Malcolm and Mickey Malcolm X wrote The Auto-biography of Malcolm X (1965), with Alex Haley. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in 1925. Malcolm changed his last name “Little,” to X, because he considered Little to be a slave name. The letter X was considered his lost African tribal name. In 1946 Little was sentenced to ten years in prison for burglary. During Little`s imprisonment, he taught himself to read and write properly; Little`s education level was the eighth grade. Bimbi was the most vocal of Malcolm`s fellow inmates. Bimbi would make speeches that gained him respect of the prison guards and inmates. Malcolm was envious of him and tried to emulate him. Malcolm would try to read books, but when he came to words he could not pronounce or understand he would just skip these words. “When I skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with …show more content…
Malcolm also needed to improve his writing skills. “My penmanship, it was sad”. (Malcolm X pg.640) He went to the prison library and checked out a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils. The next two days Malcolm spent thumbing through the dictionary. He never realized there were so many words in the dictionary; he did not know which words he needed to learn. Finally, just to do something he started copying the first page. He copied everything on the page down to the punctuation marks. It took Malcom all day to copy the first page. Then the next day he started reading out loud everything he had written. It was not long that Malcolm realized the dictionary was like an encyclopedia; to this day he remembers what an aardvark is. Malcolm eventually copies the entire dictionary. This increased his vocabulary and improved his reading skills. Malcolm spent so much time reading that months would pass by without him ever thinking about being in prison. “In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life”. (Malcolm X pg.