Lack of History

Malcolm touches on a subject that we discussed in class. Black history. Or the lack of it. "The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed h ow history had been "whitened"- when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out." He talks about how in history class as a child, Malcolm had noticed that only a paragraph had summed up the history of the Negro, while the rest of the book covered white men, governments, and independence. In the time period before and all the way up until Malcolm's time, Negroes were kept uneducated in order to keep the less dangerous. Since they were often uneducated and could not read, few written records of black history were passed down or found. Much was relayed verbally or through song. Because of all this, a lot of history was lost.