Sublime

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.

Malcolm’s role models in the public speaking world “Niall Ferguson, the historian, gave a birthday toast, which is just the best toast I’ve ever heard in my life. [It was] so much better than anything I’d ever heard. It was on another level.”

Malcolm X was a realist

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.

Seek ambition. Hire character. Train talent.

John Macdonald (1741–96), a Scottish Highlander, was a famous footman who wrote memoirs of his experiences in service. An orphan who had been sacked from a previous job rocking a baby’s cradle, Macdonald found work in a gentleman’s house turning the spit. He was aged just five.

We took apart passages from Malcolm’s book. We defined terms like definitions, axioms, postulates, and previously proved theorems. We argued over how these should be applied to Malcolm’s statements.

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.

“We believe in making twenty thousand men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment millionaires.”