Malcolm X: The Quintessential Intellectual

After being put in prison, a street hustler named Malcolm changed his life, embarking on a journey that would alter the course of the civil rights movement. In prison Malcolm was frustrated with his lack of writing skills while trying to express himself in letters. He decided to acquire a dictionary to expand his meager vocabulary. Diligently he studied new subjects, eventually copying the entire dictionary and becoming well versed in politics, social and racial …

…compulsory to get results. He engrossed himself in learning his culture and his history, open wide and ventured into the unforeseen. Behind bars with limited resource, he built his intelligence to rival any scholar; "seizing the meaning" of his very existence as a black man. The life and work of Malcolm X proves himself a model example of the type of person Ilan Stavans describes in his statement regarding the definitive characteristics of an intellectual.