Malcolm X: Saved Comprehension – Flashcards

X writes, "Many who hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I've said, will think I went to school long beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely from my prison studies."

X writes, "...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."

X writes, "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. "

X writes, "In my slow, painstaking, raged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page... Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I'd written on the tablet.. With a little effort, I could... remember what many of these words meant. "

X writes, "With every succeeding page, I...learned of people and places and events from history. Actually, the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia."

X writes, "Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened... In every free moment I had... I was reading... "

X writes, "...up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life."

X claims that he read every night during lights-out "...until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for [him]."

X explains, "Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world's black, brown, red, and yellow every variety of the world's sufferings of exploitation."

X says, "It's a crime, the lie that has been told to generations of black men and white men both. Little, innocent black children, born of parents who believed that their race had no history."

X writes, "...a Negro in America can never know his true family name, or even what tribe he was descended from..."

X explains, "As you can imagine, especially in a prison where there was a heavy emphasis on rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled upon if he demonstrated an unusually intense interest in books."