to 10 years in prison. One of his two male accomplices was sentenced to concurrent terms of 8 to 10 years on several counts. The third black gang member escaped and was never captured.
Ella visited Malcolm in prison and worked to have him transferred to the Norfolk, Massachusetts, Prison Colony. Somehow she accomplished this, and in 1948 Malcolm was transferred (Huxley and X 160). In prison, Malcolm began the first phase of his transformation into Malcolm X. He describes this incident to Alex Huxley: ôI still marvel at how swiftly my previous lifeÆs thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof. It is as though someone else I knew of had lived my hustling and crime. I would be startled to catch myself thinking in a remote way of my earlier self as another personö (Huxley and X 173).
In his autobiography, Malcolm related his attempts to read while in prison. He described how he skipped through the books, because he could not understand most of the words. At Norfolk, he requested a dictionary, tablets, and pencils. In one of the m
...