Scaling the Racial Mountain with Wings of
Words: Role of Self-Education in the Making of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X
We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,
and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. - Langston Hughes (57)
On
July
5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass, a
former slave, rocked the American nation with his fiery speech entitled “What,
to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” We are all aware of the
significance of the said date in American history. 4th of July 1776 was the
date on which the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the
Continental Congress setting free the thirteen American Colonies of all
allegiance to the British rule under King George III. Enshrined in the famous Declaration
of Independence were the ideals set forth by the founding fathers: “We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence 35)
Douglass began his speech by showing his respect for the creators of the Declaration
of Independence but soon turned his focus to a scathing indictment of the
institution of slavery that was a gross violation of the principles contained
in the Declaration. He stated with a blend of courage and commitment:
The
sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death
to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn… What,
to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to
him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to
which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your
boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity;
your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of
tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow
mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your
religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a
nation of savages. (Douglass, “What to the Slave…”)
The above passage, from what is
considered the most significant of the hundreds of speeches that Douglass gave
after he gained his freedom, amply illustrates his ability to earmark the
aspects that separated American ideals of democracy from the gross reality of
the slavery to which the blacks were subjected. Like Douglass, Malcolm X,
though born a little over a century later, became an undisputed spokesman of
racial discrimination and Black Power Movement in America. My purpose in the
present essay is to examine and highlight how these two African American
revolutionaries scaled the racial mountain through self-education and
passionate activism.
Frederick Douglass
(1818-1895)
Way
back in September 2003, when I picked up the Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself at the University
Book Store in Seattle, USA, I was instantly drawn to the appendage “Written by
Himself” in the title itself. As I had not till then come across any title of a
book where an author felt the compulsion to authenticate his authorship, I couldn’t
help feeling a little surprised. Then it dawned on me that, since it was an
autobiography of a slave, Douglass must have been concerned by the prejudice
that questioned the ability of someone ‘less than human’ to read and write. It
is quite possible that Douglass may have been aware then about the trials,
tribulations and the humiliation that Phillis Wheatley – a black slave girl –
had to undergo way back in October, 1772 to prove to the gathering of eighteen
heightened white statesmen and politicians from Massachusetts Colony that she
was the rightful author of her collection of twenty poems. “The panel,” writes
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “had been assembled to verify the authorship of her
poems and to answer a much larger question: was a Negro capable of producing
literature?” (Gates, Jr. 5)
Perhaps, in order
to emphasize that a slave actually has written the book, Douglass thought it
prudent to include the fact in the title as a kind of a declaration. The book
was published in 1845. In a letter dated April 22, 1845, Wendell Phillips, abolitionist and president of the
American Anti‑Slavery Society, wrote to Frederick Douglass
to convey his deep appreciation of the latter’s brilliant Narrative:
I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most
neglected of God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the
injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had
mastered your A B C, ... you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the
slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel
and blighting death which gathers over his soul. (Phillips in Narrative
44)
What
is significant in the Narrative is how an extremely sensitive soul
grapples with the dehumanizing first-hand experience of slavery in all its
wretchedness and how, refusing to accept his fate as a bondsman, he feels the
ceaseless stirrings of freedom from slavery. This desperate urge for freedom is
kept alive by his instinctual need for learning to read and write to attain his
goal.
At
the very beginning of the Narrative, Douglass writes about his
parentage. His mother was Harriet Bailey, daughter of Isaac and Betsy Bailey,
both colored. His father, he presumes, was a white man. He had no means of
verifying the whispers that told that his master was his father. Douglass
succinctly points out that it was a common custom to separate children from
their mothers at a very early age. He says, “For what this separation is done,
I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection
towards his mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the
mother for the child.” (Narrative 48) Douglass describes his master as
“a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding.” (Narrative 51)
Nothing seems to have given his master greater pleasure than the opportunity to
whip a slave.
Douglass
recounts how, even as a seven-year-old, he would be deeply affected by the
songs sung by the slaves in chorus that described their miserable existence
fraught with ceaseless oppression. Though the songs displayed scant regard for
melody or rhythm, they told “a tale of woe … (and) breathed the prayer and
complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a
testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” (Narrative
57-58) According to Douglass, the songs convey the misery
and pain of the debasing nature of human bondage far more effectively than
‘volumes of philosophy’. He lyrically describes the lasting imprints the slave
songs had on his impressionable mind and heart and in spurring his creativity.
Chapter X of the Narrative dwells at length
with the craving for freedom from bondage that Douglass experienced even at the
tender age of seven/eight. Fired by the zeal to escape the predicament of
remaining permanently enmeshed in chains of bondage, he often vacillated
between bitter despair and endless glimmer of hope. He confesses how, like
Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, he too seems to be caught in the dilemma
of ‘To be or not to be’. Echoing Shakespeare’s lines, Douglass writes: “I say,
this picture some-times appalled us, and made us ‘rather bear those ills we
had,/ Than fly to others, that we knew not of.’” (Narrative 124) Caught
between the reality of his existence and the prospect of gaining freedom, he
became restless.
Even a cursory reading of the Narrative is
bound to convince anyone of the author’s extraordinary power to use words with
ease and felicity. But, at the same time, one may wonder how a slave boy,
especially in the pre-civil war era, could acquire such learning and flair for
writing to become a legend among the abolitionists. This should be a matter of
paramount concern for those who believe in the transformative potential of
words. It is true that with desire, determination, commitment and steadfastness
one can aspire for any goal in life.
Yet, it appears
almost incredible that a slave-boy, without access to any formal education of
any kind, could write in the manner that Douglass does in the Narrative or
deliver speeches indicative of the highest quality of intellectual oratory.
His deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold him “within
its foul embrace” would not have turned to fruition but for what providence had
in store for him.
At the age of seven Douglass was sold to a couple
named Hugh and Sophia Auld to take care of their little son Thomas. When he
reaches the Auld household he is pleasantly surprised to find them
affectionately disposed towards him. With
utmost sincerity Douglass acknowledges the human kindness he receives from the
Aulds as an act of divine dispensation: “From my earliest recollection, … and
in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and
spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to
cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer
thanksgiving and praise.” (Narrative 75)
Sophia Auld takes
a lot of interest in little Douglass and teaches him the alphabets. Gradually,
she tells him how he can combine a few letters and create three or four-letter
words. His heart is full of praise and gratitude for Sophia Auld whom he refers
to as “a woman of the kindest heart and finest
feelings … Her face was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil
music.” (Narrative 77)
However, fate soon intervenes to give his ecstasy a
jolt. One day while Sophia is in the process of teaching him to read, she
encounters her husband. Her husband gives her a scolding and forbids her from
teaching him to read and write saying that such acts were unlawful and unsafe.
He instructs her: “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his
master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger
in the world … if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there
would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” (Narrative
78)
Douglass is quick
to comprehend from the content of Hugh Auld’s admonishment of his wife that
education can create “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” What needs to be
specifically pointed out from this episode is that any society that wants to
keep the oppressed in their place, its first attempt is to stop them from
getting access to anything related to reading, writing, knowledge, culture etc.
because the moment they are able to rationalize, they are sure to question the
status quo. The kind of determination this boy at the age of seven has is
evident from his statement: “What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he
most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be
carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought.” (Narrative 79)
Hugh Auld’s views on the hazards of teaching a
“nigger” to read and write comes as an awakening for Douglass. On the contrary,
it is interesting to see the effect it has on Sophia. With a tinge of humor,
Douglass recalls:
Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her
of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became
stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.
The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She
now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. … She was not satisfied with
simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. (Narrative
82)
Subsequently, if Sophia Auld saw Douglass
even with a newspaper she would rush at him and snatch it away from his hands.
Douglass ruminates: “She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon
demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible
with each other.” (Narrative 82)
Though Douglass is
deeply interested in reading, writing and expressing himself, he realizes how
difficult it is to learn anything without a teacher. Yet, he is not the one to
give up his determination to use education as the “pathway to freedom.” He soon
explores other avenues for acquiring learning. The Aulds had plenty to eat and
Douglass would take loaves of white bread in his pocket and go to the streets
to meet white little boys who were poorer than him where eating and other
things were concerned. He thought of a plan wherein he could exchange the bread
and make them his teachers to augment his learning:
As
many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid,
obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in
learning to read. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins,
who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. (Narrative 83)
With the anxiety
of “being a slave for life” weighing heavily upon him as he grew older,
Douglass became all the more eager to immerse himself in reading books that
could take him forward on his mission to freedom. Around the age of twelve, he
heard about a book entitled The Columbian Orator that the white kids
often mentioned in their conversations. Collecting 50 cents by shining shoes
for a month, Douglass bought the book. What immediately attracted his
attention, among the many speeches and texts from celebrated writers,
intellectuals and statesmen from diverse ages, nations and cultures that the
book contained, was a conversation between a slave owner and a slave. The slave
runs away thrice and is caught thrice and brought back. In the said conversation,
whatever can be said in support of slavery is narrated by the slave owner and
whatever can be said against slavery is spoken by the slave. In the story, the
slave owner is so convinced with the arguments that he finally frees the slave.
Douglass accepts that the moral he gained from the dialogue “was the
power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.” (Narrative 84)
The various other speeches that he found in The
Colombian Orator had a magical effect on his mind and soul:
These were choice documents to me. I read
them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to
interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my
mind, and died away for want of utterance … The more I read, the more I was led
to abhor and detest my enslavers. (Narrative 84)
The Colombian Orator
made Douglass not only aware of man’s inhumanity to man in terms of race and
color but also stirred within him the passion to denounce slavery and other
agencies of oppression and exploitation. The book became Douglass’s most prized
possession and he would carry that book with him all the time. Because he was
not supposed to write or read at the Auld home, he would go into the streets
with a piece of chalk and practice his writing on the pavements, walls, and
trees to acquire the skills he so desperately needed. Interestingly, one common
word which would always perplex him was “abolitionist”:
I was eager to hear any one speak of slavery. I was
a ready listener. Every little while, I could hear something about the
abolitionists. It was some time before I found what the word meant. It was
always used in such connections as to make it an interesting word to me. If a
slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master,
set fire to a barn, or did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder,
it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition. (Narrative
86)
It is pertinent to
mention here that, while embarked on his mission, Douglass was never tempted by
thoughts of material gains for himself. His
avowed goal was not restricted to ways and means to attain his individual
liberty. He generously shared the fruits of his knowledge
and wisdom with fellow-slaves to awaken their urge
to freedom.
Douglass’s passionate dream of attaining freedom
ultimately succeeds when, on the third day of September 1838, he leaves his
chains forever and arrives in New York. From that moment started the remarkable
journey unparalleled in human history. Freed from the chains of slavery, he
wrote his iconic Narrative and engaged himself, heart and soul, in
addressing huge gatherings on the denunciation of slavery and advocacy of equal
rights for the slaves as human beings. His intuitive ability to be inspired by
the power of words that began with The Columbian Orator did not become
dormant after he procured his freedom. Towards the end of the Narrative
he mentions how Liberator, the weekly abolitionist newspaper published
from Boston, “became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its
sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of
slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful attacks upon
the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as
I had never felt before!” (Narrative
151) It is, perhaps, significant that David Blight’s recent Pulitzer Prize
winning biography of Douglass is titled Frederick Douglass: Prophet of
Freedom.
Malcolm X (1925-1965)
Malcolm
X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother,
Louise Little, was the National recording secretary for the Marcus Garvey
Movement which commanded millions of followers in the 1920s and 30s. His father,
Earl Little, was a Baptist minister. Earl Little’s Civil Rights activism
prompted death threats from the white supremacist organization Black Legion,
forcing the family to relocate twice before Malcolm’s fourth birthday. In 1929
their Lansing, Michigan home was burned to the ground. Two years later, Earl’s
body was found lying across the town’s trolley tracks. Malcolm’s mother was
diagnosed as mentally ill and sent to the Kalamazoo State Mental Hospital,
where she stayed for 26 years. Placed in foster homes. Malcolm had a disturbed
childhood. In 1939 Malcolm was sent to a juvenile home in the nearly all-white
community of Mason, Michigan. Bright and intelligent, he did well at
school and figured among the toppers in his class. English and History were the
subjects he liked most. In his VIII grade he was quite impressed by his English
teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, who was “always giving advice about how to become
something in life.” (Autobiog. 29) One day he asked Malcolm what he
wanted to be in life? Malcolm answered, “I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a
lawyer.” Surprised by Malcolm’s aspiration, Ostrowski responded by saying:
Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be
realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that.
But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no
realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be.
You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry
shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person— you’d
get all kinds of work. (Autobiog. 36)
Shocked
by the attitude of his teacher he had hitherto adored, Malcolm lost interest in
his studies and left for Boston to be with Ella Collins, his half-sister. He
wistfully notes in his Autobiography:
Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to
become a success at it. I’ve often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged
me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional
black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community
spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary
concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the
two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to “integrate.” (38)
Boston
wrought the astonishing transformation of the studious Malcolm into one engaged
in doing odd jobs on railroads, in restaurants and bars, at shoeshine stands,
and in a jewelry store. Malcolm learns to dress like a hipster, dyes his hair,
and starts hustling in Boston, New York and Detroit where he goes around by the
nickname "Detroit Red." He returns to Boston where he engages himself
in hustling, stealing, dope peddling, pimping, wielding firearms and other such
nefarious activities. These activities ultimately lead to his arrest and
conviction with an eight-to-10-year imprisonment sentence. He is sent to jail
in Charlestown, Massachusetts followed by Concord Reformatory and finally to
Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts.
It
is at Norfolk Prison Colony that his life undergoes a change for ever from the
criminal Malcolm X to the militant spokesman for the Blacks in America. In an
interview with Re-Markings, Lama Rangdrol lucidly captures the transformation
of Malcolm X when he says: “One might recall “Detroit Red,” an ordinary
incarcerated Black man. While “doing his time” he studied world culture and
African history in the prison library. The fact that street thug Detroit Red
emerged as Malcolm X is the kind of miraculous turn of events Buddhists believe
in. Malcolm was not Buddhist. Nonetheless his metamorphosis was miraculous and
inspiring. (Rangdrol 18)
Chapter
XI of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X offers a graphic account of what turned a mind from
that of a criminal to one whose passion for reading and writing helped him
create and expand his intellectual horizon to address issues of oppression of
the Blacks in the world’s most powerful democracy. Though he had been studious at school, the criminal phase
of life that he underwent after quitting school changed him into someone who
would grope for words to convey even his basic feelings on paper. Malcolm
observed in desperation: “I became increasingly frustrated at not being
able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote… In the street,
I had been the most articulate hustler out there—I had commanded attention when
I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t
articulate, I wasn’t even functional.” (Autobiog. 171)
Malcolm’s
despair led him to think of using a dictionary to learn new words with all
seriousness. At the same time he felt the acute need to improve his writing
skill and penmanship. He requested the prison authorities to provide him with a
dictionary along with tablets and pencils. Once he lay hold of the dictionary,
he says, “I’d
never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to
learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying. 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.” (Autobiog. 172) Going a step
further, he began reading aloud the words he had copied. The sound of the words
resonated in his mind and with every succeeding page, he says, “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.” (Autobiog.
172)
Stating that he had had read over a
million words, he recounts that with the broadening of his word-base, he began
to pick up books to read and understand the contents. He became an avid reader
and until he left the prison every free moment he had he spent in reading in
the library or in the isolation of his cell. Enjoying reading in the “total
isolation” of his cell, he would read till 10 P.M. every night and when the
lights were switched off he would remain awake and read by the glow of the
corridor light till early morning. For the first time Malcolm felt he had never
been so “truly free” in his life. He acknowledges that attending lectures in
the classes given by instructors who came from Harvard and Boston universities
enhanced the area of his reading and opened, in the process, a completely new
world for him.
The first set of books that
impressed him comprised Wonders of the World, Will Durant’s Story
of Civilization, H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, Souls of
Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson’s Negro
History, J. A. Rogers’ three volumes of Sex and Race, Aesop’s
Fables, Genetics by Gregor Mendel and books by
Frederick Olmstead among others. As a voracious reader he devoured books that
reminded him of the message he had once received from Elijah Mohammad, the
leader of the Nation of Islam Movement: “black prisoner symbolized white
society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and
unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.” (Autobiog. 169) The bound
pamphlets related to the Abolitionist Anti-Slavery Society of New England that
he found among the Parkhurst’s collection in the prison library made him aware
of “atrocities, … illustrations of black
slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their
babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs
after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and
clubs and chains and guns.” (Autobiog.
176)
The only novel, he recalls to have
read was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reality appeared more important than
fiction. He reminisces with anger and sadness how in his school at Mason “the
history of the Negro had been covered in one paragraph.” (Autobiog. 29) Such factors
motivated him to remain immersed in books that brought to light the “glorious
history of the black man” in all its manifestations. Reading the histories of
various nations, he tells, opened his eyes to “how the whole world’s white men
had indeed acted like devils, pillaging and raping and bleeding and draining
the whole world’s non-white people.” (Autobiog. 176)
His reading arena didn’t close with
Black history. He read Philosophy too at length beginning with Herodotus and Socrates,
and moved on to “touch all the landmarks of philosophical development.” (Autobiog. 179) His reading
included both Occidental and Oriental philosophers like Schopenhauer, Kant,
Nietzsche, Spinoza and many others. He also read Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton.
He succinctly pointed out that “the collective white man had been actually
nothing but a piratical opportunist who used Faustian machinations to make his
own Christianity his initial wedge in criminal conquests.” (Autobiog. 177) He
emphasises that his “homemade education” gave him with every book he read “a
little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was
afflicting the black race in America.” (Autobiog. 177) He mentions how, later, when
asked by an English writer on phone from London, “What’s your alma mater?” he
responded by saying that his alma mater was “books, a good library” and added,
“If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest
of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention
anything I’m not curious about. I don’t think anybody ever got more out of
going to prison than I did.” (Autobiog.
179-80) Intensive reading for a considerable time every night in the faint
lights-out glow of the prison led to astigmatism and to his first pair of
eyeglasses.
In his Autobiography Malcolm
humbly mentions how extensive passionate and committed reading had changed his
life forever: “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.” (Autobiog. 171)
It is relevant to indicate here
that if extensive reading helped him acquire intellectual awakening of the
highest kind, he had realised in his prison tenure itself that he needed to
develop his skill at oratory through which he could address the masses of Black
people and show them the way to their true independence. Consequently, he
enrolled himself in all the debating contests and activity that came his way in
the prison. He writes, “in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as
exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been.” (Autobiog. 184) Looking back at the situation as a prison
inmate Malcolm accepts that his transformation through reading books was
nothing short of a miracle: “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.” (Autobiog. 184)
It is amazing that his concern
while in prison was not circumscribed to the racial situation in America but it
extended to various parts of the globe inclusive of Africa, China as well as
India. He notes about Africa that “115 million African blacks—close to the
1930’s population of the United States—were murdered or enslaved during the
slave trade.” (Autobiog.
177) He talks about the way China was duped by the white men and controlled by
the Opium War. He also refers to India where, according to him, “half a billion
deeply religious brown people” were subjugated by the “British white man, by
1759, through promises, trickery and manipulations, controlled much of India
through Great Britain’s East India Company.” (Autobiog. 177) As an inspired leader, Malcolm
X felt that his concern was not limited to the indictment of the Whites but it
was equally necessary to awaken the element of human dignity in the heart and
soul of his Black brothers who had been brainwashed into accepting the ‘White
is Right’ dictum. In one of his famous speeches, “The Ballot or the Bullet,”
delivered in Cleaveland on April 3, 1963, Malcolm appeals to the Black masses:
Whenever you're
going after something that belongs to you, anyone who's depriving you of the
right to have it is a criminal. Understand that. Whenever you are going after
something that is yours, you are within your legal rights to lay claim to it.
And anyone who puts forth any effort to deprive you of that which is yours, is
breaking the law, is a criminal. (Malcolm X Speaks 33)
In speech after speech Malcolm
exhorted his Black brothers and sisters to come out of their shell of
helplessness and despair and claim their human rights before talking about
Civil Rights. He was extremely critical of even Black professors and
intellectuals who had been brainwashed by the evident “whitening” of history by
the White man so much so that professors and Ph.D.’s knew “little more than the
most ignorant black man about the talents and rich civilizations and cultures
of the black man of millenniums ago.” (Autobiog. 181)
Following his release on parole on August 7, 1952, Malcolm joined the
Nation of Islam under Elijah Mohammad. Rejecting his surname “Little” as a
slave name given to his family by white oppressors, he came to be known
as “Malcolm X.” With his charismatic personality and eloquent oratory he
quickly created a special place for himself in the leadership of the
organization. However, in 1963 differences with Elijah Mohammad began to
surface that worsened with time till Malcolm parted ways with the leader he had
once so deeply revered. In the summer of 1964 Malcolm formed the Organization
of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and continued his mission of bringing together
his Black brethren not only in the U.S. but also in other nations like Egypt,
Lebanon, Liberia, Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, and Saudi Arabia.
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was
assassinated while speaking at an OAAU rally in Harlem. Malcolm X passed away
at the age of 39 but his legacy of awakening the racially oppressed masses
continues to inspire people throughout the world through his bestselling Autobiography
and through his electrifying revolutionary speeches that had taken roots during
his prison days. Cornel West in Race Matters hails Malcolm X as “the
first real black spokesperson who looked ferocious white racism in the eye,
didn’t blink, and lived long enough to tell America the truth about this
glaring hypocrisy in a bold and defiant manner.” (West 151) How Malcolm X
continues to cast a long shadow on issue of race relations in America can be
gauged from the way he dominates the discourse of the Black Lives Matter
movement. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the winner of the US National Book Award, 2015 for Between
the World and Me reaffirms with enormous respect in the said book: “If I could have chosen a flag back
then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a
business suit, his tie dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other
holding a rifle.” (Coates 35)
Taken together, the narratives of Frederic
Douglass and Malcolm X exemplify how the zeal for self-education can help
individuals use the power of words to become torchbearers for humanity’s
relentless struggle against slavery of any kind, be it in the domain of religion, class, caste,
creed, colour, ethnicity, or race. In conclusion, I deem it
appropriate to exhort young teacher members of the Association for English
Studies in India to draw inspiration from the above narrative to illumine their
own lives and that of others rather than limit themselves to view education as
a mere source of livelihood.
WORKS CITED
Bingham,
Caleb. The Columbian Orator (1797). Edited by David W. Blight. New York
University Press, 1998.
Blight, David. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Coates,
Ta-Nehisi. Between
the World and Me.
One World, 2015.
Douglass,
Frederick. “What,
to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” https:// constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/frederick-douglass-what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july-1852. Accessed 12 October 2023.
Douglass,
Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself. Penguin Classics, 1986.
Gates,
Jr., Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet
and Her Encounter with the Founding Fathers. Basic Civitas Books, 2003.
Ghosh, Nibir K. “From Slavery to Freedom on the Wings of Words:
Ruminations on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave, Written by Himself.” Re-Markings Vol.
21, No. 2, September 2022. pp. 42-51.
Hughes,
Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Keeping Time:
Readings in Jazz History. Ed. Robert Walser. Oxford University Press, 1999.
pp. 55-57.
Malcolm
X. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and
Statements. Edited with Prefatory Notes by George Breitman. Grove Press,
1965. pp.23-44.
Malcolm
X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With the assistance of Alex Haley and
Introduction by M. S. Handler. Grove Press, 1964. References to the text is
from this edition and have been marked by page number in parentheses by Autobiog.
Phillips, Wendell.
“Letter from Wendell Phillips, Esq.” in Narrative
of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Penguin Classics, 1986. pp. 43-46.
Rangdrol, Lama. “‘Bridges between Oppressed People’: A Conversation with Lama Rangdrol.” Re-Markings, Vol
16 No.1 March 2017 pp. 7-23.
The Declaration of
Independence.
The Constitution of the United States. U.S. Government Printing Office
(Twentieth Reprint), 2000. Appendix. pp.35-39.
West, Cornel. Race Matters.
Vintage Books, 1994.
·
Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is UGC Emeritus Professor & former Head, Department
of English, Agra College, Agra. A Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of
Washington, Seattle, USA during 2003-04, he has authored/edited 15 widely
acclaimed books. His most recent works include Mirror from the Indus:
Essays, Tributes and Memoirs (2020) and Republic of Words: Conversations
with Creative Minds from Around the Globe (2021) [with Dr. Sunita Rani
Ghosh]. He is Chief Editor of Re-Markings (www.re-markings.com), an
international bi-annual journal of English Letters which is in its 25th
year of publication. He can be reached at ghoshnk@hotmail.com
Abstract
The present essay
focuses attention on two African American icons – Frederick Douglass and
Malcolm X – who remain in the forefront of any discourse related to the issues
of the racial dilemma of America in coming to terms with the ideals of life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in The Declaration of
Independence.
Through the close examination of Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave, Written
by Himself and The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, an attempt has been made to show how the two personalities,
each in his own way, discovered the importance of self-education in
transforming their own lives and that of the communities they hailed from.
Douglass, a former slave had affirmed, “Once you learn to read, you will be
forever free.” Similarly, Malcolm X, a human rights activist and electrifying
orator, championed the cause of Black empowerment and equality in the United
States and beyond with what he called his “home education.”
Keywords
Racism,
Slavery, Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, Home-Education
Published in Indian Journal of English Studies Vol. 61 2025. pp. 23-40. Published by Association for English Studies in India.
Copyright Nibir k. Ghosh Dec. 2025.
