“Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade,” Malcolm X said in his landmark 1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “This impression,” he said, “is due entirely to my prison studies.”

Malcolm Little dropped out of high school in the Boston area at age fifteen before completing ninth grade. Known on the streets as “Detroit Red,” he pursued sundry hustles. In late 1946, he was caught for a string of home burglaries in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and received an eight-to-ten-year prison sentence. When he was released on parole in 1952, he was Malcolm X.

If the storyline seems familiar, that is because it has been well told, first by Malcolm (with Alex Haley), later by filmmaker Spike Lee, and more recently by the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographers Manning Marable and Les and Tamara Payne.