What Malcolm X Taught Me About Education

Malcolm X would have turned 100 years old today, May 19, 2025. Worldwide, Malcolm’s birthday and legacy are being honored, and with it comes not only a moment of remembrance but an urgent invitation to reflect on the relevance of his legacy right now.

A century after his birth, his words still hold a mirror to the world we live in. For me, Malcolm has never been just a symbol or a figure in the margins of a history textbook. He is a voice that called me back to myself when I needed it most.

As an educator, I don’t carry his legacy as a quote to recite; I carry it as a lens. Malcolm helps me see what education truly requires in a society shaped by racial lies: clarity, courage, and spiritual discernment.

I’ve come to understand that teaching is not simply academic. It is soul work. It involves tending to often unnamed wounds, addressing rarely acknowledged erasures, and preparing young people not only to understand the world but also to face it with dignity.

I Didn't Meet Malcolm In a Classroom

I didn’t meet Malcolm in a classroom. I met him through the quiet gift of a book, after an experience that left me shaken. In fourth grade, I had a stutter. One day, I was called on to speak. The words got caught. My classmates laughed. Then the teacher added, almost offhandedly, “Don’t mind him, his people talk like that.”

By that time, I had already experienced racism. I’d been teased by classmates, called names, targeted in ways that felt familiar even before I could fully name them. But this moment landed differently. It wasn’t just the laughter. It was those who had joined in. The harm didn’t come from another child; it came from someone I was supposed to trust. Someone whose role was to guide, not wound.

Her words didn’t just embarrass me—they unsettled something deeper. I left the classroom feeling like I had been pushed outside myself. I was unsure of how I was being seen and unclear about how to see myself. That kind of confusion isn’t just emotional—it’s spiritual. It disorients the inner compass we’re all born with.

At that age, I didn’t have the tools to reorient myself. My parents contacted the school, and the teacher apologized. But what I needed wasn’t resolution; it was repair. A few days later, the school librarian, who had heard what happened, quietly handed me her personal copy of Malcolm X's Autobiography. “You might find something in here,” she said.

She was right. Reading that book, first with my mother and then again on my own, shifted something foundational. Malcolm had also struggled to be heard. He, too, had been cast aside, renamed, reshaped by forces beyond his control. But he didn’t lose himself in those forces. He studied. He reflected. He asked questions that cut through confusion. He didn’t accept the story he had been handed. He wrote his own.

Malcolm reflects at one point in the autobiography: "Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.”

That passage helped me see that what happened in the classroom wasn’t everything, but it was part of something. It was an ingredient. And I could choose how to carry it. That moment didn’t erase the harm, but it sparked a hunger for truth.

Malcolm didn’t offer comfort. He offered clarity. And in a world that often expects Black children to shrink in order to be accepted, clarity is a kind of protection.

Today, I work in public education leadership. I help shape curriculum, support teachers, and build systems that aim to affirm rather than erase. But I carry that fourth-grade moment with me. I remember how quickly a child can be misnamed. And I remember what it meant to be handed a story that named me rightly.

Malcolm’s gift was not only his honesty but also the precision with which he revealed the mechanics of distortion. He understood that white supremacy is not just a system of exclusion; it is a system of confusion. It obscures, manipulates, and isolates. It aims to disconnect Black people from their histories, their communities, and ultimately, themselves. And that disconnection is not just social or intellectual. It is spiritual.

He named it as such and warned us, “The time that we’re living in is not an era where one who is oppressed is looking toward the oppressor to give him some system or form of logic or reason. What is logical to the oppressor isn’t logical to the oppressed.”

I see that disconnect daily in education: in how student behavior is pathologized, but school climate isn’t; in how “rigor” is used to dismiss creativity; in what is excluded from standards and who gets to decide. Malcolm prepared us to ask different questions, questions that begin not with metrics but with memory.

His later years, especially through the work of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), were devoted to building an educational and political framework rooted in sovereignty and truth. He believed in the power of study, not just as an academic pursuit but as a way to repair fractured consciousness. He wasn’t asking for inclusion. He was insisting on transformation. And that insistence was spiritual because it demanded that we see ourselves fully and love ourselves without apology.

We are again living in a time of erasure. History is being softened or stripped from the curriculum, books are disappearing from libraries, and teachers are being told to sidestep the very truths that might liberate their students. But this is more than a policy crisis. It is a spiritual one, and Malcolm prepared us for that, too.

In Malcolm’s speech announcing his new organization, OAAU, he said, “Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self-respect. Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” But he wasn’t just speaking about career readiness. He was speaking about clarity. About cultivating discernment. About giving students the tools to understand the world and to imagine it differently. That’s what I try to remember in my work. Not because I have all the answers, but because I know what it means to be silenced. And I know what it means to be restored.

I was once a boy with a stutter, laughed at and dismissed. But I found my way back through Malcolm’s words. He reminded me that voice is not about perfection. It is about presence. It is about truth. As we mark his centennial, let us not flatten him into myth, but mobilize to continue the work he led. Let us carry forward his clarity. Into classrooms. Into libraries. Into the choices we make about what and whom we teach. Not so that students learn to fit into the world as it is, but so they begin to feel the power of remaking it.

This post first appeared on Philly's 7th Ward.