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Vincent Vitale

Dr. Gunter

Texts and Contents

8 September 2017

Response to Malcolm X Excerpt

After reading this excerpt from Malcolm Xs autobiography, there were two things that I

mainly took away from the text. The first thing is the true power that comes from reading.

Because I have been blessed with the privilege of being able to learn to read from such a young

age, I did not understand the power that reading can have on someone who has little to no

academic literacy. Malcolm X, just by reading every second he got the opportunity, learned

things that had been hidden from him ever since he was a boy. These things inspired him to do

big things like join the Nation of Islam and to heavily contribute and provide influence to the

growing civil rights movement. Reading can truly change the way we see the world. Malcolm

X says in his autobiography while in a prison cell having so much time to read, I never had been

so truly free in my life.

The second thing that I took away from this excerpt was the true perspective of that of

someone who has lived through and experienced racial oppression and discrimination during the

peak of the civil rights movement. Before reading this piece, I thought that I was respectably

knowledgeable of the roots of racial injustice and reasons why the African American protesters

did what they did to achieve things like suffrage and desegregation. However, by reading this

part of Malcolm Xs autobiography, I learned a great deal and got to see exactly what was going

through his mind rather than just learning about it in history class. I was able to see all the

different reasons as to why a good portion of the history of the white man can be seen as evil.
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Prior to the reading, I had just assumed that he was fighting for the black mans ancestors who

had been treated so poorly. However, now I realize that he is fighting for many other reasons

like how white men years ago exploited Asia, Africa and the Americas for their resources and

raped and murdered millions of innocent people. He even mentions the hypocrisy of historical

white philosophers and how they formed their ideas and viewpoints. These reasons are ones that

would have never crossed my mind if I had not read this excerpt. I now view Malcolm X as an

even more influential figure in American history than what I once thought he was because of

these very reasons.