Losing Mother

"I can't describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me... I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together. Our home didn't have to be destroyed. But the Welfare, the courts, and their doctor, gave us the one-two-three punch."

The autobiography of Malcolm X waists no time in touching the heart and sympathies of any reader that is at least half-human. Malcolm's story is one that is familiar with pain from his childhood, and within the first chapter alone his father is beaten severely by white supremacists, who lay him on railroad tracks to finish the job, and his mother has lost her mind, due to the constant pressures of the welfare system, and them telling her she is crazy to turn them down. These memories would be the bedrock from which Malcolm's anger and frustration toward the white man and his society would be fashioned later as he analyzed his experiences and hardships, inevitably accrediting most of his misfortunes and sufferings to the white man's cruel and self-serving ambitions. It was here that Malcolm would later see that he and his family were not viewed by the white man as humans, but "as numbers and as a case in their book." Losing his mother in this way hurt Malcolm deeply as you can imagine, and would be such a source of pain for him that, as the years passed, he would block her out of his mind and build up "subconscious defenses" in order to not have to face the pain. As is the case for most of us who lose loved ones, Malcolm Little, as he was known at this time in his story, would surely lose part of himself to that mental institution that claimed his mother as its patient, and to the white man for that matter, and would only come to recognize this through the process of dictating this book. Yet, undoubtably, it was losing his mother and father that forced Malcolm to explore his own trail toward identity at such an early age, and as a result, to become a very self-reliant individual; a characteristic that would be very necessary for the work of his later career.