Limiting Opportunity

Please note that this reading includes dehumanizing language. We have chosen to include it in order to honestly communicate the harmful language of the time; however, dehumanizing language should not be spoken or read aloud during class.

Malcolm Little was also a top student in his high school in Lansing, Michigan. He kept his grades high even though he too held a part-time job in a restaurant. He worked as a dishwasher. In his autobiography, Little recalls a conversation with one of his teachers:

Somehow, I happened to be alone in the classroom with Mr. Ostrowski, my English teacher. He was a tall, rather reddish white man and he had a thick mustache. I had gotten some of my best marks under him, and he had always made me feel that he liked me. . . .

He told me, “Malcolm, you ought to be thinking about a career. Have you been giving it thought?”

The truth is, I hadn’t. I never have figured out why I told him, “Well, yes sir, I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a lawyer.” Lansing certainly had no Negro lawyers—or doctors either—in those days, to hold up an image I might have aspired to. All I really knew for certain was that a lawyer didn’t wash dishes, as I was doing.

Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He kind of half- smiled and said, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry in shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work.”

The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind.

What made it really begin to disturb me was Mr. Ostrowski’s advice to others in my class—all of them white. Most of them told him they were planning to become farmers. But those who wanted to strike out on their own, to try something new, he had encouraged. Some, mostly girls, wanted to be teachers. A few wanted other professions, such as one boy who wanted to become a county agent; another, a veterinarian; and one girl wanted to be a nurse. They all reported that Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged what they had wanted. Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine.

It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.

It was then that I began to change—inside. ¹

Malcolm Little is better known today as Malcolm X. In 1952, he changed his name when he converted to Islam.

• 1The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. Ballantine, 1965, pp 35-37.