Frederick Douglass and Malcom X created some of the most famous African-American pieces to ever be released. They were written to reveal how hard the process of learning to read was back during the slave era. Douglass had a chapter in his narrative ”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” called “Learning to Read and Write,” it was written in 1845. Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read,” is an excerpt from,” the Autobiography of Malcolm X“. These two pieces were written more than a century apart yet several common themes can still be identifies. These themes help provide a sense of the African American civil rights movements. The two bios demonstrate how hard it was to obtain basic reading and writing skills, As the texts reveal, there is a strong connection between the concepts of freedom and the process becoming fully educated.
Douglass and Malcolm X both write an extensive amount of details to describe the way they learned how to read and write, and how they both got around the obstacles that stood in front of them. Douglass explains that he had to sneak around to learn, and one of the quotes from “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” talk about how he “had no regular teacher”. His owners thought that slaves didn’t need education to become a slave, so they banned it from the fields. Douglass convinces himself that illiteracy Is like living in a “mental darkness”. Since Douglass was young, he devoted himself to learn these important skills. He got these skills by sneaking around things with words on them and he used to get into words duels with kids of the owners. Just like Douglass, Malcom X writes about the challenges of learning to read and write. He sees this as part his salvation from the “mental darkness” that enslaved
him. While in prison, Malcolm X teaches himself to read by going through the dictionary. In order to make sure he taught himself correctly, he copied every single page. In, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, he says,...