Malcolm X and Superman

In both articles, the authors start out with little or no literacy and basically end up teaching themselves to be literate.  The two authors had some very different angles though.  Their approaches were definitely influenced by their socioeconomic statuses.  Malcolm wanted to learn to be literate so he could speak as powerful as he could on the streets with a pen and paper in letters while Sherman was raised in a house full of his fathers books wanted to learn literacy to be like his father.  A "smart indian" was a dangerous person though according to Sherman.  Indians were supposed to fail in school, but Sherman didn't want that so he taught himself to read and understand paragraphs.  Malcolm on the other hand started learning in a jail cell by copying pages of a dictionary, so he did not have much material to work with, but motivation to be literate and the amazing feeling of accomplishment kept him going and copying more and more pages until he could eventually read for himself.