Sublime

Malcolm gave himself an extraordinary education: Herodotus, Kant, Nietzsche, H. G. Wells’s History of the World, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Gregor Mendel’s Findings in Genetics, J. A. Roger’s Sex and Race, Will Durant, Mahatma Gandhi, and so on.

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.

He crept out of bed at night and read by a small crack of light that reached his cell floor, sneaking back to bed once an hour as the guard passed. In this painstaking way, Malcolm Little spent years educating himself.

“From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk.” He read history, he read sociology, he read about religion, he read the classics, he read philosophers like Kant and Spinoza. Later, a reporter asked Malcolm, “What’s your alma mater?” His one word answer: “Books.” Prison