The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

Encouraged by his family, Malcolm wrote directly to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who responded with a letter welcoming him to “the true knowledge” and expanding on the information Malcolm’s family had sent. Every day, Malcolm wrote letters—to his siblings, to Elijah, and to government officials—but he soon became frustrated by what he could not express on the written page. “My reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face.” While continuing to write letters, he joined the prison’s weekly debate team and cultivated world-class polemical skills during face-offs in Norfolk prison with debating teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, and Harvard. These verbal calisthenics with Ivy League wordsmiths pumped up Malcolm’s dialectical prowess as a fierce and fearsome debater, a skill that would power his meteoric rise as a Muslim advocate in Harlem, New England, and the rest of the United States—and eventually the world—while also incurring envy within the Nation of Islam. “Debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been,” he later wrote.