Malcolm X used reading to reach his full potential. Will kids now do the same?

Yahoo

19-05-2025

Put yourself inside a 6-by-8-foot prison cell, no window, bare concrete walls. A concrete slab juts out from the wall with a mattress to lay on. There's a creaky desk and chair and, in the corner, a wooden pail to defecate in. For 17½ hours a day, this is your reality.
You do have a pen and paper. And there is a library nearby, but only with books. No multimedia center here. No smartphone, no television, maybe one or two radio stations, but only for an hour at night. Those other six-and-a-half hours are spent either working in the laundry or walking outside in the yard.
Could you do it? For 39 months?
Malcolm X did, and if he hadn't endured this cruelly deprived reality, we would have never heard of him. At Charlestown State Prison (now Bunker Hill Community College), Malcolm Little, as he was called at the time, endured suffocating idleness and boredom. He turned to the books in the prison library for, at the very least, a distraction from the thought of being incarcerated.
As he explained to Alex Haley years later: '…I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.'
On May 19, 2025, Malcolm X would have been 100 years old. He only made it to 39. That itself is tragic, but it would have been even more so if his mother Louise had never taught him how to read.
Louise gathered her seven children around the table during the Great Depression, her husband Earl killed after being run over by a streetcar, and asked them to read aloud from the dictionary, the Bible, and from newspapers established by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and Grenadian politician T.A. Marryshow. 'A strong-minded mother,' Malcolm wrote to his older brother Philbert while incarcerated, 'has strong-minded children.'
According to the National Literacy Institute (NLI), not only are 21% of American adults illiterate, but also '130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.'
Imagine if Louise did not have the ability to read to Malcolm or teach him how to read aloud and hear his voice gain strength. Would he have been able to survive those hellish months in prison? Would he have been able to write his now-famous speech, 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' delivered at Cleveland's Cory Methodist Church on East 105th Street?
In prison, as Malcolm read, 'months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned.' Reading, even in that tiny, ancient, decrepit cell, released him. 'I never had been so truly free in my life,' he wrote in his autobiography.
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Smartphones have the power to capture the mind of a child or teenager and place it on a hamster wheel fueled by dopamine, an imprisonment of distraction. In 2025, reading a book takes a backseat (is it even in the car?) to the eye strain required to take in a 15-second soundbite, watch a ball strike a line of dominos, enjoy a new music video or scroll an endless clothing catalog.
At Charlestown, Malcolm threw himself into reading a wide range of titles. He cracked open an old copy of Shakespeare's Macbeth, unsure of what exactly he was reading. But he had time and little to no distraction, so he dug into the etymology using a dictionary. As he improved, he was eventually transferred to Norfolk Prison Library, and the prison library there was large enough for him to find more specific titles. He devoured Frederik Bodmer's The Loom of Language, studied Grimm's Law, read ancient Persian poetry and joined a Great Books discussion group, Machiavelli's The Prince being one of the 17 books discussed.
Here's hoping it doesn't take prison for children to crack open a new book and learn about another world.
Patrick Parr's third book is Malcolm Before X, published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School in 1999.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Malcolm X shows the power of reading, even decades later | Opinion