“Learning To Read” Malcolm X Summary Essay Example

left out.

This bothered Malcolm and because of this he hunted down any book in that library that had any information at all about black history. Books like The Wonders of the World and Negro History taught him about black empires before black slavery and the early Negro’s struggle for freedom. He also came across some bound pamphlets of the Abolitionism Anti-Slavery Society of New England. In these pamphlets he learned of a slave preacher named Nat Turner who, according to Malcolm “wasn’t going around preaching pie-in-the-sky and “nonviolent” freedom for the black man. He read how in 1831, Nat Turner and seven other slaves one night in Virginia, started a revolution, by killing 57 white slave owners.

After that night there were about seventy rebel slaves following him until about two months later, a small army hunted them down and hung Nat Turner. In short through multiple violent stories he learned that over 115 million African blacks were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade. Malcolm shares “Ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books. When asked one time by an English writer what his alma mater was Malcolm responded “Books. ” Every free moment Malcolm had in prison it was spent reading and studying, up to 15 hours a day. Months would pass without him even thinking about being in prison. Every additional book he read he used as tool to aid the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. From Malcolm’s life up to his homemade education in prison he never had been so truly free.