Malcolm X — Reading

So Malcolm said, “Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book I want to read. and that a lot of books these days.

If I weren’t out here everyday battling the White man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity because you can hardly mention anything that I’m not curious about.

I don’t thing anyone got more out of prison than I did. In fact prison enabled me to study far more intensely than I ever would if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college.

I imagine one of the biggest troubbles; the biggest trouble with colleges is there are too many distractions”.

Malcolm spoke at Oxford University. I spoke to Oxford Union when you walk in they give you a standing ovation just for getting there. You don’t even have to give a talk after that, you just wave or something.

Because you’re at the union, they consider it so prestigious, I mean this typical Anglo-Saxon pride. They considered it so prestigious that you’ve been invited; you get a standing ovation just for walking in.

So Malcolm was there December 3rd 1963. A beautiful speech he gave on extremism He went toe to toe with professors from Oxford. The ovations in that speech were immense, His diction was impeccable. His elocution was beautiful. He did not speak slang. If he spoke slang it was for rhetorical effect. This is actually a trope in rhetoric to say “We was robbed”.

So Malcolm new rhetoric and he used it to great effectiveness. He was an extraordinary orator but he was an educated mind. And this is what has to be understood.

This man struggled with great difficulty to educate himself. And he spent years. While in prison, he would read until 3 in the morning. He would read with light at end of the hall. Every 58 minutes he would go because the guard would come by and they weren’t allowed to be up that late, so he would pretend to be asleep. The guard would leave and he would go back to reading. This was Malcolm.

So when you see this man. You must understand this was not something that came down. All these gifted people. There great gift Is discipline, their ability to struggle against themselves and overcome laziness, overcome the temptation to go the easy way

Malcolm was a highly disciplined individual. He was disciplined intellectually. He was disciplined spiritually. When his brother Reginald was thrown out, he spent the entire night in prayer.

He was a man of prayer. These are important things to remember.