Brandin Harvell
English 112/ 11am
Elizabeth Carter
April 25th, 2013
Malcolm X vs. Santiago Baca The black militant leader Malcolm X was the founder of the Muslim Mosque Inc and the Organization of Afro American Unity. He was a major part of the Civil Rights Movement, and often educated African Americans. However before he became what we know Malcolm X to be today he was a trouble young man, it wasn’t until he was sent to prison, he decided to educate himself and turn his life around. Although the comparison is often not found, similar to Malcolm X was Santiago Baca. Baca wasn’t a civil rights activist but a troubled young drug dealer. He was sentenced to prison where he turned his life around and became a poet and a teacher. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little but he considered that a slave name, so he change his last name to X to represent his lost tribal name. In the 1945 while living in Boston, Malcolm participated in a series of robberies. He was arrested in 1946 while picking up a stolen watch that he left for repair at a jewelry shop. In February, he was sentenced to 8 to 10 years at the Charlestown prison. When Malcolm got to prison he couldn’t read or write in a straight. However during his time there he met John Bembry who was a self educated man, he quoted that “he was the first man he seen command total respect with words” this made Malcolm feel envy for the stock of knowledge Bembry had and influenced his voracious appetite for reading. He grabbed a dictionary from the Norfolk colony school and began reading and writing words. Reading book in the prison he was in was smile upon. Over time the dictionaries he was reading turned into actual books. He would read until the lights went out, then he try to find a section in his room where a little amount of light cracked from the moon to read some more. Although he was locked up in prison he never felt freer. Each book gave him more insight on the dumbness, blindness and the deafness that affect the black race. Like Malcolm X, Santiago Baca was a troubled young man. He was abandoned by his parent at the age of 2 and was taken in by his grandparents for several years before being placed in a orphanage. He ran away and wounded up living in the streets and at the age of 21 he was arrested for drug possession, he was sentence to 6 and a half years. Unlike the prison Malcolm X was in the prison Baca was in frowned on inmates reading. But during his prison sentence a man part of a church group that wrote inmate without families, wrote Baca a