"Freedom from Ignorance"
Although a century apart, two men in the later stages of life gained the power of knowledge. They obtained the power to control not only their lives, but they also helped others take control of their own lives. Having control is the ability to overcome being a slave to your condition. Rising above the circumstances of society means freedom from not only physical constraints but also mental restraints. Literacy is the tool to obtain independent knowledge and therefore liberate the mind from the restriction of ignorance. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X represent the inner gap between mental slavery and complete freedom and that knowledge is the bridge between the two states.
Both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were born into a life at the bottom of society. Douglass was a slave in the mid-nineteenth century and Malcolm X was a poor black man in the inner cities nearly a century later. Both circumstances symbolize the extreme restrictions placed upon an individual by society. As a slave, Douglass lacked any possibility of free choice. Malcolm X as a hustler in Boston and Harlem was in an environment with basically two choices of lifestyle: struggling as a working class black man enslaved to serve those in power, or working against the status quo of society as a hustler. On the surface level, the possibility of choice implies that Malcolm had certain freedom. In reality however, he was bound by the limitations placed upon him by society because of his race. In general, both men spent the first half of their life struggling in society’s oppressed class.
While struggling to survive, both men’s minds were limited to daily observations. When you only worry about what your life is, you don’t realize what your life could be. Frederick Douglass was kept overworked, fatigued, and hungry. While existing in a state of borderline survival, there is no time to ponder the greater problem of this social injustice or the methods to overcome it. Malcolm X’s lifestyle as Detroit Red concerned simply the lower animalistic aspects to life like survival and gaining corporeal pleasures. Detroit Red could just barely grasp how society functioned outside of his niche. His life revolved around making money to gain food, clothing, and shelter and maintaining visceral pleasures like dancing, gambling, and drugs abuse. He knew how to operate and manipulate only that which was held within the Boston and New York ghettoes. External pressures took center stage because they threatened Malcolm’s survival. Juggling these concerns, it is obvious why someone trapped in the cycle of street life is overwhelmed by their condition and cannot overcome it. Inundated by the daily hurdles to surviving, Douglass and Malcolm were kept oppressed because of their inability to ponder the means of challenging their condition.
Physically limited and mentally oppressed, both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X reached a pivotal point in their lives that separated their story from the millions of black men suffering the same plight at the time. If their mind were a dark cave, both found light in the form of literacy that uncovered the truth of their condition. Reading is the one way to gain knowledge completely independent from others. A book is someone else’s ideas preserved in writing and transmitted through generations. Once the initiative is taken, nothing can stop you from making these ideas your own. The ability is gained to see beyond your daily struggle and gain perspective as a reference to gauge your own life.
When you are accustomed to the medium of reading, it is taken for granted. But once both Douglass and Malcolm X tapped into this channel of ideas, nothing could stop them from taking full advantage of it. Douglass said “It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty – to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass, 20). Similarly Malcolm also looked upon this moment as a revelation: “Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened . . . In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life. No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand” (Haley, 176). Both men made the statement that literacy helped them to understand – to recognize their condition, to interpret its causes, and to be able to communicate that to the others.
What is a man without knowledge? It can be argued that the only dividing factor between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is the level of our ability to observe, interpret, and retain information about our environment and the societies in which we live. This information takes form in many shapes: direct observation, orally interpreted stories, essays, novels, historical documents, etc. But without taking advantage to personally learn from all forms of common knowledge, that person is reduced to a level further down the evolutionary scale. That is why it is easier for those who utilize knowledge to control the ignorant. The lack of a better understanding of the world equates to a vulnerable outlook and therefore an inhibited existence. While the oppressed remain ignorant it is easy for those in power to exert their control because the ignorant are unaware of the truth to society’s system.
Both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X reached monumental realizations about the nature of society through reading. For Douglass, it was the book “The Columbian Orator” that broadened his prospective.
I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery” (Douglass, 24).
Prior to reading the book, Douglass only had instinct to tell him that slavery was wrong. The knowledge he obtained gave him the power to oppose the institution.
Similarly, Malcolm X gained insight into the system of oppression through numerous history books. “Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation” (Malcolm X, 180). These books showed Malcolm that although exploitation was common throughout history, but it wasn’t the only possibility. “Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History opened my eyes about black empires before the black slave was brought to the United States” (Malcolm X, 178). The texts helped them understand their roles within society, which was the starting point for challenging it. What both men realized is that although they were born underprivileged and oppressed, it did not have to remain that way.
With these new perspectives, both men could then reflect upon their life and realize the extent of their oppression. As Douglass’s knowledge evolved he realized that he was not only a physical slave laborer denied the obvious features of liberation including the freedom of movement, choice, physical comfort, and ability to better your condition. His reflections revealed an insight into a deeper psychological enslavement from the system the slave-owners enforced upon the slaves. Douglass recognized that the grasp of enslavement reached past the external condition to one’s very being and controlled the essence that composes you – the mind. Without the means of an independent education, the slaves were not even free to let their mind take its own shape, and therefore their mental state was restricted of autonomous movement.
The mind control was most evident in the way the slaves continued to act while the restriction of physical enslavement was lifted for the week of a so-called Christmas vacation. “From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity” (Douglass, 44). Not only were they physically controlled, but also their “spirit” was manipulated. The pent up frustration, angst, desperation, and general outrage at their condition was released by a week of drunken oblivion. Therefore, no problems were solved, merely ignored – as was the wish of those in power. The slaves did not know what true freedom was, they only knew what those in power told them it was. The slaveholders manipulated the slaves’ ignorance in order prevent them from desiring freedom.
Similarly, society controlled young Malcolm’s mind and prevented him from being knowledgeable in several ways. It is overtly evident by what was taught to him during his schooling. “Later, I remember, we came to the textbook section on Negro history. It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves and then were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless” (Haley, 30). This is an example of how public schools do not allow a choice in what is learned. How was young Malcolm expected to learn anything about life that wasn’t filtered by someone else’s agenda? In that sense, how can you be considered a free thinker when you don’t even realize all there is to think about?
In Douglass’s time there was a distinct boundary between being free and being a slave. It was the divide between North and South, and black and white. Towards the end of his life, Malcolm X began to realize that it was not just race that drew the boundary between the liberated and oppressed, but it was also a deeper running personal ignorance. Malcolm eventually came to the insight that “The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings” (Malcolm X, 378). It is ironically America, the “land of the free” whose citizens are not objective individuals but subjective to the moral ills society creates. Knowledge is more than retaining information, freedom applies to those who use this information to form independent opinions, despite what society deems as right.
Why did reading, and ultimately the knowledge obtained through it, transform these two men from oppressed to liberated? Once they realized their condition, they could no longer passively accept it. Soon after learning to read, Douglass said in desperation:
“I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy . . . I have often wished myself a beast . . . Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it” (Douglass, 24).
Douglass would never be the same because now that he knew the problem he toiled to discover the solution. Malcolm also could not go back to the life he once knew. “I knew, from what I had been when I was with them, how brainwashed they were” (Malcolm X, 219). When you lose your ignorance, you can never get it back. When you are free to see things for how they really are, it is hard to pretend blindness. Therefore the consequence of knowledge is facing the challenge of improving your situation. Both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X did so by using their intellectual freedom to educate others through verbal communication.
Ironically, it is the autobiography in itself that is the greatest testament to the liberating effects of literacy. The life stories of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X are inspirational to anyone who wants to challenge their role within society, or the institutions that holds them there. It is an example of how society has laid a path for you to take –slave, hustler, factory worker, businessman etc. – and it demands that you agree with certain ideals – slavery, racism, capitalism etc. - and it is ultimately up to you to choose whether or not you accept it. No one is going to ask you to decide, and freedom by its very nature is the ability to make your own decisions. If these men had not told their stories, their acts of individualism would have been lost because their ideas were a threat to the norm and this challenge was met with repression. Malcolm realized this fact “He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of ‘hatred’ – and that will help him to escape facing the truth . . .” (Malcolm X, 389). Malcolm X’s autobiography is a perfect example of how emancipation from thought control is seeking knowledge through reading in order to make any independent conclusions.
Both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X proved that freedom is not simply a right or a physically quality, but a mental state to be obtained. Either we are born with an uninhibited mental state, but then brainwashed through society and lack of exposure, or we are all born prisoners to our conditions, and maturity is a process of liberating your mental state. Regardless, remaining ignorant is to be content with whatever society imposes on you. The means of achieving free will is through the knowledge acquired independently through literacy. Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were living testaments that freedom means being free from the cycle of living day by day; free to see the world for more than what meets the eye; free to not only help yourself, but to help others; and free to criticize what is popular, because what is popular is not always right.




Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Dover Publications,
Inc. New York: 1995.

X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Ballantine Books. New York: 1964.