CHAPTER 1
Malcolm X’s father, Earl Little, Sr., was born in Reynolds, Georgia, on July 29, 1890. A farmerʹs son who was frequently called Early, he had barely three years of formal schooling, although as a teenager he learned carpentry, which provided him with a livelihood. In 1909, he married a local African-American woman, Daisy Mason, and in quick succession had three children: Ella, Mary, and Earl, Jr.
Reynolds, a small town in Georgia’s southwest corner, had a population of only twelve hundred people around 1910, but it was an impressive manufacturing hub with a large cotton milling factory, producing seven to eight thousand bales each year. Like most of the South in the decades after Reconstruction, it was also a dangerous and violent place for African Americans. Between 1882 and 1927, Georgia’s white racists lynched more than five hundred blacks, putting the state second only to Mississippi in lynching deaths. The depression of the 1890s had hit Georgia particularly hard, unleashing a wave of business failures twice the rate of that in the rest of the United States. As jobs grew increasingly scarce, skilled white laborers faced increasing competition from blacks, especially in masonry, carpentry, and the mechanical trades. Earl’s status as a skilled carpenter probably provoked tensions with local whites, and his parents and friends feared for his safety.
Well over six feet tall, muscular and dark skinned, Little frequently got into heated arguments with whites who resented his air of independence. Reynolds and surrounding towns had seen several lynchings and countless acts of violence against blacks. His home life was only slightly less tumultuous: Daisy’s extended family liked neither his brawling nor the way he treated his wife. By 1917, tired both of fighting his in-laws and of white threats of violence, Earl abandoned his young wife and children as part of the great northern migration of Southern blacks that began with World War I. Following the path of the Seaboard Air Line railroad, a common route for blacks headed north from Georgia and the Carolinas, he stopped first in Philadelphia, then New York City, before finally settling in Montreal. He did not bother to get a legal divorce.
It was within Montreal’s small, mostly Caribbean black community that Earl fell in love with a beautiful Grenadian, Louisa Langdon Norton. Born in St. Andrew, Grenada, in 1897, she had been raised by her maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Langdon. Louise, as she was known, had a fair complexion and dark, flowing hair; in everyday encounters she was often mistaken for white. Local blacks gossiped that she was the product of her motherʹs rape by a Scotsman. Unlike Earl, she had received an excellent Anglican elementary-level education, becoming a capable writer as well as fluent in French. Thoughtful and ambitious, she had emigrated to Canada at nineteen, seeking greater opportunities than her small island homeland could provide.
Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites that brought Louise and Earl together—although a more likely explanation is that they shared an interest in social justice, the well-being of their race, and, with it, politics. In 1917, black Montrealers started an informal chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), founded by a charismatic Jamaican activist, Marcus Garvey. Although not officially established as a branch organization until June 1919, the Montreal UNIA exerted tremendous influence on blacks throughout the city. It sponsored educational forums, recreational activities, and social events for blacks, even sending delegations to international conventions. The two militant Garveyites fell in love, and were married in Montreal on May 10, 1919. They decided to dedicate their lives and futures to the building of the Garvey movement in the United States. Garvey was to play a pivotal part in their lives and, a generation later, in that of their son Malcolm.
On the eve of America’s entry into World War I, black American political culture was largely divided into two ideological camps: accommodationists and liberal reformers. Divisions in tactics, theory, and ultimate goals concerning race relations would persist through the century. Led by the conservative educator Booker T. Washington, the accommodationists accepted the reality of Jim Crow segregation and did not openly challenge black disenfranchisement, instead promoting the development of black-owned businesses, technical and agricultural schools, and land ownership. The reformers, chief among them the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and the militant journalist William Monroe Trotter, called for full political and legal rights for black Americans, and ultimately the end of racial segregation itself. Like the nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, they believed in dismantling the barriers separating blacks and whites in society. The establishment of the liberal National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910, led by Du Bois, and the death of Washington in 1915 advanced the national leadership of the reformers over their conservative rivals.
It was at this moment of intense political debates among blacks that the charismatic Marcus Garvey arrived in New York City, on March 24, 1916. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey had been a printer and journalist in the Caribbean, Central America, and England. He had come to the United States at the urging of Booker T. Washington to garner support for a college in Jamaica, a project which came to naught but which launched the flamboyant young man on a different mission, a new and ambitious political and social movement for blacks. Inspired by Washington’s conservative ideas, Garvey did not object to racial segregation laws or separate schools, but astutely he paired these ideas with a fiery polemical attack on white racism and white colonial rule. Unlike the NAACP, which appealed to a rising middle class, Garvey recruited the black poor, the working class, and rural workers. After establishing a small base of supporters in Harlem, he embarked on a yearlong national tour in which he appealed to blacks to see themselves as “a mighty race,” linking their efforts not only with people of African descent from the Caribbean but with Africa itself. In uncompromising language, he preached self-respect, the necessity for blacks to establish their own educational organizations, and the cultivation of the religious and cultural institutions that nurtured black families. In January 1918, the New York UNIA branch was formally established, and later that year Garvey started his own newspaper, Negro World; the following year the UNIA set up its international headquarters in Harlem, naming their building Liberty Hall.
Central to Garvey’s appeal were his enthusiastic embrace of capitalism and his gospel of success; self-mastery, willpower, and hard work would provide the steps to lift black Americans. “Be not deceived,” he told his followers, “wealth is strength, wealth is power, wealth is influence, wealth is justice, is liberty, is real human rights.” The purpose of the African Communities League was to set up, in his words, “commercial houses, distributing houses, and also to engage in business of all kinds, wholesale and retail.” Starting in Harlem, the league opened grocery stores and restaurants, and even financed the purchase of a steam laundry. In 1920, Garvey incorporated the Negro Factories Corporation to supervise the movement’s growing list of businesses. His best-known and most controversial start-up, however, was the Black Star Line, a steamship company backed by tens of thousands of blacks who bought five- and ten-dollar shares. Ironically, all this activity depended on the existence of de facto racial segregation, which limited competition from white businesses, all of which refused to invest in urban ghettos.
Racial separation, Garvey preached, was essential for his people’s progress, not only in the States but worldwide. His program was an informal mélange of ideas extracted from such disparate sources as Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, and Benjamin Franklin, set now in a framework of achievement occupying a separate sphere from whites. Blacks would never respect themselves as a people so long as they were dependent upon others for their employment, business, and financial affairs. Like Booker T. Washington, Garvey sensed that Jim Crow segregation would not disappear quickly. It was logical, therefore, to turn an inescapable evil into a cornerstone of group advancement. Blacks had to reject the divisive distinctions of class, religion, nationality, and ethnicity that had traditionally divided their communities. People of African descent were all part of a transnational “nation,” a global race with a common destiny. The UNIAʹs initial manifesto of 1914 called for people of Negro or African parentage “to establish a Universal confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of race, pride and love . . . [and] to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa.” Later, many middle-class blacks dismissed Garveyism as a hopelessly utopian back-to-Africa movement, which underplayed its radical global vision. What Garvey recognized was that the Old World and the New were inextricably linked: blacks throughout the Caribbean and the United States could never be fully free unless Africa itself was liberated. Pan-Africanism—the belief in Africa’s ultimate political independence, and that of all colonial states in which blacks lived—was the essential goal.
Garvey also recognized that creating a mass movement required a cultural revolution. Generations of blacks had endured slavery, segregation, and colonialism, producing a widespread sense of submission to white authority. Black power depended on activities that could restore both self-respect and a sense of community—essentially the development of a united black culture. For these reasons, “cultural nationalism” occupied a central role in his project. Garveyites sponsored literary events and published the writings of their followers; they organized debates, held concerts, and paraded beneath gaudy banners of black, red, and green. They were encouraged to write nationalist anthems, most popular among these being the “Universal Ethiopian Anthem,” which featured the powerful if ungainly chorus:
Advance, advance to victory,
Let Africa be free;
Advance to meet the foe
With the might
Of the red, the black and the green.
Garvey used pageantry to great effect in building the culture of his movement. Exalted titles and colorful uniforms created a sense of historical import and seriousness, and gave poor African Americans a sense of pride and excitement. At a 1921 Harlem gathering, six thousand Garveyites launched the “inauguration of the Empire of Africa.” Garvey himself was crowned president general of the UNIA and provisional president of Africa, who with one potentate and one supreme deputy potentate constituted the royalty of the empire. Garveyite leaders were bestowed titles as “Knights of the Nile, Knights of the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia and Dukes of Niger and of Uganda.” The fact that Garvey’s movement controlled no territory in colonial Africa or the Caribbean did not matter. Blacks were identifying themselves as a nobility in exile, working toward the day when Europeans would be expelled from the Motherland and they would claim inheritance.
The UNIA assimilated themes from various African-American religious rituals. Although a nominal Catholic, Garvey held that people of African descent had to embrace a black God and a black theology of liberation. This was not an open rejection of Christianity, although he did declare at one rally, “We have been worshipping a false god. . . . We just create a god of our own and give this new religion to the Negroes of the world.” In 1929, Garvey went so far as to say that “the Universal Negro Improvement Association is fundamentally a religious institution.”
Garveyism created a positive social environment for strengthening black households and families that confronted racial prejudice in their everyday lives. As in any all-encompassing social movement, enthusiastic members often find the best companionship within the group. Whatever initially brought Earl Little and Louise Norton together, they shared a commitment to Garvey’s ideals that would sustain them in the future. They made their first home among Philadelphia’s black community, where they would reside for nearly two years. By 1918, Philadelphia had become the hub of extensive UNIA activities, and soon the chapter’s growth exploded; between 1919 and 1920, more than ten thousand people, mostly working class and poor, joined the local organization, putting Philadelphia behind only New York City in total membership. Here, the religious side of Garveyism drove its popularity, thanks largely to the commanding presence of the chapter’s charismatic leader, Reverend James Walker Hood Eason. In 1918, Eason and his spiritual followers had formed the People’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Disillusioned with the lack of militancy within the NAACP, Eason joined forces with Garvey, and his rise was immediate. In 1919, without consulting his congregation, the pastor sold the church building to Garvey’s Black Star Line for twenty-five thousand dollars, and the next year Garvey appointed him “Leader of American Negroes” at UNIAʹs first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. Known as “silver-tongued Eason,” he was selected by the Harlem-based Liberty Party as its presidential candidate in the 1920 elections.
At the party’s convention that year, before a crowd of twenty-one thousand in Madison Square Garden, Eason emphasized the international dimensions of the UNIA’s mission. “We are talking from a world standpoint now,” he proclaimed. “We do not represent the English Negro or the French Negro . . . we represent all Negroes.” By 1920, there were at least a hundred thousand UNIA members worldwide in more than eight hundred branch organizations or chapters. Garveyites enthusiastically told the world their followers numbered in the millions. A more objective assessment would still place the total number of new members in the 1920s and 1930s at one million or more, making it one of the largest mass movements in black history.
The UNIA never acquired a formal affiliation with any religious denomination, but given Earl Little’s lifelong background in the black Baptist Church, religious Garveyism had a special appeal, and no one in the country better personified it than Eason. With Louise at his side, Earl attended many of UNIA’s conferences and lectures in Philadelphia and Harlem, where Eason was frequently the star attraction, and from whom Earl would learn practical lessons in public speaking. As he grew within the movement, so did his family; on February 12, 1920, Louise gave birth to the couple’s first child, Wilfred, but they were not much longer for Philadelphia. The UNIA routinely selected capable young activists as field organizers, and in mid-1921 the Littles agreed to move halfway across the continent to start a fledgling outpost in Omaha, Nebraska.
Their appointment coincided with the explosive rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in America’s heartland. Created in the aftermath of the Civil War, the first Klan had been a white supremacist vigilante organization, employing violence and terror chiefly against newly freed African Americans. The second KKK, prompted by the waves of xenophobia among millions of white Americans following World War I, expanded its targets to include Jews, Catholics, Asians, and non-European “foreigners.” Nebraska’s local branch, called Klavern Number One, was set up in early 1921. Before that year’s end, another twenty-four such groups had been born, initially recording an average of eight hundred new members statewide every week. Their forums were well advertised, and by 1923 membership totaled forty-five thousand. Within the year, Klan demonstrations, parades, and cross-burnings had become common throughout the state. According to Michael W. Schuyler, a leading local historian, the KKK’s 1924 state convention in downtown Lincoln “featured 1,100 Klansmen in white robes. Klan dignitaries rode in open cars; hooded knights marched on foot, frequently carrying American flags; others rode horses.” It was hardly the clandestine group it would be forced to become in later decades.
Omaha’s small black community felt under siege. A few militants had already joined the NAACP, and they used their newspaper, the Monitor, to appeal to sympathetic local whites to join them against the KKK. In September 1921, the Monitor declared that with “the combined efforts of the Jews, the Catholics and the foreign-born, the Klan may expect the battle of its life. If actual bloodshed is desired, then the allies are prepared to do battle. If the war is a social and industrial one, then the allies are ready to meet that kind of warfare. The common enemy will drive the common allies together.” Still, they found it difficult to match their rhetoric with action in the rigged political machinery of middle America. In January 1923, the anti-KKK coalition petitioned Nebraska’s state legislature to outlaw citizens from holding public meetings while “in disguise to conceal their identities” and to require local police to protect individuals accused of crimes while in their custody. The bill easily passed the state house, sixty-five votes to thirty-four, but failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority in the state senate, where Klan supporters ensured its failure.
By 1923, two to three million white Americans—including such rising politicians as Hugo Black of Alabama, and later Robert Byrd of West Virginia—had joined the Klan, and it had become a force in national politics. The secret organization ran its members in both the Democratic and Republican parties, holding the balance of power in many state legislatures and hundreds of city councils. Their significant presence led Garvey to extrapolate that the KKK was both the face and soul of white America. “The Ku Klux Klan is the invisible government of the United States,” he told his followers at Liberty Hall in 1922, and it “represents to a great extent the feelings of every real white American.” Given this, he reasoned, it was only common sense to negotiate with them, and so he did, taking an infamous meeting with Klan leader Edward Young Clarke. From a practical standpoint, the groups shared considerable common ground, with both the KKK and the UNIA opposing interracial marriage and social intercourse between the races. However, many prominent Garveyites directly challenged Garvey’s initiative, or simply broke from the UNIA in disgust. Even more members criticized their organization’s chaotic business practices such as the Black Star Line, condemning the authoritarian way it was run. Many former UNIA members rallied around the leadership of Reverend Eason, who now created his own group, the Universal Negro Alliance, and whose popularity in some quarters exceeded Garvey’s. Loyal Garveyites responded by isolating or, in some cases, eliminating their critics. In late 1922, Eason traveled to New Orleans to mobilize his supporters. After delivering an address at the city’s St. John’s Baptist Church, surrounded by hundreds of admirers, he was attacked by three gun-wielding assailants, shot in the back and through the forehead. He clung to life for several days, finally dying on January 4, 1923. There is no evidence directly linking Garvey to the murder; several key loyalists, including Amy Jacques Garvey, his articulate and ambitious second wife, were far more ruthless than their leader and may have been involved in Eason’s assassination.
Neither dissension within the UNIAʹs national leadership nor their leaderʹs erratic ideological shifts discouraged Louise and Earl. The young couple’s life was hard; they had few resources, and Louise had given birth to two more children—Hilda in 1922 and Philbert in 1923. Earl supplemented the family’s needs by hiring himself out for carpentry work; he shot game fowl with his rifle, and raised rabbits and chickens in their backyard. But his constant agitation on behalf of Garvey’s cause led local blacks to fear KKK reprisals against their community. Earl’s UNIA responsibilities occasionally required him to travel hundreds of miles; during one such trip, in the winter of 1925, hooded Klansmen rode out to the Little home in the middle of the night. Louise, pregnant again, bravely stepped onto her front porch to confront them. They demanded that Earl come out of the house immediately. Louise told them that she was alone with her three small children and that her husband was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. Frustrated in their objective, the Klan vigilantes warned Louise that she and her whole family should leave town, that Earl’s “spreading trouble” within Omaha’s black community would not be tolerated. To underline their message, the vigilantes proceeded to shatter every window. “Then they rode off,” Malcolm wrote, recalling what he had been told about the event, “their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.”
The apex of Klan activity in Nebraska came in the mid-1920s. By then the Klan numbered tens of thousands, drawn from nearly every social class. In 1925, a women’s branch was established, and soon they were singing, listening to lectures by national spokeswomen, and joining their menfolk marching in parades. Thousands of white children were mobilized, boys joining the Junior Klan, girls the Tri-K clubs. Their influence in both Omaha and Nebraska was pervasive, some white churches even acquiescing when the Klan disrupted their services. That same year, 1925, the KKKʹs annual state convention was staged to coincide with the Nebraska State Fair, both held in Lincoln. Crosses were burned while a KKK parade with floats mustered fifteen hundred marchers and a public picnic drew twenty-five thousand followers.
It was during this terrible time that, on May 19, 1925, at Omaha’s University Hospital, Louise gave birth to her fourth child. The boy, Earl’s seventh child, was christened Malcolm.
Despite continuing threats, the Littles struggled to build a UNIA organization. On Sunday, May 8, 1926, the local branch held a meeting that featured “Mr. E. Little” as its principal speaker. In her role as secretary, Louise wrote, “This division is small but much alive to its part in carrying on the great work.” By the fall of 1926, however, they concluded that their community, beleaguered by Klan depredations, could not sustain a militant organization. The UNIA’s troubles nationally compounded their difficulties. The Justice Department had for years aggressively hounded UNIA leaders, and in 1923 Garvey had been convicted of mail fraud in connection with the financial dealings of his Black Star Line and given a five-year sentence. He spent the next two years exhausting his appeals before finally entering federal prison in Atlanta in February 1925. In many urban areas, especially in the Northeast, his imprisonment created major schisms and defections, but across the rural South and in the Midwest thousands continued to join the movement. Loyal Garveyites sent funds and letters of encouragement to local chapters and national offices, and made appeals to reverse Garvey’s conviction.
Louise and Earl and their four children soon moved on to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an urban center with an expanding African-American community. Between 1923 and 1928, industries in the city were hiring hundreds of new workers, and blacks migrated there in droves. In 1923, the black residential population was estimated at five thousand; by the end of the decade, it had grown by 50 percent. Common laborers’ jobs paid up to seven dollars a day, higher than in many other cities. What also attracted the Littles was black Milwaukee’s robust entrepreneurship and racial solidarity. There were a good number of black-owned restaurants, funeral parlors, boardinghouses, and hotels; many proprietors saw their entrepreneurial efforts as realizing “the dream of a black city within the city.”
Though relations between Garvey and the national NAACP leadership were cold, if not frequently antagonistic, on the local level chapters of both groups often found themselves on the same side of issues and were open to collaboration. Despite their differing visions for the future of race relations, both could agree on the immediate need for less racial violence and more black jobs. In 1922, for instance, the local Milwaukee UNIA had drafted a resolution, endorsed by the NAACP, opposing the employment of blacks as strikebreakers on local railroads, aimed at preventing racial strife between striking workers. That year, the UNIA chapter claimed one hundred members; by the early 1930s more than four hundred had joined. This success was due largely to the efforts of a local clergyman, the Reverend Ernest Bland, under whose leadership the local UNIA pursued a strategy to appeal to low-income black workers, holding parades and cultural events and opening its own Liberty Hall. Many Milwaukee UNIA leaders also became Socialist Party activists; unlike at the national level, they frequently participated in civil rights protests and campaigns to elevate African Americans to elective office. Earl Little was involved as an officer in the International Industrial Club, a black working-class organization, and it was in that capacity, rather than as a UNIA leader, that he and two other club officers wrote to President Calvin Coolidge on June 8, 1927, asking for Garvey to be released. The Littles left town shortly after this petition was mailed, their departure delayed only by the birth of yet another son, Reginald. (Shortly after his birth Reginald was diagnosed with hernia problems; poor health would plague him into manhood.)
The family’s next stop was East Chicago, Indiana, but their stay was even briefer, since the state proved to be another KKK hotbed. By 1929, they had moved on again, purchasing a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse on a small three-lot property on the outskirts of Lansing, Michigan. Curiously, it was a neighborhood where few blacks lived. The Littles failed to realize that the deed for the property contained a special provision—a racial exclusion clause that voided the sale to blacks. Within several months, their white neighbors, well aware of such clauses, filed to evict them, and a local judge granted the request. Earl retained the services of a lawyer, who filed an appeal.
Waiting on the due processes of law was not enough for local racists. Early in the morning of November 8, the Littles’ house was shaken by an explosion that Earl would later attribute to several white men, none of whom he recognized, dousing the back of the house in gasoline and setting it afire. Within seconds, flames and thick smoke engulfed the farmhouse. Four-year-old Malcolm and his siblings would relive this event for the rest of their lives. “We heard a big boom,” remembered Wilfred.
When we woke up, fire was everywhere, and everybody was running into the walls and into each other, trying to get away. I could hear my mother yelling, my father yelling—they made sure they got us all rounded up and got us out. The fire was spreadin’ so fast that they couldn’t hardly bring anything else out. My mother began to run back and bring our bedclothing, whatever she could grab, and pulled it to the porch and then out into the yard. She made the mistake of laying my baby sister down on top of some quilts and things that were there and then went back for something else. When she came back, she didn’t see the baby—what had happened, they’d put somethin’ else on top of the baby. And my mother almost lost her mind. I mean they were hanging on to her to keep her from going back into the house. And then finally the baby cried, and they knew where the baby was.
The terrified family huddled together in the cold night air. Enraged, Earl “took a shot at somebody he said was running away from the house,” Wilfred recalled. No fire wagon arrived to rescue them, and their home burned to the ground.
The police assigned Detective George W. Waterman to investigate the Little family’s house-burning case. White residents in the neighborhood told the detective that a local gas station proprietor, Joseph Nicholson, had called the fire department but it had refused to come. Yet almost immediately, rumors circulated in the neighborhood that Earl had started the fire himself, and Waterman decided to pursue this line of inquiry vigorously. His suspicions were reinforced when he learned that Earl held a two-thousand-dollar home policy with the Westchester Fire Insurance Company, as well as a five-hundred-dollar policy on household contents with the Rouse Insurance Company. Waterman and another officer interviewed Nicholson, who claimed that Earl Little gave him a revolver the previous night. Nicholson produced the gun, which had five remaining bullets and one empty cylinder. Meanwhile, newly homeless, the Littles had decamped to Lansing, to stay temporarily with the family of a man named Herb Walker. That same evening, Waterman drove out to the Walkers’ house while Earl was away and interviewed Louise, who explained to him that she had no knowledge of the fire until she was awakened by her husband. The police next interviewed Wilfred, then nine years old. It was dark by the time Earl finally returned to the Walker house, and Waterman and another officer took him outside to their car to interrogate him. Because some of Earl’s responses did not exactly coincide with those of Louise and Wilfred, Waterman reported later, “We decided to lock Mr. Little up for further investigation.” The police were now convinced that Little had set fire to his house to acquire the insurance money. Their problem was that the district attorney concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Earl. Instead, he was charged only with being in possession of an unregistered handgun; he pled not guilty, and bond was set at five hundred dollars. The weak case was repeatedly delayed by the county prosecutor’s office until February 26, 1930, when it was quickly dismissed.
Waterman’s final report did not indicate that the investigation into Earl’s possible arson had been closed. At the time of the fire, moreover, the Littles’ attorney had been appealing their eviction to the Michigan State Supreme Court. Further, Earl had allowed one of the insurance policies on his home to lapse. On the morning after the fire, he visited a local insurance office and made a late payment on his old policy, saying nothing about the blaze that had just destroyed his home. His hasty actions indicate that he probably did not start the fire: had he intended to do so, he would surely have made the late payment first.
The destruction of a black family’s home by racist whites was hardly unique in the Midwest at this time. In 1923, the Michigan State Supreme Court had upheld the legality of racially restrictive provisions in the sale of private homes. Most Michigan whites felt that blacks had no right to purchase homes in predominantly white communities. Four years before the Littles’ fire, in June 1925, a black couple, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife, Gladys, purchased a single-family home in East Detroit, a white neighborhood, escaping Detroit’s largest ghetto, known as the Black Bottom, and were forced to pay $18,500 even though the fair market value of the modest bungalow was under $13,000. On the night the Sweets moved in, despite the presence of a police inspector, hundreds of angry whites surrounded the house and began smashing its windows with rocks and bricks. Several of the Sweets’ friends shot into the mob, killing one man and wounding another. Ossian and Gladys Sweet plus nine others were subsequently charged with murder. The NAACP vigorously took up the case, hiring celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Despite an all-white jury, eight of the eleven accused were acquitted; the jury divided on the remaining three. The judge subsequently declared a mistrial, and ultimately the Sweets were freed.
This latest setback did not destroy Earl Little’s resolve. He was by now an experienced master carpenter, with the skills necessary to construct a new home. In only a few months, on the extreme south side of Lansing, close to the educational campus of what would later become a part of Michigan State University, the Littles found an inexpensive six-acre plot next to sprawling woodlands. Its owner, a white widow, agreed to sell it to them. Only a few months later, however, the Littles learned that a lien on one half of the property had been filed against her for nonpayment of back taxes. Once again frustrated by the law, they had no recourse but to forfeit the disputed land.
Earl’s anger at his continued misfortunes was largely channeled into his work for the UNIA. Meanwhile, Malcolm, by then five years old, was fast becoming his favorite child, and the two would travel together to UNIA gatherings, usually held in a memberʹs home. Such meetings rarely attracted more than two dozen people, but they were filled with energy and enthusiasm fueled by Earl’s leadership. Malcolm remembered this vividly, writing, “The meetings always closed with my father saying several times and the people chanting after him, ‘Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!’”
As he had in Omaha, however, Earl found recruitment in Lansing difficult. Although as early as 1850 several black families had lived in the area, even by 1910 blacks totaled only 354—about 1.1 percent of the town—of whom about one-fifth had migrated from Canada; the majority had been born in the upper South—states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. The migration of millions of African Americans from the Deep South (beginning about 1915) drew a steady stream of poor blacks into Michigan’s state capital, so that by 1930 1,409 lived there. It did not take long for class divisions to emerge. The earliest wave of migrants had possessed relatively high levels of education and vocational training. By the 1890s, the majority owned their own homes and some their own businesses, mostly in racially mixed neighborhoods. A small number were employed as stone and brick masons, teamsters, painters, carpenters, and plasterers. At the turn of the century, only 10 percent of the men had been classified as “unskilled and semiskilled.” By contrast, most of those who arrived after 1915 often had no trade to speak of, and the sense of invasion brought about by their sheer numbers provoked new laws that drew sharper racial divisions. With the emergence of segregation laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, restrictive racial covenants on the mortgages of private houses were widely adopted in many states, including Michigan. Such codes had the effect of forcing a second wave of black emigrants to occupy a poor neighborhood in west central Lansing. Although blacks were allowed to vote, their civil and legal rights were restricted in other ways. With only slight exaggeration, Wilfred Little later described blacks’ lives in Michigan in the 1920s and 1930s as “the same as being in Mississippi. . . . When you went into the courts and when you had to deal with the police, it was the same as being down South.”
When local Negroes resisted racial discrimination, whites would blackball them. Because Earl Little persisted in trying to get blacks to organize themselves, he was considered just such a troublemaker. Yet Earl blamed his difficulties in securing regular employment on Lansing’s black middle class, who looked askance at Garveyites. He frequently gave guest sermons in black churches, the paltry offerings he received meaning financial survival for the family. Yet Malcolm was taught to have little but scorn for the solid citizens who sat listening to his father. Lansing’s black leaders were deluding themselves, he was convinced, about their real place within society. “I don’t know a town with a higher percentage of complacent and misguided so-called ‘middle class’ Negroes—the typical status-symboloriented, integration-seeking type,” than in Lansing. Yet this black bourgeoisie lacked the resources of a true upper class. “The real elite,” Malcolm later wrote in his Autobiography, “‘big shots,’ the ‘voices of the race,’ were the waiters at the Lansing Country Club and the shoeshine boys at the state capitol.” He was not being sarcastic: such men had indeed been his peers.
By the late 1920s, Garvey’s once-massive movement had disintegrated in many of America’s largest cities. In 1927, the UNIAʹs Liberty Hall headquarters in Harlem was sold at auction. That November, President Coolidge commuted Garvey’s prison sentence, with the stipulation that he be deported and permanently barred from reentry. Garvey duly arrived in Jamaica on December 10, where he immediately went to work consolidating the remnants of his organization. The following year, he and Amy Garvey embarked on an international speaking tour, addressing thousands in England, Germany, France, Belgium, and Canada. In Jamaica, Garveyites launched the People’s Political Party and started a daily newspaper, Blackman. Throughout the Caribbean, in Africa, and in rural and isolated black communities and small towns of the United States, Garveyism still flourished.
Perhaps because thousands of poor Southern migrants constituted the majority of Detroit’s black working class, the city continued to be a Mecca for the cause. In 1924, Garveyites estimated membership in the city at seven thousand. Its African-American migrant population was predominantly between the ages of twenty and forty-four, and most were unmarried men, semiskilled or unskilled. Hundreds had found employment in Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant, but others were routinely hired only in dangerous jobs in the foundries. These young migrant workers continued to be a prime constituency for the Garvey movement.
Even well into the early 1930s, Garveyite branches thrived in Michigan’s smaller cities and towns, despite—or perhaps because of—the advent of the Great Depression. Between 1921 and 1933, fifteen UNIA divisions or branch organizations were established there. Earl organized fleets of cars of local Garveyites to travel to UNIA gatherings (usually held in Detroit) and imposed the movement’s principles in his own household. African-American and even Caribbean newspapers were read at home, Wilfred Little recalled, and the children were regularly tutored about “what was going on in the Caribbean area and parts of Africa,” as well as on news of the movement from around the country. From these educational efforts grew the Pan-African perspective that would become so crucial for Malcolm later in life.
The Little children were constantly drilled in the principles of Garveyism, to such an extent that they expressed their black nationalist values at school. For example, on one morning following the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the national anthem at school, Wilfred informed his teacher that blacks also had their own anthem. Instructed to sing it, Wilfred complied: “It began with the words . . . ‘Ethiopia, the land of the free . . ’ That creates some problems,” Wilfred recalled, “because here is this little nigger that feels he is just equal to anybody else, he got his own little national anthem that he sings, and he’s proud of it. . . . It wasn’t the way they wanted things to go.”
As the family continued to grow, Louise did her best to care for them all with a meager income. To learn the Garveyite principles of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, each older child was allotted a personal patch of garden. They continued to raise chickens and rabbits, but the daily pressures of poverty and their reputation as Garveyite oddballs took its toll. Earl was prone to physical violence with his wife and most of his children. Yet Malcolm, who idolized his father, would routinely escape punishment. Somehow the small boy sensed that his light color served as a kind of shield from Earl’s beatings. As an adult, Malcolm recalled the violent incidents, admitting that his parents quarreled frequently; however, nearly all of his whippings as a boy came from his mother.
As the Great Depression deepened, impoverished whites in the Midwest became attracted to a new vigilante formation, the Black Legion. Starting as the Klan Guard in late 1924 or early 1925 in Bellaire, Ohio, the formation employed a blend of anti-black and anti-Catholic rhetoric. Black robes instead of white were used; “burning crosses on midnight hillsides were in; noontime parades down Main Street were out.” The Black Legion successfully attracted many law enforcement personnel and some union members in public transport. By the early 1930s, its members routinely engaged in night riding and policing of town and village morals, with their victims subjected to any number of humiliations, including whippings, being tarred and feathered, or just being run out of town.
Early in the evening of September 8, 1931, shortly after supper, Earl went into his bedroom to clean up before setting off for Lansing’s north side to collect “chicken money” from families that had purchased his poultry. Louise had a bad feeling about the trip and implored him not to go. Earl dismissed her fears and left. A few hours later, Louise and the children went to bed. Late in the night, she was awakened by a loud knock on the front door and sprang from her bed in terror. When she cautiously opened the door, she found a young Michigan state police officer, Lawrence G. Baril, who brought dreadful and long-feared news: her husband had been critically injured in an accident and was in the local hospital.
Several hours earlier Baril had been summoned to the scene of a streetcar accident. This was the first serious accident that the young officer had investigated; his vivid impression, his widow, Florentina, later recalled, was that “the man had been cut in two . . . the accident was quite violent.” Police had immediately hypothesized that Earl had somehow slipped and fallen while boarding a moving streetcar at night. Perhaps he’d lost his footing and was pulled under the streetcarʹs rear wheels, they speculated. The possibility that Earl could have been the victim of racist violence was never considered.
Earl suffered terrible pain for several hours after being taken to hospital. His left arm had been crushed, his left leg nearly severed from his torso. By the time Louise reached him, he was dead. The Lansing coroner ruled Earl’s death accidental, and the Lansing newspaper account presented the story that way as well. Yet the memories of Lansing blacks as set down in oral histories tell a different story, one that suggested foul play and the involvement of the Black Legion.
Wilfred recalled attending the funeral and viewing his fatherʹs corpse. “While my mother was talking, I slipped into the back where they had the body on the table,” he remembered. “The streetcar had cut him just below the torso and it had cut his left leg completely off and had crushed the right leg, because the streetcar. . . had just run right over him. He ended up bleeding to death.” Malcolm’s most vivid memory of his fatherʹs funeral was his motherʹs hysteria, and later her difficulty in coping with what had happened. He believed that he and his siblings “adjusted” to the challenging reality of Early Little’s death better than Louise did. Nevertheless, the children were deeply disturbed by swirling rumors about their father’s violent death. Philbert, then eight years old, was told that “somebody had hit my father from behind with a car and knocked him under the streetcar. Then I learned later that somebody had shoved him under that car.”
A forensic reconstruction of Earl Little’s death suggests that the story Philbert had heard may have been true. Before leaving home on the night of his death, Earl had told his wife that he was traveling to North Lansing. However, according to a local newspaper, his body was discovered at the intersection of Detroit Street and East Michigan Avenue, one block east of the town’s boundary line. Few blacks lived in the area. The odd location of the body suggests the possibility that Earl was struck by a car or perhaps bludgeoned in one location, and then moved under a streetcar at another site, making it appear to have been a terrible accident. Earl Little’s possible murder may have served the same purpose that lynchings did in the South—to terrorize local blacks and to suppress their acts of resistance.
Louise harbored no doubts that her husband had been murdered, possibly by the Black Legion. Although she identified Earl’s body, she does not appear to have challenged the police report or otherwise tried to search out the truth. Malcolm remained throughout his life both haunted by his fatherʹs tragic end and ambivalent about how it occurred. In 1963, while visiting Michigan State University, he described Earl’s death as accidental, yet the following year cast his father as a martyr for black liberation.
With their patriarch’s sudden death, the Little family was plunged into an abyss of poverty. Earl held a one-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, which was now paid to Louise, but she was not allowed to keep the money for long. The news of her husband’s death brought a host of irate petitioners to the probate court, demanding payment for past services. Local physician U. S. Bagley, for one, came asking for ninety-nine dollars, claiming he had assisted at the births of Louise and Earl’s youngest children, Yvonne and Wesley, in addition to his household visits to treat Philbert for pneumonia. Dentist bills, rental fees, roof repairs—all of these added up; even the funeral company was still owed close to four hundred dollars, including burial expenses in Georgia. Almost none of the petitioners received anything, because the estate was worth only a thousand dollars—the equivalent of about $15,000 in 2010. Louise had petitioned the court for a “widow’s allowance,” requesting eighteen dollars per month “for the maintenance of myself and the family.” Nearly $750 from the insurance payment went to cover the widow’s allowance. After paying the court fees and the probate administrator, the policy payout was almost exhausted.
At first, Louise fought desperately to maintain stability. “My mother had a lot of pride,” Yvonne Little Woodward, Malcolm’s younger sister, would recall. “She crocheted gloves for people. . . . She rented out garden space, she sharecropped with the man that would come and rent garden space. We had a dump behind our house—she rented that out.” Hilda, almost ten years old, became the surrogate mother, taking care of her younger siblings while finding occasional employment as a babysitter. Wilfred used his fatherʹs rifle to hunt game for the family’s suppers. The only children who apparently failed to rally were Philbert and Malcolm, who took no part in the household obligations. After school, at Lansing’s Pleasant Grove Elementary, the two boys would hang out with local whites “to create mischief,” as Philbert later admitted. On one such occasion, they deliberately moved the outhouse of a neighbor who routinely “used to give them a bad time,” one of Malcolm’s childhood friends, Cyril McGuine, recalled. “When he came out to chase them, all of a sudden he just dropped out of sight with a scream and fell into the hole that they had prepared.”
Even at seven, Malcolm had a knack for avoiding hard work. Yvonne recalled her mother sending a group of the children out to work in the garden. Almost immediately, “Malcolm would start talking, and we would start working. . . . I can remember Malcolm lying under a tree with a straw in his mouth. [He] was telling these stories, but we were so happy to be around him that we worked.” Wilfred noticed that his younger brother already possessed an unusual self-confidence. “When a group [of children] would start playing, [Malcolm] would end up being the one that was leading.” When the local white children played in the woods behind the Littles’ property, “Malcolm would say, ‘Let’s go play Robin Hood.’ Well, we’d go back there, and Robin Hood was Malcolm. And these white kids would go along with it—a Black Robin Hood!”
Already difficult, things grew more frustrating when Louise was forced to contend with Michigan’s bedeviling welfare bureaucracy. The state had passed its first comprehensive pension law in 1913, providing financial support for poor children whose mothers were judged suitable guardians. This established a statewide standard of three dollars per week per child, but in reality—the result of a 1931 state law that separated “poor relief” from the administration of “mothers’ pensions”—the average weekly payment was no more than $1.75. In some cases, women who headed households with six or more children received payments covering only three. Recipients had few rights. Unlike those on poor relief, who were required to live in a particular county for a full year before they could become eligible, mothers could move throughout the state without surrendering benefits. However, because the pensions were administered by counties, local administrators and probate judges exercised considerable discretion. Although state law required equal access for African-American mothers, discrimination based on marital status, race, and other factors was widespread. Louise’s pension payments never covered even basic needs. “The checks helped,” Malcolm admitted, “but they weren’t enough, as many as there were.”
The year 1934 was especially trying. Michigan’s welfare department was constantly investigating the Little household, and Louise just as constantly faced down its officers, protesting at the “meddling in our lives.” Hunger was the family’s constant companion, and occasionally Malcolm and his siblings became dizzy from malnourishment. By the fall, a subtle psychological shift had taken place; the Garveyite sense of pride and self-sufficiency began to fade. The Littles started to see themselves as victims of the state’s bureaucracy.
Louise desperately continued to seek ways to keep her family afloat. She was careful to maintain a household routine that would nurture order and a sense of family. At the end of the day, they “would all gather around the stove,” said Wilfred, “and my mother would tell us stories. Or we would sing our alphabets, or we would sing our math, and then she taught us French. . . . And then she would tell us stories about our ancestry.” For Louise, the family increasingly became her only enduring source of support. The small network of Garveyites with whom she and her husband had worked had unraveled during the Great Depression. She solicited help from members of a nearby Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but their assistance came with the price of assimilation. With Wilfred, she read through the Adventists’ many pamphlets, modifying the family’s food intake to conform to what the church taught. This included a ban on pork and rabbit, two staples of their diet.
At school, Malcolm’s stigmatization as a child on relief affected him deeply; Michigan’s schools were integrated, and it was difficult enough to be black, much less black and on welfare. Before long he began stealing food from local stores, both as a way of acting out and to satisfy his hunger. It was still far from enough. For days at a time, when the Littles had no food, Malcolm started showing up around suppertime at the home of their neighbors Thornton and Mabel Gohanna. The Gohannas “were nice, older people, and great churchgoers. I had watched them lead the jumping and shouting when my father preached,” Malcolm recalled. Their household always included a number of interesting drifters and the indigent who needed care. The Gohannas were soon lavishing attention on the growing boy. After Malcolm had been caught stealing several times, his petty thievery became a contentious issue for county welfare workers, who approached the Gohanna family to see if they were willing to take him in as a foster child. The Gohannas consented. “My mother threw a fit, though,” Malcolm related.
The fabric of life seemed to be worn increasingly threadbare by daily events, large and small. Yvonne recalled an incident when her mother had managed to scrape enough together to buy some new bedroom furniture. One day soon afterward, a truck pulled up in front of her home, and the driver explained that he had been ordered to return the purchases to the store. “My mother kept saying, ‘I have paid this. I have the receipt,’” but the driver refused to listen. The next day, Louise went downtown to rectify the problem, and the furniture was returned to her. Still, the incident rattled her, as it compounded the stress of poverty by challenging her efforts to keep up appearances in front of her white neighbors. “How many of them saw [the furniture] come back?” Yvonne questioned. “They didn’t know that [it] was paid for. The store apologized, but look what they put my mother through.” In another incident, someone killed the family’s dog. Wilfred explained, “They shot [it] just for the purpose of seeing to it that you don’t have a dog. I guess, just to give you a hard time.” Local whites, with few exceptions, treated Louise and her children with contempt. “When they would come to the house,” Wilfred recalled, “they would speak to my mother in a way where they were trying to get her to kneel . . . because she was independent.”
Louise was not yet forty and, despite these hardships, remained an extremely attractive woman. Sometime in 1935 or 1936, she began dating a local African American. Malcolm described the man’s physical appearance as similar to his fatherʹs, noting that Louise would brighten whenever her suitor came by. The man—never identified in Malcolm’s account—was selfemployed and possessed modest resources. His presence in their lives offered a glimpse of promise: only the security of marriage could guarantee that welfare officers would keep out of the Little family’s lives. For a time a proposal seemed likely; then, in late 1937, Louise became pregnant with the man’s child. Once he discovered she was pregnant, Malcolm recalled, he “jilted my mother suddenly.”
It was either just before or during the pregnancy, when Malcolm was eleven or twelve, that welfare workers placed him in the Gohannas’ home. He resisted the move, but Louise could no longer look after the whole household. “We children,” Malcolm reflected, “watched our anchor giving way.” He was unhappy at first, but put on a good face when his transfer to his foster neighbors was made official: the new arrangement eased the financial burden on his mother, and he was close enough to visit frequently. The Gohanna family, out of its religious convictions, was also known for welcoming ex-convicts into their home. Perhaps it was here that the genesis of Malcolm’s later strategy of “fishing” for religious converts among the homeless and former prisoners was born.
As the winter of 1938 turned into spring, the Littles’ slender hopes disintegrated. Physically and psychologically, Louise grew weaker. That summer, she gave birth to her eighth child, Robert. Several weeks later, in the fall, Malcolm was enrolled in West Grove Junior High School in Lansing. By all indications, he performed well academically and easily established friendships with other children, black and white. At home, though, the new baby had pushed Louise beyond her breaking point. Days before Christmas, police officers found her trudging barefoot along a snow-covered road, her new child clutched to her chest. She appeared traumatized and did not know who or where she was. In early January 1939, a physician certified that she was “an insane person and her condition is such as to require care and treatment in an institution.” On January 31, 1939, Louise was received at Kalamazoo State Hospital, accompanied by Sheriff Frank Clone, Deputy Sheriff Ray Pinchet, and Wilfred Little. She would be confined to the state hospital’s grounds for the next twenty-four years.
Michigan’s mental health facilities were primitive by the era’s standards, in some cases no better than old-fashioned asylums where the mentally ill were warehoused. Their wards were frequently overcrowded, and recovery rates remained low. Kalamazoo State Hospital had been established in 1859 as the Michigan Asylum for the Insane, and by the time Louise arrived, it wore its age plainly; throughout the 1930s, its administrators complained of chronic understaffing, which contributed to neglect and improper diagnoses. A 1903 Michigan law on insanity had mandated that asylums “use every proper means to furnish employment to such patients as may be benefited by regular labor suited to their capacity and strength.” Beginning in the 1920s, female patients were routinely assigned to weave rugs and construct mattresses in the asylum’s industrial building. Elsewhere, women patients cooked, ironed and mended clothing, and kept house. Louise was expected to carry out such tasks. Given her diagnosis of severe depression, her treatment at the time seems likely to have included electroconvulsive therapy. Whatever the treatment, it offered her little relief, and she drifted in and out of a dazed state for years.
Malcolm would rarely visit his mother, and seldom spoke of her: he was deeply ashamed of her illness. The experience etched into him the conviction that all women were, by nature, weak and unreliable. He may also have believed that his motherʹs love affair and subsequent out-of-wedlock pregnancy were, in some way, a betrayal of his father.
Welfare officials determined that Wilfred, twenty, and Hilda, eighteen, were old enough to be responsible for the household. That summer, however, a state worker decided that the Gohannas could no longer provide for the now fourteen-year-old Malcolm and recommended that he be reassigned to the Ingham County Juvenile Home in Mason, ten miles south of Lansing. The town was virtually all white, as was the school to which Malcolm would be forced to transfer. During his time with the Gohannas, Malcolm had often spent weekends at home with his family, but the reassignment severely limited such access.
At first, he adjusted easily to Mason’s junior high school—he was elected class president during his second semester, and finished academically near the top of his class. The handsome black boy began to develop crushes on several white female classmates. Tall and painfully thin, he was noticeably unathletic; his two attempts at boxing were comic disasters, and he was a poor performer in basketball. Yet his charm and verbal and intellectual skills won him admirers. He was a natural leader, and others enjoyed being around him. White teens nicknamed him “Harpy,” because he kept “harping” on pet themes or talking loudly and rapidly over others. Within Lansing’s black community, however, he received a different nickname—“Red,” due to the color of his hair.
With Malcolm separated from the family, and Wilfred and Hilda struggling to support the rest of their siblings after their motherʹs institutionalization, help arrived from Boston in late 1939 or early 1940 in the form of Ella Little, their oldest half sister. One of Earl’s children from his first marriage, Ella had moved north from Georgia with other family members in the 1930s. Though she had never met—or at least had never been much involved with—Earl’s second family, when news reached her of their troubles in Lansing, she set out to take an active role in the children’s supervision. To the fifteen-year-old Malcolm, she was an assertive, no-nonsense woman. During Ella’s visit, the Little children accompanied her to Kalamazoo to call on their mother. Malcolm was particularly affected by the physical differences between the two women; Ella’s jet-black skin and robust physique provided a striking contrast to Louise’s much lighter complexion. Several days later, just prior to her return home, Ella urged Malcolm to write to her regularly. Perhaps, she ventured, he might even spend part of the summer with her in Boston. “I jumped at the chance,” Malcolm recalled.
When Malcolm made the trip in the summer of 1940, he was overwhelmed by the city’s sights. Ella was only twenty-six, but seemed worldly and independent. She lived with her second husband in a comfortable single-family home on Waumbeck Street in the racially mixed Hill district of Boston. Her younger brother, Earl, Jr., and her shy younger sister, Mary, resided there as well. On the weekends, thousands of blacks congregated in Boston’s busy streets—shopping, going to restaurants or movies. For the first time in his life, Malcolm saw black-white couples walking together easily, without obvious fear. He was fascinated by the sounds and rhythms of jazz, which poured forth from clubs like Wally’s Paradise and the Savoy Café, along Massachusetts Avenue between Columbus and Huntington avenues. It was a thrilling world, a lively, urban environment, and its magic took hold of his imagination in a lasting way.
When he returned home that fall, he made some efforts to readjust to small-town life. Despite his physical awkwardness, he tried out for, and made, Mason’s football team. Over two decades later a local newspaper published a photograph of Mason’s 1940 squad, which included Malcolm; the paper claimed that he “showed a preference for tackling ball-carriers . . . instead of tackling the white race as he is doing today.” “When Malcolm went to Mason, you could see a change in him,” Wilfred recalled. “Some for the better, some for the worse. . . . He would complain about some of the things the teachers would try to do—they would try to discourage him from taking courses that black people weren’t supposed to take; in other words, keep him in his place.” It hadn’t bothered him particularly during the previous year when white students who had befriended him continued to call him nigger. But now Malcolm was keenly aware of the social distance between himself and others. An English teacher, Richard Kaminska, sharply discouraged him from becoming a lawyer. “You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger,” Kaminska advised him. “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. . . . Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” Malcolm’s grades plummeted and his truculence increased. Within several months, he found himself expelled.
Already burdened by the demands of a large family, Wilfred and Hilda soon found they could not handle their wayward younger brother. Once again, Ella felt compelled to intervene. Several months earlier, in a letter to Malcolm, she had written:
We miss you so much. Don’t swell up and bust but honest everything seems dead here. Lots of boys called for you. . . . I would like for you to come back but under one condition. Your mind is made up. If I would send your fare could you pay all your bills? Let me know real soon.
Ella believed that Malcolm would be better off under her care, and his older siblings agreed. In early February 1941, three months shy of sixteen, nearly six feet tall and still growing, Malcolm boarded the Greyhound bus at Lansing’s depot. He took pains to wear his best suit, a dark green; the sleeves stopped some way short of his wrists. He wore a narrow-collared light green topcoat. Twenty hours later, his first major reinvention would begin.