysteriously assassinated in 1965. By the time of his death, his own telling of his life story, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, had been widely known. He was born Malcolm Little into a poor household. Later, he took the name Malcolm X after joining a religious organization.
Malcolm X learned about the organization while in prison for committing criminal acts such as theft. Because he was poorly educated, he felt inadequate to teach his new beliefs to others. As a young man, he could sketch his thoughts with poor grammar and little vocabulary using the simple, unsophisticated language of people on the street. As an adult, when he tried to inform people about his new beliefs, he found that he didn’t have the adequate communication skills he needed. In his own words, he “wasn’t even functional”.
In a bid to increase his knowledge and improve his skills, desperate Malcolm X devised a scheme. He turned to books, believing this would be beneficial. However, when he tried to read serious books on his own, he was distressed as he didn’t know most of the words. To speed up his language learning scheme, he skipped all the words he didn’t know and then would end up with no clue as to what the book was about. “I became frustrated,” Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography, speaking of his inadequate language skills.
Malcolm X’s considerable frustration at his inability to read and write launched him on a quest to overcome his deficiencies. He said, “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary – to study, to learn some words.” And he was also lucky enough to reason that he should try to improve his handwriting. “It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line,” he told us. These ideas together moved him to appeal to the prison authorities for some paper and pencils.
For the first two days, Malcolm X just skimmed through the pages of the dictionary, trying to negotiate his way through its unfamiliar format. He told us of his amazement at how closely related the words seemed – how moist could be the root of moisture, and how advisable and advisory had the same root! “I didn’t know which words I needed to learn,” he said. “Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.” In his slow, careful, and crude handwriting, Malcolm X copied everything on the first full page of the dictionary into a notebook. He even copied the quotation marks! This took him one full day. After that, he read everything he had written aloud. “Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting,” Malcolm recalled. He also logged important things that happened every day. Repetition helped move him from basic literacy toward true proficiency.
Malcolm X depicted how, the next morning when he woke up, he kept thinking about the words he had copied and read aloud and about the acquisition of the knowledge he was pursuing. It was a marvellous feeling. He felt immensely proud.
He was so fascinated that he went on copying the next page of the dictionary. Once again, he awoke, proud and energized. With every succeeding page he copied and read aloud, Malcolm X found he was learning and remembering more and more words. With each successive day, his confusion diminished.
As Malcolm X’s word base broadened, he began to better understand the books he read. It was the first time in his life this had ever happened. “Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.” From then until he left that prison, his concentration was focused on reading. He was so absorbed in it that months passed without his even thinking about being in prison. “In fact, up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life.”
“I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life,” Malcolm X wrote. He described how one day a writer telephoned him from London for an interview. The interviewer asked Malcolm X what college he had graduated from as he could write so fluently. He told the Englishman that his personal university was “books”.
Malcolm X’s life is a wonderful example of the profound effect of learning a language. He was born into a world full of poverty and ignorance. However, as he acquired knowledge, his horizons expanded. He had left behind the narrow, ignorant world of his youth to join the world community of thoughts and actions ever since he started with his great journey of learning in prison.