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By Root 1752 0

preached that registering to vote or mobilizing blacks to petition the courts, as the NAACP did, was a waste of time. In the years prior to Brown v. Board of Education, the May 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in the country’s public schools, Muhammad’s arguments could be reasonably defended, but his “audience” among blacks still remained small. By 1947, he had consolidated control over Fard’s followers in only four cities—in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Milwaukee, and at his headquarters in Chicago. The Nation’s combined membership was four hundred, an insignificant number compared to the thousands of African-American members of the growing Ahmadiyya movement, or even the fading remnants of the Moorish Science Temple.

Yet there was also a growing group of black prisoners converting to the Nation of Islam while still in prison, where the depression caused by long confinement made inmates particularly vulnerable. Muhammad’s own prison experience had taught him to channel his recruitment efforts at convicted felons, alcoholics, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Malcolm numbered among these, and as he sat in isolation, anxiously writing letters to Elijah on an almost daily basis, the intensity of his commitment grew until he reached total acceptance.

Prison life can shatter the soul and will of anyone who experiences it. “It destroys thought utterly,” Antonio Gramsci observed in his prison notebooks. “It operates like the master craftsman who was given a fine trunk of seasoned olive wood with which to carve a statue of Saint Peter; he carved away, a piece here, a piece there, shaped the wood roughly, modified it, corrected it—and ended up with a handle for the cobblerʹs awl.” Confined to Mussolini’s prisons for over a decade, Gramsci struggled fiercely to maintain his sense of purpose, and eventually realized that only through a dedicated program of intellectual engagement could he endure the physical hardships. He wrote, “I want, following a fixed plan, to devote myself intensely and systematically to some subject that will absorb me and give a focus to my inner life.” Faced with a similar dilemma, Malcolm committed himself to a rigorous course of study. In doing so, he consciously remade himself into Gramsci’s now famous “organic intellectual,” creating the habits that, years later, would become legendary. His powers of dedication and self-discipline were extraordinary, and directly opposite to the wayward drifting of his earlier years. The trickster disappeared, the clowning side of disobedience, leaving the willful challenger to authority.

At Norfolk, the prisoners in the debate club engaged in weekly exchanges on a variety of issues. Malcolm and Shorty, who had also been transferred to Norfolk, found a forum for Malcolm’s new beliefs and arguments. “Right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading,” Malcolm wrote. “Standing up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate—once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” It soon did not matter what the formal topic was. Malcolm had by now become an expert debater, thoroughly researching his subjects in the prison library and planning his arguments accordingly. The common theme of his public discourses, however, was his indictment of white supremacy.

Malcolm now began perfecting what would become his distinctive speaking style. He possessed an excellent tenor voice, which helped him attract listeners. But even more unusual was how he employed his voice to convey his thoughts. Coming into maturity during the big band era, he quickly picked up on the cadence and percussive sounds of jazz music, and inevitably his evolving speaking style borrowed its cadences.

Once he had started reeducating himself, there was no limit to his search for fact and inspiration. Through Norfolk’s