The Influences of BTW and Malcolm X's Early Experiences on Their Beliefs

    Both Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X were influential figures in the fight for civil rights. Separated by the better part of a century, they still took similar paths through life. They began in dangerous and demoralizing conditions, but fixated in their adolescence on learning to read and educating themselves despite numerous barriers. Both used this skill to develop an understanding of the problems facing Black people in their times, and eventually both became prominent advocates for the whole of their race. But within these general periods of their early lives, their individual experiences varied significantly, taking their beliefs, goals, and tactics in two very different directions. Booker T. Washington felt that racism could be eventually beaten through forgiveness, incremental change, and programs which worked "inside the system," like vocational training, while Malcolm X argued that significant change would never occur without constant, aggressive activism forcing white people to listen.

    Booker T. Washington was enslaved from birth until the age of nine. During this time, he experienced frequent hunger, intense, dangerous work, and dirty conditions. Yet, somewhat unexpectedly, he never characterizes his childhood as especially full of cruelty or suffering, nor does he express any sort of grudge against his former masters for enslaving him. As he puts it, "[my experience as a slave] was so, however, not because my owners were particularly cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others" (1). He also only devotes a few pages to explicitly describing these negative experiences. Furthermore, the effects of the Civil War on the lives of his owners caused their experiences to increasingly mirror his own as the war dragged on: "...as the war was prolonged the white people, in many cases, often found it difficult to secure food for themselves. I think the slaves felt the deprivation less than the whites, because the usual diet for the slaves was corn bread and pork . . . articles which the whites had been accustomed to use could not be raised on the plantation, and the conditions brought about by the war frequently made it impossible to secure these things. The whites were often in great straits" (7). In this childhood story and several other similar ones, the struggles of Washington's owners seem to remind him of the many times he was forced to go hungry too, eliciting feelings of sympathy for white people in him from an early age. Especially during the era of Reconstruction, when there was great optimism for the future of Black people and no history of ineffective social movements, childhood experiences such as these contributed to Washington's belief that racism harms all races, but could be beaten through forgiveness, understanding, and incremental change.

    But despite being born long after the abolition of slavery, Malcolm X grew up constantly beaten down by racism in Jim Crow society and watching the failure of movements that could have elevated Black people, like Reconstruction. In his eyes, the vast majority of white people were inherently evil, even "devils." He believed that anti-racist attitudes would never take root among them unless someone extremely radical forced them to. But his beliefs never reached this point until around his release from prison, and his experiences as a child and teenager are key to understanding how he developed these radical ideas. In 1931, when Malcolm was 6 years old, his father was murdered on a streetcar by White supremacists, plunging his mother into "impossible family responsibilities and sharply limited finances" (1859). She was diagnosed as mentally ill and sent to an asylum, while Malcolm moved to Boston and then to New York. There, he became part of a bustling Black culture unlike any he had ever seen in his previous majority-white towns, but also part of various burglary, drug, and gambling rings to make ends meet, which led to his 1946 arrest and 10-year prison sentence. As opposed to what may have happened during Reconstruction, the conditions of the Jim Crow era enabled one racist act against Malcolm's family to snowball into ruin in every part of his life while keeping him held down at nearly every point he could have recovered.

    However, Malcolm X's life and beliefs started to change and solidify as a result of his time in prison. Like Booker T. Washington at the salt furnace, he also developed an overwhelming drive for learning at a similar low point in his life and became set on learning to read. But the books he would read once he learned to do so were far more political and took an unwaveringly brutal stance on the history of white society: "I read the histories of various nations, which opened my eyes gradually, then wider and wider, to how the whole world's white men had indeed acted like devils, pillaging and raping and bleeding and draining the whole world's non-white people" (1866). The influence of the earliest literature that he read is visible in his beliefs as an adult too, with his talk of the "white devil" and calls for the races to interact as little as possible. In prison, his family also continually encouraged him to "Turn to Allah . . . pray to the East" (1860). But he experienced incredible difficulty doing so: "Of evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world. It's easy for me to see that now. But then, when I was the personification of evil, I was going through it" (1861). Experiencing the difficulty of abandoning a life of "evil" also brought him a greater understanding of white people, similar to what Washington developed. But, having seen the evil side of them throughout his life instead, this experience helped shape his understanding of white people into the opposite of Washington's in many ways. He believed they were fully capable of abandoning the role of the oppressor and working towards anti-racist goals instead, but that constant aggressive pressure was needed to change them, instead of accommodationism and coddling.

    Influenced by their early experiences, Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X express two vastly different conclusions about how to achieve racial equality in their autobiographies. Washington's experiences under slavery of suffering less compared to other slaves and even feeling sympathy for his owners' struggles gave him a somewhat positive opinion of white people and hope for mutual understanding between the races. In contrast, Malcolm X was crushed by the effects of racism throughout his life, and in prison, the books he consumed and his religious experience further confirmed his lived experiences: that white society had a long history of brutality towards non-white people, and that it would never change without being forced to. The fact that both men developed such different ideas despite spending their early lives in such similar conditions shows how much the specific details of one's experience, rather than its general structure, can determine the course of their life and beliefs.