Why a Thought Leader Turned to Philosophy While in Prison

Malcolm X, the 1960s American Black Rights activist, was born in the ghetto and barely went to school. Yet his views were sought by world leaders and his book. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, is deservedly a classic work of political literature. Oh, and it has sold over six million copies. over a million in the first eighteen months...

How he got from insignificance to world fame in a few fast-paced years is an amazing story, but at the heart of it is a small collection of books that he came across in a prison library while serving a sentence for larceny.

Because Norfolk Prison Colony, a progressive-minded facility in Massachusetts, had a remarkable feature: a very substantial library, hundreds of old volumes, donated by a millionaire named Parkhurst. History and religion had been his special interests and the library’s books reflected that.

However, when Malcolm X arrived at the prison, he could barely read. So he taught himself, very slowly, by looking up almost very word in a kind of illustrated encyclopedia. He says that he would spend days just reading the dictionary, and that he had never imagined that so many words existed! The word aardvark particularly stuck in his mind: a long tailed, long-eared burrowing African mammal’ that eats insects.

“...the books made the prison bars melt away.”

Malcolm says the books made the prison bars melt away. He had never been so free as he was there in that prison. In fact, he would read so much that the prison routine of "lights out" began to enrage him. But he discovered he could read secretly by the light of the corridor. He slept no more than three or four hours a night from then on.

The first books and the ones that impressed him most were collections of scientific and historical facts, called Wonders of the World, as well as Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, and H.G. Wells’ monumental Outline of History. Black culture came with W.E.B du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, and Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History. He also read about Gandhi’s campaign to push the British out of India, and of the history of China and the opium wars, and the signs put up by the "vicious, arrogant white man: Chinese and dogs not allowed." And he read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but that was almost the only novel that he did read.

Because above all, Malcolm explored philosophy.

From Nietzsche, Malcolm took the idea, central to his politics, that Christianity is a slave ideology, a religion fit only for slaves. However, completely unlike Nietzsche, he then presents Islam, instead, as a liberation theology.

He says that of Western and Eastern philosophies he came to prefer the latter, seeing Western philosophy as essentially unacknowledged borrowings from the East—a view I have argued myself, to an equally deaf audience!—but his attempt to "Africanize" philosophy’s history is forced: "Socrates, for instance, traveled to Egypt," he said.

He recalls, rather randomly, the German philosophers Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche but quickly dismisses them, saying that they spent their time arguing over useless things, and probably laid the ground for the rise of Hitler too. Spinoza impressed him though, all the more because he was black—a black Jew. But ultimately, he says, the whole of Western philosophy "...wound up in a cul-de-sac." A racist cul-de-sac determined to hide the black man’s greatness.

This view itself, though, draws on his prison reading of those two historical surveys which came with a grand, philosophical sweep. H. G. Well’s A Short History of the World includes a very subversive account of "the real Jesus" while Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization is a monumental, let us not say hubristic, enterprise to offer a "philosopher’s perspective" on the world and everything in it.

“...Malcolm X had a 'thirst for truth' and that he...found satisfaction in philosophical writing more than in any other kind of texts.”

What we can draw from all this is that Malcolm X had a 'thirst for truth' and that he seems to have, at least to start with, found satisfaction in philosophical writing more than in any other kind of texts. It is remarkable to see that he sought to bring some of the driest, most abstract ideas into modern political debates.

And, as his ghostwriter, Alex Haley, makes subtly clear, Malcolm X always retained something of a philosopher’s mindset. If in public he was not prepared to admit any doubts, in private he acknowledged gaps in his theories and uncertainty as to their foundations.

In his own personal epilogue for the autobiography’ Alex Haley writes that any interesting book that Malcolm X read could get him going about his love for books. "People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book," he writes, and returned again and again to the books he had first come across while in prison. Books like the newly published The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, which explains where words originate and come from.

Actually, speaking of Alex Haley, he loved stories, especially moral tales form the Bible and adventure ones. His grandparents house, where he lived as a young child, "was the only one in Henning with a library, and it was well stocked. A black traveling bookseller would come around, especially in the Fall, when people had money from the cotton harvest," notes Robert Norell in his biography of Haley, adding that books usually cost one dollar, except if they were bibles. Bibles were more expensive.

Martin Cohen is a full-time author specializing in explaining complex topics in a direct and lively way. His latest project, I Think Therefore I Eat: the Word’s Greatest Minds Tackle the Food Question, represented by literary agent Mark Gottlieb, is a book about food and why no one—governments, doctors or even celebrities—really seem to know even the truth about it.