Micro-Activity # 3: Malcolm X

Quote 1: “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”

Reason: His level of dedication and wanting to study every aspect of the dictionary pages fueled his curiosity of those words associated in the dictionary. He managed to maintain and take his time writing out each and every word, fixing his penmanship, spelling them out and trying to understand what they all meant. It’s the mere fact that he was so unaware of the words within the dictionary which baffled him of it’s existence making him that much curious to explore and gain the knowledge he lacked in.

Quote 2: “The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been “whitened” – when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr. Muhammad couldn’t have said anything that would have struck me much harder. I had never forgotten how when my class, me and all of those whites, had studied seventh-grade United States history back in Mason, the history of the Negro had been covered in one paragraph, and the teacher had gotten a big laugh with his joke, “Negroes’ feet are so big that when they walk, they leave a hole in the ground.”

Reason: Time went on and he exceeded what he thought was possible for himself by learning the teachings of someone that has lived through these experiences as well as seen them happen to others. He continued in his time at Norfolk Prison Colony in which he expanded his knowledge of the forgotten history of African Americans. During his time he had recollected a moment when he in a class of whites had learned of the history of African Americans in which their history had been neglected to a paragraph of explanation. For the first time someone (the teacher) had made a joke about the feet of an African american as well as how their feet create holes in the ground. I find this interesting because back then you see how everyone was so openly racist and negligent to the African Americans and yet today it hasn’t much changed except them being less open about their racial thoughts.

Quote 3: “I found books like Will Durant’s Story of Civilization. I read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History. Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois gave me a glimpse into the black people’s history before they came to this coun­try. Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History opened my eyes about black em­pires before the black slave was brought to the United States, and the early Negro struggles for freedom.”

Reason: I relish the fact that he educated himself in all areas possible to him. If he wanted to learn of his people and their civilizations he set out to go find the information in a book that was reliable to himself. He brought himself to understand any and everything that stood as a barrier to himself before he could read or write properly. Education was a powerful tool to him which he used in his later teachings and speeches to educate others upon understanding the struggles and hardships they went through to get to this point in their lives. 

Quote 4: “Mr. Muhammad’s teaching about how the white man had been created led me to Findings in Genetics, by Gregor Mendel. (The dictionary’s G section was where I had learned what “genetics” meant.) I really studied this book by the Austrian monk. Reading it over and over, especially certain sections, helped me to understand that if you started with a black man, a white man could be produced; but starting with a white man, you never could produce a black man – because the white chromosome is recessive. And since no one disputes that there was but one Original Man, the conclu­sion is clear.”

Reason: Due to his research earlier on in the dictionary he was able to understand the meanings behind the word genetics as it pertained to the ‘Findings in Genetics’ by Gregor Mendel in which he found some truly astounding information. As he read deeper into the words and the genetics of them all he found that an African american could produce a white man while if it were the other way around a white man couldn’t produce a black man all due to genetics of the chromosomes in which it  is recessive. Malcolm continuously expanded on himself, his culture and his world history, which has helped him in his fight as an African American leader.