Summary Of The Autobiography Of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley is a story about a life of Malcolm X or his Muslim name, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz that is definitely worth reading. Malcolm X is an important figure in the history of African American for many reasons, but the most prominent one is his fight for his people and social justice. Most people who do not know anything about Malcolm X or people who even made a pre judgment saying that Malcolm X was a racist would change their point of view after reading this insanely extraordinary life of Malcolm X summarized into a stack of papers.

I learned a few things from this book. First and foremost, in the beginning of his childhood Malcolm learned that if he wanted to get something, for instance a butter biscuit from his mother, he had to make a fuss for him to get it. That incident has brought him to say this, “So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.” It taught me that, if I really want something so bad I just cannot stay put and do nothing about it. I need to work on it, regardless of the way I do it. There is an example that I can relate to this quote, if we are fighting for a cause, let’s say a fair change in an education system, sometimes voicing out through a valid medium such as official letter or formal meeting does not work. We need something more aggressive, perhaps a demonstration. There might be some drawbacks from that but sometimes that is the only way for us to be heard and to be taken seriously.

Second, I learned that people will treat you according to what is appealing to them. This is proven in Malcolm’s book in earlier chapters, when his family was falling apart and he was living with Swerlin’s family, they treated hi...

... middle of paper ...

... family and that is it. This book taught me that every single people exists on the globe matters, and we would not be given a life without a sense of purpose, and that purpose it to serve other people, our society and our humanity.

As a conclusion from Malcolm X, a true leader who taught so many the meaning of struggle, justice, courage, freedom, self-critique and compassion, racism is real thing, it still exists even in this present time, and it is actually a part of many problems in the world. But the power to change the world is in actually in our hand, know that our every actions has dominos effect on other people, either we can sit back and see the world crumble in front of our eyes, or we could do something about it. Let us ponder on this quote, “Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.”