Compare and Contrast Ssing Extensive Quoting of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X
“Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read” talks about both authors self-teaching themselves to read and write. Any deficiency in education makes it difficult to achieve any great task in life regardless of your race. Making the choice to become an educated African American male during a hostile time of life for African Americans, demonstrated the extraordinary devotion of both men. Malcolm X seized “special pains” in searching to inform himself on “black history” (Malcolm X 3). African Americans have been persecuted all through history, yet two men endeavor to demonstrate that regardless of your past, education can be acquired by anybody. Douglass and Malcolm X share some similarities on how they learned to read and write. Despite the similarities, there were some differences in achieving their goal of obtaining a higher education. Douglass and Malcolm X were ambitious men. They both desired to learn how to properly read and write. This goal was particularly challenging because they didn’t have a teacher. Douglass and Malcolm X come from different educational backgrounds and circumstances. Douglass was a slave with no educational background, who wanted to learn how to read and write. He knew better opportunities were possible if he were educated and not a slave. He took a risk to become a better man, “ I was compelled to resort to various stratagems” (Douglass 100). Being a slave caused him to be secretive and deceptive in his learning practices. The potential consequences of being caught with learning materials were life altering. Malcolm X was a criminal with some educational background.
He had a desire to express his thoughts and knowledge, but was held back by his eighth grade education and imprisonment at that moment. With those obstacle, he wanted to be able to speak properly and to share his thoughts in a proper letter to the great Mr. Elijah Muhammad, “How could I sound writing in slang,…say[ing] it, something such as, ‘Look, daddy, let me pull your coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad-’ ” (Malcolm X 1).
Douglass ambition to learn reading and writing is what helped him reach his goals. His mistress started out helping him with some instruction until her heart became “stone” and “ceas[ed] in instruction.” (Douglass 101). She soon realized that “education and slavery were incompatible with each other” (Douglass 101). Little did the mistress know that it was a too late, Douglass states “ The first step had been taken.” He remembered her teachings of the alphabet and gave him the “inch, and no precaution could prevent …from taking the ell” (Douglass 101). Without his mistress, he found “success” in using the little white boys he met in the streets (Douglass 101). Douglass converted the boys into teachers. He used the resources of newspapers, books like “The Columbian Orator” and “Webster’s Spelling Book”, as well as speeches. Douglass often studied the shapes of letters written on lumber at the bayside on his daily errands around town, “In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way” (Douglass 105). Even though Douglass had troubling times he pushed through the regrets, self consciousness, and doubts to educate himself, “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free…” (Douglass 103).
Through learning, Douglass was enlightened by a subject that eventually brought success to his life and would change the world, “From this time I understood the words abolition and abolitionist, and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves” (Douglass 104).
Malcolm X like Douglass had a great ambition in learning to read and write. He wanted to be able to properly write his thoughts and opinions out to be understood. He wanted to leave an impression on people. That impression was credited to his “prison studies” (Malcolm X 1). He had a voice that needed to be heard all over to bring a change to society. He was studying day and night with the dictionary, and books. Malcolm X considered that “three or four hours of sleep a night” was enough (Malcolm X 3). Malcolm X became interested in the “glorious history of the black man” (Malcolm X 3). “Book after book” showed him the “white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the suffering of exploitation” (Malcolm X 4). Like Douglass, Malcolm found the “Faustian machinations” of the “white man” against the “non-white victims” (Malcolm X). Douglass states, “I feared they might be treacherous.” Unlike Douglass being social and receiving help from others around, Malcolm kept everything to himself and sought information on his own through books. Malcolm X had more pride in his education and wasn’t afraid to share his knowledge, “Mr. Muhammed, to whom I was writing daily, had no idea of what a new world had opened up to me through my efforts to document his teachings in books” (Malcolm X 6).