“Literacy Behind Bars” by Malcolm X

Interaction between brain and environment can be used to place bars around an individual or people (puts a person behind bars), or it can be used to facilitate freedom. Malcolm X goes behind bars at least partially because of negative educational opportunities. But paradoxically, he finds freedom because he gives himself the connections between culture and learning that society denied him. Malcom X's autobiographical account of his self-transformation is also very similar as regarded his ideas about thinking and self-empowerment, to the self-creation and self-invention within the dynamic personal space of intelligence, activity, culture and language used by Benjamin Franklin. Malcom X and Franklin each created zones for learning.

This selection is about how a man in jail was able to teach himself to become more literate than ever. When Malcolm X was in prison, he chose to constantly read and copy the dictionary to gain knowledge. It's as simple as that. He began copying pages of the dictionary at a time. Malcolm would also stay up all night reading, but making sure the guards at the prison didn't see him as they passed by his cell every hour. He refers to his education as "homemade".

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, to Reverend Earl and Louise Little, Malcolm, one of eight children, became (in part because of his light skin) the dearly beloved child of his father, an itinerant minister and leader-organizer for Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)movement in Lansing, Michigan. Reverend Little's involvement with what many "good Christian white people" (Smith, pp. 55) including members of the Black Legionnaires and Ku Klux Klan—considered a troublemaking, radical black movement led to his violent murder during which his badly beaten body, run over by a streetcar, was almost cut in two. Although Malcolm was six, he recollects the nightmare of it all. Malcolm records the tragic consequences caused by the deterioration and eventual separation of his family, including his mother's mental breakdown and the inevitable separation of his family, when he and his siblings were placed in foster care. Despite the ensuing instability in his young life, Malcolm excelled educationally and even became president and valedictorian of his eight-grade class. However, Malcolm's aspiration to become a lawyer by profession was discouraged by his English teacher, who told him, "You have got to be realistic about being a nigger. A ...