Malcolm X taught himself to read and write in prison, the hard way. He copied the dictionary, page by page, struggling to pronounce the words and to commit the definitions to memory.
In his autobiography he writes: ". . . as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. . . . I never had been so truly free in my life."
New worlds continued to open, but none would have if Malcolm hadn't first transformed himself this way. This crucial point has been missed in the recent reappraisals of the Malcolm X legacy.
Malcolm X's newly acquired reading skills allowed him to transform himself from hustler to disciple of the Black Muslim separatist, Elijah Muhammad. Eventually the disciple saw through Black Muslim racism and embraced a more inclusive humanism. The metamorphosis had yet to be completed when Malcolm was murdered in 1965.
In the wake of the movie "Malcolm X," newspapers and journals have carried reassessments and speculations about what he would be doing if he were alive today. Black conservatives, focusing on Malcolm's insistence on black self-sufficiency, call him the founder of their movement. But black liberals say Malcolm's nationalism would have kept him forever apart from those conservatives who doubt the need for civil rights laws.
It's striking that this debate ignores the central transformation of Malcolm's life. In prison he came to see illiteracy as a second, inner jail that could confine him forever. His autobiography is most moving when it shows him breaching those walls and making contact with the world of ideas. This example remains crucial because African-Americans still suffer alarming illiteracy rates.
What would Malcolm X be doing if he were alive? Politics, perhaps. But surely he would be among the fiercest literacy advocates that the nation has ever known.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 1993, Section A, Page 20 of the National edition with the headline: When X = Literacy.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/06/opinion/when-x-literacy.html
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