Malcolm X Learning To Read Summary

671 Words2 Pages

Crystal Jones
Professor Ryan-Johnson
Composition 1
20 September 2015
The World behind the Books
In the essay “Learning to Read,” the civil rights activist Malcolm X describes all the many different literatures such as black history, learning how to read, learning every word in the dictionary, and the history of why black people and white people act the way they do towards each other, he learned during his time in prison. Malcolm X wants the readers to understand that all this time that has passed he has been stealing, robbing, and being a hustler in the streets so he never knew how to read or write. Malcolm wrote this because after learning how to read and write he could read the books in the prison library and learn more about the history …show more content…

For example Malcolm X wrote that when he was in his United States seventh grade history class he said that the teacher had covered all black history in one paragraph (213) of the text book and would make rude comments and jokes to the class during the discussion. In today’s society it’s not really the teacher that makes the comments anymore because they could get fired, now it’s the other classmates in the class that makes the slide remarks. Malcolm X also mentioned that Elijah had spread his teachings to many other black people in different parts of the United States and other black people saw that what Mr. Muhammad was teaching was that most of them did not know anything from a black person that actually lived what happened in the past, all they know in what they learned in history and sometimes what is in a history book is not always what’s true. After considering all of this Malcolm went to the library and checked out a bunch of different books that would give him some insight from other black authors to hear their side of black history. Some examples would be Story of Civilization by Will Durant, Outline of History by H.G. Wells, and Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois (213). After looking through all of the comments and remarks Malcolm still decided to find out more information on his

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