Reading Response to Malcolm X – Patricia

“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 that. Where else but in prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day.”

The isolation in the prison helped him learn how to read. He felt as if there were no distractions in prison because it’s just him in a cell reading his book. Malcolm X felt that there were so many distractions in college that for him it would be almost nearly impossible for him to learn anything. Especially with all these fraternities and panty-raiding pranks. Prison was a place where he could attacked his endurance because he knew that he would fall for these things. He was so devoted to learn how to read and understand what it is he was reading that for him reading actually took away the thought of being in prison. For most people prison feel like very crucial place.

“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.”

For a long time Malcolm X struggled to read and when he finally tried he had no motivation and had very little to any interest to continue learning how to read. He was in prison the only thing he could do was read. When he got a hold of a dictionary not only did he start to improve his penmanship but he studied the dictionary and learned words and learned what they meant it. He was so surprised that they were so many words in the dictionary. So many things that he could learn and that sparked the motivation that he lost. That must of awoken power that he thought he could never have from all this knowledge. Just like Frederick Douglass as a slave reading, writing was not a skill they were supposed to have. So the white man hit it away from them. Years later many African-Americans lack these skills and lack the power of knowledge because with this power they can see the world differently and that scares the white man.