failed at a railroad job, he transferred his street skills to Harlem, only to be run back to Boston after a fight with a numbers boss.
In Boston, partnering sexually and professionally with a white woman, Malcolm specialized in burglary. But Boston police cracked the burglary ring, and Malcolm spent seven years in three Massachusetts state prisons. In the Autobiography he attributes the seven-year sentence, harsh for a first-time offender in those days, to his real "crime": interracial romance.
The girls . . . were well-to-do upper-middle-class whites. That bothered the social workers and the forces of law more than anything else. . . . Nobody wanted to know anything at all about the robberies. All they could see was that we had taken the white man's women (Malcolm and Haley 151).
Malcolm's seven years in prison represented the journey of a soul, an intellect, and a belief. He went from being a streetwise hustler and a prisoner known as "Satan" to a devoutly observant Muslim. His religious experience was informed by a religious epiphany not unlike that of the Christian Saul of Tarsus (Malcolm and Haley 188), as well as prison education courses and self-teaching. To improve his vocabulary and reading ability, he copied out every page of the dictionary, meanwhile reading everything available to him.
By way of his brother Reginald, Malcolm began to correspond with the leader of the black-separatist group called the Natio
...