What Is The Difference Between Malcolm X And Frederick Douglass

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“Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read” deal with the subject of both authors being self taught readers and writers. 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, an education can be acquired by anybody. Douglass and Malcolm X share some similarities …show more content…

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

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