Earl Little: The English American Baptist Lover

Knowledge Is Power

The power of language is an extraordinary thing. One person with the knowledge of language can teach you, persuade you, motivate you, or even move you to the point that you have a whole different perspective of your everyday surroundings. Preachers can bring people closer to god with the gift of speech; dictators can muster and persuade a whole nation into world domination with the gift of language and speech; and poets can comfort the weary at heart with language and speech. But for the most part language is unconsciously the norm for our everyday lives, if you want to excel in life you must educate yourself. One young man by the name of Malcolm Little did push himself toward higher learning of the English
language. Malcolm Little better known as Malcolm X was born in Nebraska in 1925; the son of an African
American Baptist Preacher By the name of Earl little, Malcolm’s mother Louise Little was from the west
Indies and her mother was black but her father was white.
Earl Little belonged to (UNIA) The
Universal Negro Improvement Association. Being a member of the UNIA got Earl in a lot of trouble with the Ku Klux Klan. So the Little family had to move around a lot through the years. In 1931 Earl was found dead, most believed that he had been murdered. Malcolm’s mother never fully recovered from her husband death and was admitted into the mental instution for the rest of her remaining years. Malcolm moved to Boston with his sister after their father’s death. He worked a few small jobs until he got hooked on drugs. Soon after his addiction he steered towards crime to support his habits. In 1946 he was convicted of burglary and sentenced to ten years in prison. In Prison Malcolm became a member of Islam like so many other black men did while imprisoned in the 40’s and 50’s.

During his stay in prison he would write local drug dealers, politicians, and hustlers and explain about the state of black Americans. Malcolm felt as if he was restrained in the way he worded his conversations and letters in Prison. He was the type that could motivate and strike a
spark in a conversation or argument when he was still on the streets; now he was in prison around individuals that had their heads buried in books most of their day. Such as Malcolm’s aquatint
Bimbi, who was obviously educated in how he talked, and Malcolm looked up to him for how he always dominated conversations. Malcolm already had the gull and spirite to stand up for what he believed in but he did not have the linguistic skills. With an education as only high as the eighth grade he began to read books that were way out of his league. Feeling like giving up, and disrupted by not knowing half of what he was reading, Malcolm picked up a dictionary and began reciting and copying down words that he did not know. He was fascinated by learning what was unknown to him. This new Knowledge was like chartering unfamiliar land, so many different words, objects, and events in history he was compelled to keep going until he was finished with the whole
Webster dictionary. Malcolm was freed from his inability to read and write; large words were becoming more familiar. The urge to keep on educating himself was uncontrollable; every chance he had he was reading. For the first time in his life there were no restraints. He moved on to being on
TV and speaking at large demonstrations. But he was not done growing as an educated man. In
1964 he left the nation of Islam and became a Muslim.

With his new found religion Malcolm took a pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca to find unanswered questions about his old faith (Islam). In Mecca he finds all different races in unity on the same journey. When Malcolm returned back to the states he had a whole new outlook on racism. He started speaking at colleges about the unity of American people as a whole. Ten months after his pilgrimage Malcolm was tragically shot several times at a peace making rally. Malcolm’s journey that changed his life and the American Nation forever.
As a child watched his family fall apart, and as a illiterate teen addicted to drugs and surviving on the streets; lead him to prison and hatred for the white man. In prison Malcolm had two options, to serve his time and go back to his old neighborhood and pick up where he left off in his life of crime, or pursue his urge to educate himself. He decided to take the hard road, If Malcolm never picked up that dictionary would he have ever accomplished what he did? Malcolm was a strong influence in early 50s and 60s for pro segregation of races, but after years of pursuing higher learning he moved on to preaching for unity and equality among all races. Pursuing more knowledge could be one of the only free things left in our modern world.
It’s your choice that if you want to put down the TV remote, you can pick up a book. If not you could go the rest of your life accepting other people opinions and thoughts as if they were your own; till you are just an empty shell waiting to be herded around like cattle. In the 21st century there is no room to act as if the human race were still primitive and only rely on
common knowledge and simple skills. Technology is taking place of most manual labor, and the only thing we will have left is our minds so we can excel and overcome what is not yet understood,
Knowledge Is Power.