“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.” - Malcolm X
In the eighth grade, a young student told his English teacher that he would like to become a lawyer.
Despite the student’s straight As, the teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, felt this was unrealistic. A boy like Malcolm should strive for a non-intellectual career.
“Be a carpenter,” the teacher advised, since “being a lawyer was foolish for a Negro.”
That clown of a teacher must’ve felt pretty dumb when, decades later, that ambitious student of his, now Malcolm X, was on stage captivating (and at times infuriating) millions through his powerful oratory, literary flourish, and encyclopedic knowledge.
In watching his former pupil out-debate university professors on topics ranging from religion and civil rights to American Democracy, Mr. Ostrowski certainly wouldn’t have been able to take credit for the intellectual prowess Malcolm had come to possess. Nor could the school system in which he apparently a rusty cog.
The credit, if one can allocate the credit with any precision, goes to Malcolm’s self-directed studies in prison—to the books he read, the fellow autodidacts he learned from, and the intellectual challenges he set himself between the ages of 20 and 27.
In his autobiography, Malcolm makes this clear:
“Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.”
In this issue of the Thinkers series, where I break down the study habits of historical figures, I’ll share the remarkable story of how Malcolm X used self-directed learning to defy society’s limits and transform himself into a well-read orator, public intellectual, and civil rights leader.
Along the way, you’ll also learn self-study tactics and principles you can bring into your own self-education to become a more effective learner and thinker yourself.
Quick & Tedious Technical Call Out: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I heavily relied on to write this, was a collaboration between Malcolm X and ghostwriter Alex Haley. For the sake of simplicity, I precede many of the quotations from the book with “Malcolm wrote…” rather than “Malcom and Alex wrote…” Please excuse this case of imprecision.
Re-starting an education from scratch—sort of
Throughout childhood, Malcolm was a bright student. He scored good grades and was elected president of his eighth grade classroom.
But after the eighth grade, he dropped out.
In addition to his suffering of racism in the classroom, there were also financial and family reasons for his departure.
It was the Great Depression. His father had recently died (by mysterious, potentially murderous and race-driven causes). And his mother, stricken by grief and now alone in raising a large family, amidst a financial crisis, was institutionalized in a state psychiatric hospital.
As a result, the family was split up. Malcolm and his siblings were sent to various foster homes. To support himself, Malcolm left school to work low-paying jobs. Eventually, he turned to crime.
Whatever learning he received from formal schooling, Malcolm claims in his autobiography to have lost during the half-decade he spent as “Detroit Red”, the skilled con artist, burglar, and drug dealer.
In his autobiography, he writes that, if he studied at all, it was a means to making money:
“When I had finished the eighth grade back in Mason, Michigan, that was the last time I’d thought of studying anything that didn’t have some hustle purpose. The streets had erased everything I’d ever learned in school; I didn’t know a verb from a house.”
Now here’s the “sort of” part.
Malcolm’s supposed near-illiteracy may be an exaggeration by Malcolm to enhance the street-hustler to intellectual narrative in his autobiography. In fact, recent scholarship, which made use of his early prison letters, has shown he was capable of writing decently before the self-education period.
Nevertheless, his education took a serious pause. And, out of practice, it’s not hard to believe he was losing some of those grammar skills—as anyone who took math in middle school and can now barely do long division can understand. His intellectual transformation is still, without question, a feat to admire.
Arrested for burglary
Even the most intelligent hustlers can be caught.
In 1946, at just 20 years old, Malcolm was arrested for burglary and sentenced to 8-10 years in state prison (though he got off on parole in 7).
Malcolm’s initial reaction to his sentencing was one of deep despair and bitterness. When he arrived in prison, he would spend hours just pacing his cell “like a caged leopard.”
What he didn’t know—what he perhaps could not have known—was that the prison system would end up being the cocoon in which he would transform himself into the Malcolm X we all know in our history books—the electrifying speaker, the devoted man of religion, the relentless civil rights leader.
Over those next seven years, he would take what almost everyone would consider a crappy situation and turn it into a learning experience, giving us a masterclass in that Stoic saying, “The obstacle is the way.”
Ironically, Malcolm’s time in prison would be one of the most liberating periods in his life, as he would embark upon a “homemade education” that, it must be said, much resembles the liberal arts ideal of education.
Through intensive self-directed study, debate team, reading, and college-level courses, Malcolm would acquire a facility with language, a broad base of knowledge, and a command over argumentation that would later enable him to become one of the most influential leaders in the civil rights movement.
It is this educational journey I’ll now share with you.
Quick Side Note: Malcolm’s conversion to Islam is interesting and useful for understanding his intellectual development, but not necessarily relevant to practical lessons related to self-directed study, so I did not focus on that part of the story.
Malcolm finds an autodidact role model
When Malcolm arrived in Boston’s Charlestown State Prison, he was rebellious, angry, and frustrated, both with himself and his situation.
According to Malcolm’s autobiography, at the beginning of his sentence he lived a lot like he had as Detroit Red, trying to get high—sometimes on nutmeg—and smuggling contraband. He was repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement for disruptive behavior.
But this all began to change when he met a particularly impressive older inmate—one who would inspire Malcolm to orient his life around education.
John Elton Bembry, known as Bimbi, was somewhat of a local legend in the Charlestown prison. He was “the library’s best customer”, and respected for his wide-ranging erudition and literary eloquence.
Many of the inmates, and even some of the guards, would gather around Bimbi to hear him speak on various subjects, from history and literature to psychology and architecture.
He seemed to know everything, lecturing even on such esoteric subjects as the the history of Concord Massachusetts. To Malcolm, Bimbi’s knowledge of this particular subject was so detailed and intimate that “you would have thought he was hired by the Chamber of Commerce.”
The effect Bimbi had on Malcolm was strong, and Malcolm felt a powerful “envy for his stock of knowledge”. However, there was one trait in particular that most intrigued Malcolm:
“What fascinated me with him most of all was that he was the first man I had ever seen command total respect…with his words.”
When Bimbi would speak, others would listen, closely. Malcolm wanted that same power. It was in Bimbi that Malcom saw who he wanted to become. And so it was Bimbi he would emulate.
“Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversation he was in, and I had tried to emulate him.”
It’s worth noting that Bimbi wasn’t the single force that inspired Malcolm to dedicate himself to a life of study—Malcolm already seemed to know the power of education before meeting Bimbi, as suggested by the fact that in his school days he was an exceptional student.
But Bimbi dried and lit what was perhaps a damp fuse in Malcolm, sending him on a path of intensive self-education, like a flame crawling up a gasoline-soaked rope.
By giving Malcolm a glimpse of what one can do with a strong command over words, ideas, and knowledge, Bimbi provided something more thrilling to chase than a high.
Malcolm takes correspondence courses in prison
Bimbi did more than just inspire by example.
Working closely with Malcolm in the license plate shop of the prison, he came to take an interest in Malcolm, who was 20 years his junior.
One day, Bimbi told Malcolm he “had some brains”, and should take advantage of the prison’s library and correspondence courses. Malcolm took his advice and enrolled in a course in English, which he claims helped him improve his writing.
“Through the correspondence exercises and lessons, some of the mechanics of grammar gradually began to come back to me. After about a year, I guess, I could write a decent and legible letter.”
Bimbi had a habit of explaining word derivations, and so Malcolm enrolled in a course in Latin as well.
Soon, however, the pupil would separate from the mentor. Left with an image of what a great self-taught thinker looks like, and a foundation in the English and Latin languages, he would continue his studies in a self-directed fashion, at a new prison.
Reading through the Norfolk Prison’s Library
In 1948, Malcolm transferred to Norfolk Prison Colony, where he would take advantage of the prison’s exceptional learning facilities to read widely and hone his skills in writing and debate.
Upon arrival, Malcolm was happy to see that “a high percentage of the Norfolk Prison Colony inmates went in for “intellectual” things, group discussions, debates, and such.”
Unlike most prisons, Norfolk had an intellectual culture and a commitment to rehabilitation. The staff included many counselors and educators, not just guards. And they regularly brought in professors, from local universities like Harvard to teach college-level courses.
In addition its organized learning offerings, the prison also boasted a magnificent library, much of which was donated to the library by a state senator and publisher, Lewis Parkhurst, upon his death.
Thousands of books lined the shelves, and those that didn’t fit were stored in boxes and crates. Malcolm wrote that you could “walk up and down the shelves, pick books”—a right which he enjoyed deeply, spending much of his time there exploring and reading.
All this reading fulfilled a part of him previously unsatisfied: the intellect. In reflecting upon his serious experiences with books, he writes:
As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
However, Malcolm encountered a problem of preparation
There was one slight issue.
Malcolm lacked the vocabulary necessary to read effectively:
“Every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said.”
This frustration with his reading abilities, along with an awareness of his inability to convey what he wanted to say in his letters to Elijah Muhammad (the leader of the Nation of Islam), inspired Malcolm to learn more words.
To do so, he used a self-study technique that might appear a bit hardcore to us today. He didn’t download an app; he got himself a dictionary and went to work.
Studying the dictionary
Malcolm began his dictionary studies a bit unsystematically.
He spent the first two days just “riffling uncertainty through the dictionaries pages”. His reaction was one of both amazement and confusion. He was floored by the sheer quantity of words, previously unknown to him, and unsure of which ones to focus on learning.
To get himself out of this analysis paralysis, he did what often works best: action.
Malcolm began hand-copying out the dictionary onto his tablet, attempting to commit words to memory.
He describes the process in detail in his autobiography:
“In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember…I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s.”
Feeling the efforts were paying off, Malcolm continued this process until he had hand-copied the entire dictionary, and soon found that his ability to make sense of books, which made the act of reading more enjoyable and turned it into a habit he would keep for the rest of his life:
“Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books these days.”
Reading late into the night
Intoxicated with a love for learning, and now capable of reading with more comprehension, Malcolm attacked the prison library, sometimes reading for as long as 15 hours per day:
“From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge.”
He writes that time began to fly by due to the intellectual life he was now living. Between his reading of books, studying of Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, talking with his visitors, and writing his correspondence, he barely noticed that he was behind bars. “In fact, up to then,” Malcolm writes, “I never had been so truly free in my life.”
Often, Malcolm would read late into the night. When the lights went out at 10 PM, he would use the corridor light, which produced a subtle glow in his cell. The glow was strongest near the floor, so he would sit there to continue reading.
Every hour, when the guards did their rounds, he would jump up into his bed and pretend to be asleep. When they passed, he would climb down and return to his quest for knowledge.
“That went on until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me. Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.”
During this stage of serious self-directed reading, his primary subjects of study were history, theology, world religions, and—as if to test out his newly expanded vocabulary—the densest subject of them all.
Malcolm studies philosophy
In prison, Malcolm made a point to self-study the classics of philosophy, reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, and many of the writers of the Western and Eastern philosophical canons:
“When I discovered philosophy, I tried to touch all the landmarks of philosophical development. Gradually, I read most of the old philosophers, Occidental and Oriental…”
While he learned much from these books, he was also an intellectual of the practical sorts, and found much of what he read to be useless squabbling over things that didn’t matter—in his words, “always arguing about something useless.”
Adding to that practical attitude towards learning was his newfound focus. If he had started reading widely without a purpose, by this point, he was also studying with a cause in mind. He read with an eye towards improving the lives of Black Americans. He wanted to uncover the intellectual roots underneath racism and racial inequality.
“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.”
A relentless curiosity is one motivator, but a desire to help others is another entirely, one that will reliably inspire the autodidact to leave their comfort zone, time and time again.
Developing his skills in spoken argument
All this reading made Malcolm feel as though his brain was “like steam under pressure”.
He needed an outlet, somewhere to share what he was learning and thinking, and he found it in Norfolk prison’s weekly debate club.
Whether the topic was “should military training should be compulsory?” or the true identity of Shakespeare, Malcolm enjoyed defending his assigned position. He had uncovered a new passion on equal footing with reading:
“debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been. Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate—once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.”
In preparing for debates, Malcolm also honed other intellectual skills, like how to conduct targeted research:
“Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I’d track down and study everything I could find on it.”
Or how to develop strong arguments, not to mention tear down those of his opponents:
“I’d put myself in my opponent’s place and decide how I’d try to win if I had the other side; and then I’d figure a way to knock down those points.”
This training and consistent practice would help him succeed in more difficult arenas later in life:
“Sometimes in a panel or debate appearance, I’d find a jam-packed audience to hear me, alone, facing six or eight student and faculty scholars—heads of departments such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and religion, and each of them coming at me in his specialty.”
If reading gave him knowledge and inspired creative thought, debating taught him how to effectively deliver that knowledge and thought in a clear, literary, and persuasive manner.
After prison, the learning continues
Malcolm had turned what could’ve been a hellish seven years into a dojo of self-education.
Armed with skills in reading, thinking, writing, and speaking—as well as an impressive a stock of knowledge—he could now go off into the world and achieve whatever he set his mind to, and that is exactly what he did.
Before his assassination, he spent the next phase of his life doing something Detroit Red could not have foreseen:
“Standing up and speaking before an audience was a thing that throughout my previous life never would have crossed my mind. Out there in the streets, hustling, pushing dope, and robbing, I could have had the dreams from a pound of hashish and I’d never have dreamed anything so wild as that one day I would speak in coliseums and arenas, at the greatest American universities, and on radio and television programs, not to mention speaking all over Egypt and Africa and in England.”
His self-education, however, did not stop after his release. It never stopped. Even when he was well-known, he continued learning.
He studied for debates. He practiced his craft. He read books on whatever subjects interested him in the moment or related to his work: global politics, religion, socialism, African American History.
Malcolm’s story is a testament to the power of self-education—of reading’s ability to liberate the mind and transform a life. We could all do worse than emulating the tenacity with which Malcolm X attacked his studies.
My two cents on Malcolm X’s self-education (2 principles to apply to your life of learning)
1. Consider studying with a cause
If it was first the hope for a better life that inspired Malcolm to study, later, his major drive was to help a group of people he cared deeply about: the black community.
“Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”
I try to take this mindset with me when studying Autodidactism, my mastery subject and the focus of this newsletter.
My goal is not only to learn for learning’s sake (though, it is darn fun), but to discover stories, ideas, and techniques that will prove useful in writing articles that help and inspire my fellow autodidacts striving to cultivate a contemplative life.
Which groups do you want to help? What ways of life do you wish to protect? What issues in the world do you want to solve? These questions can help you pick a subject of focus in your self-education.
When studying is in part a way to make the world a better place, it’s hard not to read. It has become a calling.
2. Read widely, before narrowing down
When Malcolm first started exploring Norfolk prison’s library, he read without direction, picking up and studying whatever caught his interest.
“I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose.”
It seems like so many autodidacts (myself included) go through this period of wandering aimlessly through the seas of knowledge, guided by mere chance and curiosity.
In this sampling period, you build a base and identify your authentic interests, where you’ll hunker down for a time and gain specialized knowledge to write that book, solve that problem, or master that field.
So if you are still in that part of your journey, have no fear. Continue reading widely until some subject or line of inquiry grabs hold of you.
And if you have found some areas of specialization, continue building breadth as well as depth, as it will expand your horizons and help you find interesting connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.
Broad self-study, after all, is one of the pillars of creative originality.
Closing: How to Give Yourself a Homemade Liberal Arts Education
Whether he knew it or not, Malcolm was giving himself a variation of a liberal arts education—a type of education meant to free an individual by providing broad knowledge and transferable skills like reading, critical thinking, speaking, and writing.
As a result, when he was paroled, and those doors opened before him, he was free in more ways than one.
Here are some ways to replicate this style of self-education, outside of school:
Join a book club or debate society to hone your speaking skills.
Read every day to learn material and train your mind.
Commit to learning a few new words each day.
Write one essay, YouTube script, or journal entry per week about something you have learned from your reading (and your thoughts on it).
Many people will try to set limits on what you can achieve with your mind.
They may not be as direct as Malcolm’s eighth grade teacher. It might be just the funky look they give you when you say you’re studying philosophy or plan to write a book one day.
Don’t let them set limits. Set your own. Self-education is a vehicle that, like your very own car, you can drive to almost anywhere you wish to go.
We are all capable of becoming self-taught thinkers, writers, speakers, and debaters. And we don’t have to formal programs, or prison, to do it.
P.S. If you want to learn how to design a 5-year self-education plan that helps you turn your wide-ranging curiosity into genuine expertise, polymathic breadth, and the life you want, check out my new ebook: The Lifelong Learning Compass.
Happy studying,
Sam
Malcolm's story also reminds me of Faraday's self education.
Faraday dropped out at age 8 yet studied through experiments and curiosity. Didn't have the mathematics to prove his experiments but had the results to know how electricity and magnetism works
Incredible article