Chapter 2 - Summary, The Autobiography Of Malcolm X | The Autobiography of Malcolm X -Summary, Themes & Characters - Novels PDF Download

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• Joe Lewis, the Brown Bomber, knocks out James J. Braddock to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Everyone in Malcolm's town goes crazy and wants to become the next Brown Bomber.
• His older brother Philbert is pretty good at boxing, and he’s starting to gain fans. Malcolm, being the great brother that he is, gets totally jealous. So obviously he tries to box too. It's bad. Really bad. He gets beat up so badly that he can't even show his face in town without everyone making fun of him.
• After training for several months, Malcolm asks for a rematch, but it's just as bad as the first time. Actually, the only thing better about it is that no one is there to watch him lose. He loses pretty much as soon as his competitor threw the first punch.
• Later Malcolm is up to more trouble. He wears a hat to class even though hats are not allowed. When he gets in trouble, he puts a tack on his teacher's chair. Yeah, it's just like a cartoon, only now someone really has a tack in their butt.
• Malcolm is expelled from school and sent to a detention home. It's actually not as bad as you would think, and the people in charge of the detention home are very nice. Except for one thing. They constantly say racist things right in front of Malcolm, as if he can't understand what they're saying.
• But all that doesn't bother Malcolm at the time. All he cares about is going out, meeting girls, and having fun.
• Eventually Malcolm is sent to Mason Junior High School. There are only a couple of black children at the school, and Malcolm becomes sort of a mascot for them. Everyone likes him, he does great in class, and he even gets some money from a part-time job.
• School would be great, if his history teacher weren’t a terrible racist. And Malcolm is even on the basketball team, which would make him ultra-popular if it weren’t for the constant racial slurs he encounters every time he gets on court.
• We don't even want to mention the awkwardness that comes up when Malcolm is at a school dance. It's an unspoken rule that he's not supposed to dance with the white girls, even though the white boys constantly pressure him to proposition the girls.
• When Malcolm is elected class president, he's more surprised than anyone else. He's also super proud, because he's been trying his best to act as white as he can. His election signals victory to young Malcolm on a number of levels.
• Every now and again Malcolm goes to visit his family. It seems like everything is going well, and Malcolm is happy to be able to treat his younger siblings to some money and candies. They don't talk about their mother and father when he visits.
• It turns out that Malcolm had even more family than he thought, because his half-sister Ella comes to see him. Malcolm is more impressed by her than anyone else he's ever met in his entire life. She's huge, commanding, and impressive. She even reminds Malcolm that he has a family who will take care of him, something that he's forgotten since his mom has been institutionalized.
• When Ella suggests that Malcom come visit her in Boston, he jumps at the chance. Of course, he's just a small-town boy, so when Malcolm lands in Boston he looks just like a country bumpkin.
• He gets his mind blown by Boston. He's never seen so many black people at once in his whole life. And not just black people, but famous black people too. When he goes back to school and has to interact with all of the racist white people in his town, it's obvious that Malcolm isn't going to blindly accept it anymore. Everyone around him asks why he suddenly seems so mad.
• The icing on the cake is Malcolm's meeting with his English teacher. When he says he wants to be a lawyer when he grows up, his English teacher tells him that he should be a carpenter instead since he's black. Malcolm is the only kid in that class who is not told to follow his dreams, and it pisses him off.
• That's when everything changes. Malcolm starts to draw away from white people, and he gets upset when he hears people use the N-word. When everyone notices the change in his attitude, he's sent away from the detention home. Malcolm begs Ella to let him live with her in Boston, and miraculously she does.
• Looking back on it, it seems the move to Boston was one of the most important moves he ever made in his life. If he hadn't moved to Boston, we probably wouldn't know about him. He would've just been Malcolm Little. Not Malcolm X. So he thanks Allah that he moved to Boston.