CHAPTER 2
Even before the bus carrying Malcolm Little pulled into Boston’s main bus terminal, Ella had decided that her half brother would no longer make his own decisions about school. Without checking with him, she enrolled him in a private all-boys’ academy in downtown Boston. Malcolm made at least a halfhearted effort. He arrived at the school the first morning, learned that there were no girls there, and promptly walked out, never to return to a classroom.
It was the first test of wills between the two siblings. As headstrong as her young charge, Ella did not normally allow herself to be overruled. Born on December 13, 1913, in Georgia, she had moved north as a teenager at the beginning of the Great Depression. For a short time she lived in New York City, employed as a floorwalker at a major department store. Standing five feet nine and at 145 pounds, with jet-black skin, Ella cut an imposing figure; store executives “decided she looked evil enough to possibly frighten off potential shoplifters.” After about six months, suspecting her job was going nowhere, she quit. Relocating to Everett, a suburb of Boston, she met and married Lloyd Oxley, a physician at Boston City Hospital. Oxley, a Jamaican, was a strong supporter of Garvey, which she found admirable, but tensions over money, and Ella’s refusal to be dominated, led to divorce in 1934.
Sometime after her marriage ended, Ella began seeing a married man named Johnson, but her money troubles continued. According to her son, Rodnell P. Collins, Ella had used her time catching shoplifters to learn their tricks, and soon she had joined their ranks. Boosting clothing and food items became almost routine as Ella scrambled to assist her relatives. Her transgressions quickly escalated to more serious crimes, and in August 1936 she was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and “lewd and lascivious cohabitation.” She was given a year’s probation on the latter charge, while she pled guilty and received additional probation on the assault and battery. Over the next three years Ella was arrested on three separate occasions, including another charge of assault and battery in 1939. By the time Malcolm moved to Boston, Ella was already planning to end her second marriage, and on July 31, 1941, filed a suit charging “cruel and abusive treatment.”
It probably did not take Malcolm long, once he reached Boston that February of 1941, to realize that his half sisterʹs idyllic middle-class existence hid an erratic lifestyle supported by petty crime. In temperament, Ella turned out to be neither a stable parental figure nor a particularly pleasant housemate. Her repeated run-ins with the law testify to her belligerent and paranoid behavior, a recklessness that only worsened through the years. Two decades after these events, she was admitted to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, after charges of being armed with a dangerous weapon. There, she was interviewed by the centerʹs director of psychiatry, Dr. Elvin Semrad. Even though he reported that she had been “a model patient, entirely reasonable, showing wit, intelligence, and charm,” he was far from won over. Ella was also “a paranoid character,” he observed, who “because of the militant nature of her character . . . could be considered a dangerous individual.”
During Ella’s trip to Lansing to check in on her siblings, she had met Kenneth Collins, a twenty-four-year-old blessed with good looks and a suave dancing style, and the two became involved. Early in 1941, Collins had moved to Boston, whereupon he almost immediately enraged Ella by hanging out with her brother, Earl, Jr., at dance halls and nightclubs. Still, on June 20, 1942, she married him anyway.
In the 1940s, Ella Collins and her family lived among a growing cluster of black homeowners and renters in the Waumbeck and Humboldt Avenue section of Boston, known colloquially as the Hill. This neighborhood was one of several distinctly different black communities that developed in the city during the first half of the twentieth century. The most important, and largest, was Boston’s South End, home to working-class and low-income blacks, with its heart located along Columbus and Massachusetts avenues. Another was the Intown section, located in Lower Roxbury and the blocks just beyond the South End. Yet these inner-city areas had not become all-black ghettos—yet. Thousands of white ethnic immigrants—Lithuanians, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and others—who had arrived earlier in the century, still lived together in close proximity with their new black neighbors. Like other cities in the Northeast at that time, Boston was multiethnic and expanding.
The Hill was a neighborhood in transition. A pleasant community of middle- and working-class families, largely single-family houses, and smaller apartment buildings, it had been predominantly Jewish at the turn of the century, but saw its racial composition change with the rising fortunes of blacks in the years leading up to World War II. Even before Pearl Harbor, Boston’s employment began picking up. Local industries and companies that had previously hired few or no blacks began lifting the color bar, including the Navy Yard, the Quincy Shipyard, and passenger railroad companies. Plus a new era of black migration had opened. In the years just before and during World War II, nearly two million Southern blacks relocated to other sections of the United States, with extended families first sending one or two of their members to a city to find work and locate housing before the rest followed. Relatives on Ella’s motherʹs side of her family, the Masons, moved in large numbers to Boston. Rodnell Collins estimated that by the mid-1940s Ella had as many as fifty members of her extended family living in greater Boston.
The population influx, combined with new opportunities and income for African Americans, created a major shift in the demographics of Boston neighborhoods. By the late 1930s hundreds of Boston blacks had risen to become police officers, clerical workers, schoolteachers, and white-collar professionals, and their success led them to seek out better housing in places like the Hill. It was this kind of life, a good bourgeois middle-class life, to which Ella aspired. But to scale the class hierarchy of black Boston, Ella needed money, and crime was, unfortunately, the only way she saw to get it. At the same time, she was still her Garveyite fatherʹs daughter. She was sympathetic especially to Garvey’s notions of black enterprise and upward mobility, and a strong proponent of both capitalism and a kind of proto–black nationalism. She was no integrationist, passionately opposed to interracial dating and marriage.
Malcolm must have pondered what his parents would have thought about his new neighborhood. He would later recall that initially he believed Ella’s neighbors were high class and educated, and echoing his father’s distaste for the black bourgeoisie, would observe that “what I was really seeing was only a big-city version of those ‘successful’ Negro bootblacks and janitors back in Lansing.” Looking back, he said he could quickly see the chasms of nationality, ethnicity, and class that subdivided black Bostonians. The older black bourgeois families, whose kinfolk extended back multiple generations in New England, perceived themselves as socially superior to immigrants from the South and the Caribbean; but the newcomers embraced an aggressive entrepreneurial spirit. Malcolm observed with approval that it was the Southerners and the West Indians, more frequently than blacks from the North, who appeared to open up businesses and restaurants. Malcolm was also acutely aware that he was something of a country bumpkin who knew little about the big city: “I had never tasted a sip of liquor, never even smoked a cigarette, and here I saw little black children, ten and twelve years old, shooting craps, playing cards.”
At fifteen, Malcolm was entering an early adulthood with little sense of how to carry himself in the world. He continued to feel connected to the memory of his father, and remembered the evenings they had spent together for Garvey’s great cause, but unlike Earl he had not been given a trade and seemed to lack the constitution for hard work. Living with Ella may have reinforced the importance of politics and racial identity, prized by his parents, but her example also gave him a different set of ideas on how to get on in the world. Over a twenty-year period, Ella was arrested an astonishing twenty-one times, and yet convicted only once. Her criminal behavior and knack for evading responsibility presented him with a vivid message. Unchecked by any moral counterforce, he was set on an unsteady path that would define the next phase of his youth. Years later he would describe this time as a “destructive detour” in an otherwise purpose-driven life.
Without a guide or mentor, Malcolm fashioned his own version of adult behavior whole cloth, learning to present himself as being older, more sober, and more worldly than he really was. He studied carefully the different types of adult males he met. His eye was drawn first to his half brother, Earl Little, Jr. Dark skinned, handsome, and flashy (like his comrade-in-arms, Kenneth Collins), Earl at that time was trying to break into show business, performing as a singer in dance halls and nightclubs under the stage name Jimmy Carlton. Within months of his nephew’s move to the city, however, he contracted tuberculosis and before yearʹs end was dead. Around this time a much longer-lasting male influence also came into Malcolm’s life. One night at a local Boston pool hall, as he remembered it, a “dark, stubby conkedheaded fellow” approached him and introduced himself as “Shorty.” The two teenagers were pleased to discover that they were both from Lansing, and Shorty immediately dubbed his new friend “Homeboy.”
This was Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis, who would soon become, as Rodnell Collins described it, “Malcolm’s guide and companion in the Boston street life and nightclub scene.” Two years older than his redheaded friend (though Malcolm would put it at ten in the Autobiography), Shorty was already a minor figure in Boston’s black nightlife. An accomplished trumpet player despite his youth, he regularly sat in at one-nighters for big bands, including Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s. At home in the flashy world of bars and clubs, Shorty took great pleasure in sexual adventures, and gave his young friend a tour of the city’s nightlife, equally well informed whether pointing out gamblers or pimps.
Malcolm proved a quick study. He soon learned all about smoking “reefer”—marijuana cigarettes—hustling, petty thievery, and seducing fast women. Soon he had even mastered the economic fundamentals of the numbers racket. Every day, thousands of habitual bettors would place wagers on numbers, usually between 001 and 999. Numbers “runners,” in turn, would collect “policies”—bets on slips of paper—and take them to a central collection “bank.” The racketeers who ran the scam generally took at least 40 percent of the gross revenue, redistributing the remainder as daily winnings.
Malcolm’s obvious attraction to the ghetto’s underworld caused tensions back at his new home, and partially to placate Ella he found part-time employment as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom. It was at the Roseland that he began to develop his lifelong fascination with black celebrities—men and women of talent and ability who had overcome the barrier of race to achieve public recognition. As at its more famous counterpart, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, at the Roseland black and white mingled, danced, and drank, showing the teenager that there was also a celebratory side to success. At the humble shoeshine stand, he solicited praise and tips from African Americans playing gigs at the ballroom. Decades later he recalled the jazz legends whose shoes he had once proudly buffed: “Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Jimmie Lunceford were just a few.” To make a favorable impression, the spunky teenager soon learned to make “my shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers.” During his breaks, he would gawk, openmouthed, listen to the rocking rhythms of the music, and, most especially, admire the brilliance and athleticism of the ballroom dancers doing the Lindy Hop, the standard dance performed to syncopated big band jazz. Occasionally Malcolm would sneak away from his job just to watch the dancers go through their paces.
An impressionable young black man in search of roles and images in the movies and media, however, would have found a sorry set of models. In the forties, the dominant representation of the African American was the comic minstrel, typified by the national radio show Amos ’n’ Andy. (Ironically, of course, the original actors in the series were white, mimicking black dialect.) In films, blacks were generally presented as clowns or mental incompetents. Gone With the Wind, Hollywood’s 1939 extravaganza celebrating the prewar slave South, offered up the servant Mammy, docile yet loyal, obese and hardworking. One of the few Hollywood movies of the period that departed slightly from crude stereotypes was Warner Brothers’ Bullets or Ballots, featuring black actress Louise Beavers as the notorious Nellie LaFleur, the numbers queen. It is likely that Malcolm saw this film as well as dozens of others that addressed racial themes; decades later he would recall Hollywood’s distortions of black people as part of his general indictment of white racism. Even the title of the Warner Brothers’ film may have been recycled in Malcolm’s 1964 address “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
Off-screen, however, there were ample models of militancy and resistance. Some of the figures who would lead the postwar civil rights movement were rising to prominence by focusing on the war and the opportunities and obstacles it presented to African Americans. One of Garvey’s former critics on the socialist left, labor union leader A. Philip Randolph, was pushing the Roosevelt administration to adopt reforms that would increase black employment and undermine Jim Crow segregation. Randolph boldly urged thousands of blacks to launch a civil disobedience campaign in what was called the Negro March on Washington Movement. One of his demands included the desegregation of the U.S. military. To stop the march, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941; his directive outlawed racially discriminatory hiring policies in defense industries and also created the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Three decades later, Order 8802 would become the legal foundation for equal opportunity and affirmative action laws, but both Randolph’s campaigning and Roosevelt’s response would have profound consequences even for the life of young Malcolm Little.
Though he posed to the outside world as an urban sophisticate, the anxious teen mailed a constant stream of letters to his family, as well as occasional ones to school friends. A lively correspondence continued throughout 1941 and early 1942. One old classmate brought Malcolm up to speed on the latest gossip at Mason High School. Another sketched in Mason’s basketball season, and some former sweethearts also kept in touch. For his part, he had dutifully written home within days of arriving in Boston, but his sloppy handwriting provoked Philbert to urge him to write more clearly in the future. Reginald, the brother to whom he was closest, asked whether he had yet enrolled at a high school—and also detailed his budding relationships with several Lansing girls. Malcolm kept quiet about his decision to give up his formal education.
He was determined to transform his outward appearance to fit into his cool new world. Although not naturally athletic, he patiently learned to dance by watching others at neighborhood house parties and then trying out his techniques on the Roseland’s fabled dance floor. At Shorty’s insistence, he purchased his first colorful “zoot suit” on credit. Shorty administered a cultural rite of passage by “conking” his hair, using a “jellylike, starchy-looking glop” produced from lye, several potatoes, and two eggs. The mixture burned intensely, but the final product, viewed from a mirror, more than satisfied. “I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head,” Malcolm wrote, “the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering.”
Hair styles in the African-American community then, as now, carried a certain weight or meaning, and whether or not to straighten one’s hair—conking it with various chemicals—was a contentious issue. Until he went to prison five years later, Malcolm would continue to conk his hair, though he eventually came to disdain the practice. As an NOI leader, he would routinely recite this episode from his early life as the ultimate act of selfdebasement. Yet the 1940s aesthetic of the conk was far more complicated than the mature Malcolm could admit. Most middle-class black males, as well as many popular jazz artists, rarely tortured their hair in this way, preferring a short, natural style. The conk was the emblem of the hippest, street-savvy black, the choice of hustlers, pimps, professional gamblers, and criminals. It was directly influenced by wavy-haired Latinos, whom blacks sought to emulate.
Similarly, the zoot suit uniform was an act of defiance against white standards of behavior. In the wave of national patriotism following Pearl Harbor and the United States’ going to war, zoot-suiters were widely identified with draft-dodging. For this reason, in 1942 the War Production Board banned their production and sale. In 1943, hundreds of Mexican Americans and blacks wearing the suits were beaten up by uniformed sailors in Los Angeles’s streets, prompting the city council to declare the wearing of a zoot suit a misdemeanor. Similar smaller riots took place in Baltimore, Detroit, San Diego, and New York City. Malcolm’s obsession with jazz, Lindy Hopping, zoot suits, and illegal hustling encompassed the various symbols of the cultural war waged between oppressed urban black youth and the black bourgeoisie.
By the fall of 1941 Malcolm, who was now generally known as “Red,” had gained confidence and skill as a dancer. He had also begun romancing a black Roxbury girl, Gloria Strother. Since she was from a middle-class family, the aspiring Ella approved of the relationship, perhaps hoping it might curb her charge’s fascination with the underworld. But he had many other girls on his mind, and despite beseeching letters from a more than willing Gloria, refused to commit himself. The girl’s grandmother and guardian soon grew frustrated enough to write him, inquiring about his intentions, but to no avail. Gloria, too, continued writing, even after Malcolm had moved to Harlem in early 1942, but he does not appear to have responded.
Of the many women who diverted Malcolm’s attention from Gloria, none enchanted him quite so much as a blonde Armenian named Bea Caragulian. Surprisingly little is known about this ethnic white woman who, with the exception of Betty Shabazz, maintained the longest intimate relationship with Malcolm. Several years his senior, Bea had been a professional dancer at small-time clubs. She was pleasant looking, but not stunning. It is difficult to know her motives for having an open sexual relationship with a black teenager, and Malcolm himself did little to illuminate them; in his Autobiography , he devoted far more attention to the plight of Gloria than to any discussion of Bea, who is referred to as “Sophia.” He placed their initial meeting at the Roseland, culminating in sex mere hours later, but this story, like Bea’s pseudonym, was a fabrication—the two actually met at the far less glamorous Tick Tock Club. Within several weeks, Bea was showering Malcolm with gifts and small amounts of money, while he proudly paraded his blonde conquest at nightclubs throughout black Boston, to the envy of his friends. Their sexual relationship was yet another violated taboo in a society still defined by race and class, but Bea’s obvious desire created, for Malcolm, a sense of masculine authority and power. To the world of hustlers, he had arrived as a serious player.
The liaison infuriated Ella, who was incensed at the thought of her brother dating a white woman. According to Rodnell Collins, she saw Bea as “a thrill[-seeker] for whom young black men like Malcolm are just another wild adventure.” Late one night, Malcolm attempted to sneak Bea up into his second-floor bedroom. Ella heard the couple and, in comic-opera style, pushed a bookcase down the stairs right on top of them. Malcolm was not yet legally an adult, however, and lacked the resources to maintain his own living quarters elsewhere. For the time being he had to stay put.
He next found work as a soda fountain clerk at Roxbury’s Townsend Drugstore, but with the new job came fresh frustrations. Forced to serve his middle-class betters, he was yet again irritated by “those penny-ante squares who came in there putting on their millionaires’ airs, the young ones and the old ones both.” He did not last long; with his ghetto persona enhanced by his very public liaison with Caragulian, the job of lowly soda clerk quickly lost its appeal. With Bea’s financial help, he finally left Ella’s home for Shorty’s apartment. Over four months he drifted through a series of menial jobs: at a South Boston wallpaper company warehouse; washing dishes at a restaurant; then briefly in Boston’s elite hotel, the Parker House, working in the dining room as a waiter.
Although Bea was now his regular girlfriend, Malcolm continued to see other women. In late 1941 through mid-1942, he maintained a lively correspondence with several who lived in either Boston or Michigan, and nurtured intimate relationships with a number of them. In a November 1941 letter to Zolma Holman of Jackson, Michigan, for instance, Malcolm bragged that he had already traveled through twenty-three different states. Apparently writing from a train, he noted that he was heading toward Florida, and that he hoped to travel to California soon. Then there were Roberta Jo of Kalamazoo, Edyth Robertson of Boston, a Charlotte from Jackson, and Catherine Haines, dashing off a one-page letter from her summer resort at Martha’s Vineyard, describing her boredom. These diverse contacts may have reinforced Malcolm’s growing belief that most women were dishonest and could not be trusted. He later bluntly warned: “Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell you a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.”
The formal entry of the United States into World War II on December 9, 1941, prompted several million American boys and men to volunteer for service. Harlem had a long history of sending its sons to war. The Harlem Hellfighters, the all-black 369th U.S. Infantry, had fought with distinction alongside the French army during World War I. In June 1945, the 369th fought again at Okinawa, and by the end of hostilities about sixty thousand blacks from New York City had served their country.
The immediate impact of the war mobilization was that almost overnight hundreds of thousands of white men’s jobs became vacant. Many employers were forced to hire blacks and women. In critical industries such as the railroads—in the 1940s, the principal means of national transportation—the demand for workers became acute. It wasn’t difficult for sixteen-year-old Malcolm, despite his abysmal employment record, to secure a job on a railroad line as a fourth-class cook.
His first assignment was on the Colonial, which ran from Boston to Washington, D.C., and provided him with the chance to visit big cities he had longed to see for years. During the Colonial’s routine layover in Washington, Malcolm, dressed in a zoot suit, would tour the city’s sprawling black neighborhoods. He was not impressed. “I was astounded to find in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I’d ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury.” One source of the terrible poverty, he suspected, was the backwardness of the city’s Negro middle class, which he felt possessed the intelligence and education to have reached a better station in life than what it had settled for. Malcolm later claimed that veteran black employees on the Colonial talked disparagingly about Washington’s “‘middle-class’ Negroes with Howard University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, guards, taxi-drivers and the like.”
For the first time in his young life, Malcolm made an effort to retain a job beyond a few months. He loved traveling, and railroad work made this possible and affordable, though it often meant playing demeaning service roles. Reassigned to the Yankee Clipper, the train traveling the New York- Boston route, he was expected to lug a box of sandwiches, candy, and ice cream along with a heavy, five-gallon aluminum coffeepot up and down the aisles of the train, soliciting sales. As they had done when he was a shoeshine boy, customers frequently gave larger tips to workers who displayed enthusiasm and a happy face, and Malcolm was soon mimicking the jovial dining car waiters to obtain tips. He became so proficient that his coworkers began to call him “Sandwich Red.”
His frequent stops in New York meant that he could finally visit that fabled black Mecca, Harlem. Louise and Earl had regaled their children with stories about the shining city’s legendary institutions, its broad boulevards, its vibrant political and cultural life. Yet nothing, not even Boston’s glamour and excitement, prepared the teenager for his first encounter with the neighborhood with which he would one day become identified. “New York was heaven to me,” he remembered. “And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!”
Like a frantic tourist on a tight schedule, he rushed from site to celebrated site. His first stop was the popular bar and nightclub Small’s Paradise. Opened in October 1925 at the height of Prohibition, Small’s was racially integrated from the outset. With seating accommodations for up to fifteen hundred, it quickly became a hot spot for the jazz era’s greatest entertainers, one of Harlem’s “big three” venues along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. “No Negro place of business had ever impressed me so much,” Malcolm recalled of his first time there. “Around the big, luxuriouslooking, circular bar were thirty or forty Negroes, mostly men, drinking and talking.”
Next on his itinerary was the grand Apollo Theater on West 125th Street. Built some thirty years before as a whites-only burlesque house, it had become nationally known as an entertainment center featuring black performers. A few blocks east was the celebrated Hotel Theresa. Designed in a neo-Renaissance style, the hotel first opened in 1913. Until the late 1930s it had accepted only white guests, but with new management African Americans began staying there. A host of black celebrities, including Duke Ellington, Sugar Ray Robinson, Josephine Baker, and Lena Horne, made the Hotel Theresa their headquarters in the city. Since New York’s major hotels in midtown refused Negro guests throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s, the Theresa became the center for all black elites—in entertainment, business, civic associations, and politics. When Malcolm first saw the hotel in early 1942, it may have already been known to him for hosting boxer Joe Louis’s celebration with thousands of Negroes after he won the heavyweight championship. By that evening, Malcolm made what would be a fateful decision: “I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.”
In most respects, he had already left. Most nights he spent in transit, either working or sleeping on the train, and when he was in New York he sometimes stayed at the Harlem YMCA on West 135th Street. He took to visiting Small’s on a regular basis, as he did the nearby bar at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th Street, a hangout for the Apollo’s entertainers. Before long, he was living a double life. At work, on the Yankee Clipper, he excelled as Sandwich Red, entertaining white patrons with his harmless clowning. In Harlem, he was simply “Red,” a wild, cocky kid, learning the language of the streets. He began supplementing his income by peddling marijuana, casually at first, then more aggressively. Bea frequently came down from Boston to visit, and Malcolm showed her off at his favorite nightspots. For a boy who on May 19, 1942, had reached only his seventeenth birthday, barely more than a year after settling in the Northeast, his reinvention was remarkable.
For an irresponsible, headstrong young man, trying to compartmentalize these two wildly different personas would prove impossible. Malcolm’s behavior on the Yankee Clipper soon grew erratic and confrontational, aggravated all the more by his frequent pot smoking. He provoked arguments with customers, and especially with servicemen. In October 1942, he was fired, but the shortage of experienced workers on the railroads was so severe that he was hired again on two further occasions, and he used these shortterm jobs to transport and sell marijuana across the country. Malcolm would return from long hauls “with two of the biggest suitcases you ever saw, full of that stuff . . . marijuana pressed into bricks, you know . . . but they would pay him a thousand dollars a trip,” his brother Wilfred claimed. It is highly unlikely that the trafficking was that substantial or lucrative, but the barrier between legal and illegal activity no longer mattered, and Malcolm was more than willing to jeopardize his job to profit from an illegal hustle. His career in drugs was relatively penny ante—literally selling reefers stuffed in his socks or shirt—but it still took him over a line.
Life on the railroads influenced Malcolm in other ways. The sounds of the trains have been woven into the fabric of jazz, blues, and even rhythm and blues. As the writer Albert Murray has observed, railroads have long been a central metaphor in African-American folklore because of the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ Underground Railroad that spirited thousands of enslaved blacks to freedom. Malcolm’s Harlem style helped him meet and learn from the jazz musicians who were his marijuana customers. More important, the experiences on the railroad began Malcolm’s love affair with travel itself, the excitement and adventure of encountering new cities and different people. These trips provided an essential education about the physical vastness and tremendous diversity of the country; they also provided lessons in the conditions in which blacks lived and worked. He saw some cut off from any hope, and others squandering their privileges, opportunities, and gifts. As he looked around Washington, Boston, and New York, the seeds of his later antibourgeois attitudes were sown.
His siblings continued writing to him, but his replies became sporadic. Reginald and Hilda both sent letters asking for money, although they knew that Malcolm was hardly making enough money to support himself. Bea’s occasional gifts of cash augmented his meager wages, but went only so far. Several tailoring establishments sent him bills for clothing he had obtained on credit, but he had no intention of paying. One or more creditors turned over their claims to the Boyle Brothers collection agency, which threatened legal action. Before he was fired, Malcolm was even behind in his dues to the Dining Car Employees Union.
In late 1942, he returned to Lansing to show off his new appearance, and had the satisfactory effect of shocking his family. “My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars,” he recalled. Attending a neighborhood hop at Lincoln High School, he showed off his dance steps before admiring crowds, a true celebrity. Without a hint of embarrassment, he even signed autographs for admiring teenagers with the bold signature “Harlem Red.”
Malcolm’s autobiography implies that his trip home was brief—Harlem, after all, had become the center of his new life—but he actually stayed in Lansing for at least two months. His evenings were spent pursuing a number of different women. During the day he was scrambling to find money—for himself and his family, which had continued to struggle financially in his absence. For a few weeks he worked at Shaw’s jewelry store, then at nearby Flint’s A/C spark plug company. But his return home was also about receiving family validation and support. Still a teenager, Malcolm depended on the love of his siblings. He didn’t expect them to understand Harlem’s jazz culture or his zoot suit costumes, but he needed them to recognize that he had become successful. He finally returned to Harlem in late February 1943. Once again he was hired by the New Haven Railroad, only to be fired seventeen days later for insubordination.
Malcolm wrote in his autobiography that he’d stopped seriously looking for work after 1942 and had instead devoted himself to increasingly violent crime. He dated his employment at Small’s Paradise from sometime in mid-1942, just after he had turned seventeen, till early 1943. Yet either his memory was faulty or he was at work on his legend, because he was still in Lansing at that time. His job at Small’s actually began in late March 1943 and was terminated less than two months later, when he asked an undercover military detective posing as a Small’s patron “if he wanted a woman”—prompting arrest for solicitation, and another firing.
From 1942 to 1944, he worked sporadically at a much less glamorous site, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a late-night Harlem hot spot for black artists and entertainers. Even washing dishes, he was in esteemed company: Charlie Parker had done the same in the thirties when Art Tatum held court at the piano. Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s close friend at that time, recalled that Malcolm was “flunking for Jimmy . . . doing anything, like washing dishes, mopping floors, or whatever . . . because he could eat, and Jimmy had a place upstairs, over the place where he could sleep.” One of his fellow employees was a black dishwasher, John Elroy Sanford, who had aspirations to be a professional comedian. Both Malcolm and Sanford had red hair, and to distinguish the two Sanford was called “Chicago Red,” referring to his original hometown. Since no one had even heard of Lansing, Malcolm was eager to be known as “Detroit Red.” Years later, Sanford would become famous as the comedian Redd Foxx.
The Detroit Red of the Autobiography is a young black man almost completely uninterested in, even alienated from, politics. Yet the childhood lessons of black pride and self-sufficiency had not been entirely abandoned. Malcolm spoke frequently about black nationalist ideas at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. “He would talk often,” Atkins explained, “about how his father used to get brutalized and beat up on the corner selling Marcus Garvey’s paper, and he would talk a lot about Garvey’s concepts in terms of how they could benefit us as a people.”
During his time in Harlem, Malcolm was not directly involved in activities that could be described as political—rent strikes, picketing stores that refused to hire Negroes, registering black voters, and so forth. Yet to his credit, even at this stage in his life he was an extraordinary observer of people. In his description of one of his early forays into Harlem, he mentions the presence of communist organizers: “Negro and white canvassers sidled up alongside you, talking fast as they tried to get you to buy a copy of the Daily Worker: ‘This paperʹs trying to keep your rent controlled. . . . Make that greedy landlord kill them rats in your apartment. . . . Who do you think fought the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?’” Longtime Harlem residents had schooled Detroit Red about the neighborhood’s racial demography, an urban transformation that he later characterized as the “immigrant musical chairs game.” His own telling of that shift captured both the directness and the broad strokes of his style. New York’s earliest black neighborhoods, he explained, had been confined in lower Manhattan. “Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews fled from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran . . . until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today—virtually all black.”
Malcolm’s impressions about the origins and evolution of black Harlem were only partially accurate. He correctly noted blacks’ northward movement within the island of Manhattan, but missed the larger forces that prompted it. At the heart of every community are its social institutions; black Harlem was formed largely from the migration of venerable black churches and organizations from lower Manhattan to above 110th Street. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1809 and a central institution for the African-American middle class, left Manhattan’s Tenderloin district on West 34th Street and constructed a beautiful new church—in early Gothic style—on West 134th Street in 1909. Abyssinian Baptist Church, also founded in the early nineteenth century, moved to West 138th Street in 1923, where it became for several decades the largest Protestant congregation in America. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church had existed for a century prior to its relocation to 60 West 132nd Street. Many of these churches made large profits when they sold their downtown locations, and the relative cheapness of land in Harlem allowed them to buy up not only sites for new churches but also large blocks of real estate that were then rented out to Negroes who followed them north.
Public and privately owned apartment complexes also were centers of social interaction and cultural activity in the neighborhood. One prime example was the Dunbar Apartments, built in 1926-27 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Opened in 1928 and located between Seventh and Eighth avenues at West 149th and 150th streets, the Dunbar Apartments were designed as the first housing cooperative for blacks. The residences claimed many famous tenants, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, and W. E. B. and Nina Du Bois. Harlem’s famous YMCA, a center for public lectures and cultural events, was located on West 135th Street and opened in 1933. These and hundreds of other institutions were part of the cultural bedrock of black Harlem.
Equally important to Harlem was the racial transformation of New York City. In 1910, only 91,700 blacks lived in metropolitan New York; 60,500 African Americans resided in Manhattan, of whom only 14,300 had been born in New York State. The great majority of blacks had been Southern born. With the onset in 1915 of the Great Migration from the rural South, hundreds of thousands of blacks began to make their way to Gotham. The city’s total black population steadily increased: 152,500 in 1920; 327,700 in 1930. The Census Bureau estimated that 54,724 black New Yorkers in 1930 were foreign born. Much of this increase was confined to the Harlem ghetto. In 1910, Harlem’s total population regardless of race was 49,600. In 1920, Harlem’s population was 73,000, of which about two-thirds were black. By the 1920s, Harlem became the urban capital of the black diaspora, a lively center for the extraordinary flowering of literature, plays, dance, and the arts, a period that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem’s music, jazz, traversed the Atlantic, found a loving home in Paris, and became a global expression for youth culture.
Malcolm could not have lived in Harlem during World War II without being deeply affected by its turbulent history and cultural activities. By any standard, it had by 1940 become the cosmopolitan center for black political activity, not only in America but worldwide. Roughly one-quarter of its black population consisted of Caribbean immigrants, nearly all of whom had established political associations, parties, and clubs of all kinds. One of the most influential West Indian politicians, Hulan Jack, originally from St. Lucia, had been elected to represent the neighborhood in the New York State Assembly in 1940. Harlem was also the national center of black labor activism, headed by A. Philip Randolph, who began his legendary career as a public orator even before Garvey’s arrival in the United States. Thousands of Harlem residents were active members and supporters of the Communist Party; figures like Claudia Jones and Benjamin Davis, Jr., were widely respected and popular leaders.
Despite the demise of the Garvey movement, Harlem’s militancy had grown more intense, chiefly through the Depression-era 1930s and largely in response to social inequalities the black community was no longer willing to tolerate. For example, black workers in public laundries routinely earned three dollars per week less than whites performing identical work. Employment discrimination was rampant. One 1920-28 survey of 258 Harlem businesses employing more than 2,000 workers found that only 163 employees were black, and all held low-wage jobs. As the depression deepened, joblessness soared. Black youth unemployment for the period was estimated at well above 50 percent. In 1935, the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), which had determined that the cost of living for a New York City household at “maintenance level” was $1,375 annually, estimated the average black family’s income at $1,025.
The economic pressure exerted by these conditions found a release as black citizens began to organize in protest. In 1931, the Harlem Housewives League initiated a campaign at local chain stores, insisting that they employ African Americans. Many former Garveyites joined the movement, urging blacks to support a “buy black” effort. In 1932, the Harlem Labor Union was created, which picketed white-owned stores that refused to hire blacks. A year later, the newly formed Citizens’ League for Fair Play, a popular coalition including women’s groups and religious and fraternal organizations, demanded greater black employment in business. In March 1935, such protests sparked a riot along 125th Street, involving several thousand people. Dozens of white-owned stores were looted; fifty-seven civilians and seven police officers were injured, and seventy-five people, mostly African Americans, were arrested on charges ranging from inciting to riot and malicious mischief to felonious assault and burglary. The NYPD’s brutal treatment of the rioters was subsequently documented by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem. Its report found that police had made “derogatory and threatening remarks”; one officer shot and killed a young black man, without warning, while another “called to arrest an unarmed drunk, hit the drunk so hard that he died.”
The commission’s report included recommendations for improving conditions, and the liberal LaGuardia administration sought to defuse the escalating racial tension by implementing many of them. From 1936 to 1941, the mayor’s administration backed the construction of two new schools, the Harlem River Houses public housing complex, and the Women’s Pavilion at Harlem Hospital. But LaGuardia’s concessions did little to alter the widespread residential segregation, poverty, and discontent among Harlem’s working class. When in 1938 the Supreme Court declared that public picketing of private business establishments over “racially based complaints” was constitutional, a new round of protests ensued. A “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” coalition quickly won major concessions; within several years about one-third of all clerks and white-collar employees in Harlem were African Americans. In parallel efforts, blacks won concessions to work as telephone repairmen and operators, to drive buses for the Fifth Avenue and New York Omnibus companies, and to hold white-collar positions at Consolidated Edison.
Through these struggles Harlem established a dynamic model of social reform and urban protest that would be repeated across America. Mass agitation, mostly by grassroots associations, culminated in a series of well-publicized demonstrations, followed by urban insurrection. A liberal government, supported by white and black elites, subsequently granted major concessions in the form of hospitals, public housing, and expanded opportunities in both the public and private sectors. This in turn spawned new African-American victories within electoral politics, the courts, and government. These key tactics, which would become the protest strategy during the civil rights movement, were developed in Harlem a generation before.
The primary political beneficiary of these struggles and reforms was the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a man who would later become Malcolm’s ally and occasional rival. Born in 1908, he was the handsome son of the powerful pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. The junior Powell followed his father into the ministry, but his interests were not chiefly spiritual. In 1931, he led a protest at New York City’s Board of Estimate that successfully halted the exclusion of five African-American physicians from Harlem Hospital. Seven years later, he helped launch the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which used pickets and nonviolent protests to secure jobs. Succeeding his father as Abyssinian’s pastor in 1937, Powell possessed a strong religious constituency as well as a growing army of political supporters. Ideologically and politically, he was a pragmatic liberal, at the national level endorsing Roosevelt’s New Deal, while in Harlem working with the Communist Party and supporting LaGuardia’s reelection campaign in 1941. That same year, Powell started the People’s Committee, a Harlem-based organization of eighteen hundred campaign workers and eight offices dedicated to electing him to the city council. Powell’s challengers on his left and right, American Labor Party candidate Dr. Max Yergan and Republican candidate Channing Tobias, pulled out of the contest in his favor. LaGuardia endorsed him, and the two liberals campaigned together—and both won.
On the city council, Powell consistently fought for Harlem’s interests. When Yergan, a history instructor at the nearly all-white City College located in West Harlem, was not reappointed, Powell introduced a resolution that outlawed racial discrimination in academic appointments. In May 1942, his organization sponsored a mass rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom to protest against the NYPDʹs beating and killing of a black man, Wallace Armstrong. The next year, when the LaGuardia administration granted the navy permission to establish training facilities for the racially segregated Women’s Reserve (WAVES) at Manhattan’s Hunter College and Walton High School, Powell denounced the action.
Powell’s bold position was embraced by civil rights organizations, black labor, and the Communist Party. His fierce opposition to Jim Crow, moreover, was in harmony with the black press’s “Double V” campaign of 1942–43, which called for victory over fascism abroad and racial discrimination at home. In response to blacks’ modest gains in employment, thousands of white workers participated in “hate strikes” during the war years, demanding exclusion of Negroes, especially in skilled positions. In July 1943, for example, white racists briefly paralyzed part of Baltimore’s Bethlehem Shipyards. In August the following year, white streetcar drivers in Philadelphia, outraged at the assignment of eight black motormen, staged a six-day strike. In response, Roosevelt dispatched five thousand troops and issued an executive order placing the streetcar company under army control.
None of the meaning of these events was lost upon African Americans, many of whom began to question their support for America’s war effort. Years later, James Baldwin recalled, “The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. . . . A certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.” Although the vast majority of blacks still supported the war, a militant minority of young African-American males refused to register for the draft; others sought to disqualify themselves due to health reasons or other disabilities.
After a relatively calm period in black-white relations—or perhaps better put, one with a less aggressive push by blacks for equality—a new era was opening, characterized by black resistance and militancy. The Negro March on Washington and the civil rights rallies and demonstrations led by Powell in Harlem provoked fear and reaction among whites. Government authorities tried to derail the burgeoning movement by restricting the freedoms or activities of African Americans and to impose Jim Crow even in cities and states without legal racial segregation laws. Some targets were auspiciously outside politics—most notably, in Harlem, the world famous Savoy Ballroom.
Since its grand opening in 1926, the Savoy, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets, had quickly become the most significant cultural institution of Harlem. The great ballroom contained two large bandstands, richly carpeted lounges, and mirrored walls. During its heyday, about seven hundred thousand customers visited each year. Frequent white patrons included Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, Lana Turner, and even the rising Republican star Thomas E. Dewey. In a period when downtown hotels and dance halls still remained racially segregated, the Savoy was the center for interracial dancing and entertainment.
On April 22, 1943, the Savoy was padlocked by the NYPD, on the grounds that servicemen had been solicited by prostitutes there. New York City’s Bureau of Social Hygiene cited evidence that, over a nine-month period, 164 individuals had “met the source of their [venereal] disease at the Savoy Ballroom.” These alleged cases all came from armed services or coast guard personnel. Bureau officials offered absolutely no explanation as to how they had determined that the servicemen contracted diseases specifically from Savoy hookers. The appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold the police action, with Mayor LaGuardia declaring that he was powerless to stop the ballroom from being closed down.
The Savoy remained closed throughout the summer of 1943. On October 15, the police announced that the establishment’s license had been renewed, and a “grand reopening” took place the following week. For Malcolm, the whole episode was clear evidence of the limitations of white liberalism’s racial tolerance: “City Hall kept the Savoy closed for a long time. It was just another one of the ‘liberal North’ actions that didn’t help Harlem to love the white man any.”
Meanwhile, plans were afoot downtown for a major urban development project that was designed to exclude black New Yorkers entirely. Only weeks after the Savoy’s closing, the LaGuardia administration made public its agreement with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to construct Stuyvesant Town, a semipublic housing complex located on the east side of Manhattan by Gramercy. Metropolitan Life had received generous tax exemptions, eminent domain authority, and control of tenant selection. When the company admitted that it would bar black tenants, blacks and many white liberals were outraged. Powell accused LaGuardia of once again capitulating to racism. His newspaper boldly editorialized, “Hitler won a victory in New York City.” At one rally attracting twenty thousand protesters, Powell demanded LaGuardia be impeached. Not until 1944 did LaGuardia broker a compromise. Stuyvesant Town was constructed under the original terms; however, the mayor signed Local Law No. 20, barring all racial discrimination in tenant selection in future housing projects constructed under the city’s authority.
In Detroit, the hub for Malcolm’s family, escalating racial tensions erupted in a massive riot on June 20, 1943. In only its first six hours, the toll from Detroit’s unrest was thirty-four deaths, seven hundred injured, and two million dollars worth of property damage. Five thousand federal troops had been sent in to patrol the streets; military vehicles were assigned to escort trolley cars and buses. New York City’s authorities should have recognized that the conditions for a similar insurrection were ripe in Harlem. The neighborhood’s turn duly came on August 1, when a policeman shot a black serviceman in uniform. Within minutes, rioting erupted; white-owned businesses were attacked throughout the neighborhood—along 125th Street and on Harlem’s major north-south boulevards, Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues, north from Central Park up to 145th Street. Before midnight, 1,450 stores had been vandalized, 6 people killed, 189 injured, and more than 600 blacks arrested. Significantly, unlike the 1935 riot, eyewitness accounts described the rioters as both middle class and low income. Even one police report recognized that: “Those actually committing malicious acts of violence were irresponsible, ignorant individuals. [But] the probability is that many decent citizens were in various groups, who in the most instances are intelligent and law abiding, and while not actually taking part in the physical disturbances, aided and abetted indirectly.”
The afternoon of the riot, Malcolm was walking south on St. Nicholas Avenue when he encountered blacks running uptown “loaded down with armfuls of stuff.” Along West 125th Street, he discovered, “Negroes were smashing store windows, and taking everything they could grab and carry—furniture, food, jewelry, clothes, whisky.” Within an hour, the NYPD had dispatched what appeared to be “every New York City cop” into Harlem. Malcolm went on to describe the semicomic scene of NAACP leader Walter White accompanying Mayor LaGuardia, driving along 125th Street in a bright red fire car appealing to blacks to “please go home and stay inside.”
The real world finally intruded into Malcolm’s life in the spring of 1943: he was called up for duty in the U.S. Army.
While the majority of African Americans had patriotically pledged their services since the first days of war, there had always been a vocal minority who saw little reason to enter a segregated service to fight in a white man’s war. By 1943–44, dissent among blacks within the armed forces had escalated. Hundreds of black soldiers were simply going AWOL. When the military induction notice addressed to Malcolm arrived at Ella’s house in Boston, she informed the authorities that her half brother no longer resided there. Malcolm did eventually receive the notice, deciding that he would avoid service by any means necessary.
In his autobiography, he recalled with approval Shorty Jarvis’s attitude: “Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.” Malcolm may have heard about the well-publicized case of Winfred W. Lynn, an African American who had refused to be inducted because he opposed racially segregated military units. Lynn had lost the case, but his protest provoked widespread sympathy.
Writing about the day of his scheduled induction at Local Draft Board #59 on June 1, 1943, Malcolm recalled, “I costumed like an actor . . . I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk.” He addressed one white soldier, sitting at the receptionist desk, as “Crazy-o.” Eventually pulled from the induction line, the zoot-suited hustler was interrogated by a military psychiatrist to determine his fitness to serve. Malcolm rambled incessantly before whispering in the psychiatrist’s ear, “I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!” The medic, stunned, uttered, “That will be all,” later marking him as 4-F, unfit for duty. “A 4-F card came to me in the mail,” Malcolm concluded triumphantly, “and I never heard from the Army anymore.”
A subsequent FBI report released in January 1955 gave the official version of Malcolm’s rejection: “The subject was found mentally disqualified for military service for the following reasons: psychopathic personality inadequate, sexual perversion, psychiatric rejection.”
Harlem’s racial grievances—employment discrimination, widespread lack of jobs, the closing of the Savoy, the Stuyvesant Town agreement, and the August 1943 race riot—color all of Malcolm’s actions concerning his military induction. He was pushed in new directions largely by external events. Malcolm’s zoot-suited performance at the induction center was a different version of his Sandwich Red routine on the railroad. Both were examples of buffoonery, designed to achieve, respectively, financial reward and a permanent deferment from military service; both directly repudiated the forward, militant, and assertive model of his father. Though he had objected in principle to going to war, his choice of method for avoiding service was pointedly the opposite of actually embodying that principle.
Malcolm had learned well how to play the role of the clown or buffoon, but this pose was beginning to come up against his slowly forming new political attitude. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s leadership during these years had deeply impressed him, reminding him of the more positive heritage of active engagement once practiced by his parents. What made Earl Little and Powell different from Detroit Red, or other tricksters, was their sense of responsibility to others within their community, and to African Americans generally. The trickster or hustler “getting over” was the ultimate opportunist who would use others to achieve his own ends. Malcolm would soon have to choose which model of black masculinity he would claim.
The Autobiography’s narrative suggests that, in 1944–45, Malcolm had ceased seeking legitimate work and had graduated from small-time street hustling into burglary, armed robbery, and prostitution, in order to pay for what was becoming a regular drug habit. The narrative’s key character during this destructive phase is appropriately called “Sammy the Pimp,” later identified as Sammy McKnight. As Malcolm would have it, over a six-to-eightmonth period he pulled a series of robberies and burglaries outside New York City. During one heist, the robbery encountered “some bad luck. A bullet grazed Sammy. We just barely escaped.” Malcolm subsequently described his involvement in the numbers racket: “My job now was to ride a bus across the George Washington Bridge where a fellow was waiting for me to hand him a bag of betting slips. We never spoke. . . . You didn’t ask questions in the rackets.” He also claimed to work as a “steerer” in Times Square, making connections with potential johns and placing them with white and Negro prostitutes working out of Harlem apartments. Through these criminal activities, Detroit Red was witnessing what he viewed as the filth and hypocrisy of the white man.
Without question, some elements of Detroit Red’s gangster tale are accurate. But if by 1944 Malcolm had graduated from marijuana to cocaine, as seems possible, he probably was in no condition to engineer a series of wellexecuted burglaries without at some point being discovered. An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little years later failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.
Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s friend, asserted, “He was never no big-time racketeer or thug.” A more realistic appraisal of his criminal activity speculates that Malcolm and Sammy may have occasionally burglarized “Harlem’s popular nightspots, such as LaFamille,“ and subsequently “divide[d] the spoils.” Crimes of this nature, during the racially segregated 1940s, were frequently not taken seriously by the nearly all-white NYPD, and Malcolm’s possible burglaries could well have escaped police attention. But the politics of race that underscore the entire Autobiography’s narrative are careful to place the most nihilistic, destructive aspects of Malcolm’s criminal history well outside Harlem. Perhaps this explains Malcolm’s description of his string of successful burglaries in 1944 as taking place in New York City’s nearly all-white suburbs. His role as a steerer for prostitutes also usually occurred in Times Square, not on 125th Street.
What seems plain is that between 1944 and 1946 Malcolm Little was struggling to survive. His sporadic work at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack had dried up, leaving him to find other ways to scrape by. Reginald Little, who had visited his brother on several occasions in 1942–43, had left the merchant marine and by that time settled in Harlem, where Malcolm set him up in a “legal” con operation. “For a small fee, Reginald obtained a ʹregular city peddlerʹs license,’” Malcolm wrote. “Then I took him to a manufacturers’ outlet where we bought a supply of cheap imperfect ‘seconds’—shirts, underwear, cheap rings, watches, all kinds of quick-sale items.” Reginald then sold this merchandise, giving buyers the impression that the goods had been stolen. If approached by the police, Reginald could simply produce his peddlerʹs license and sales receipts from the purchase of the goods. This gambit was a classic grifterʹs short-con, manipulating the expectations of the victim to profit from a perfectly legitimate transaction. Malcolm’s efforts to shield his younger brother from serious criminality revealed the continued responsibility he felt toward his siblings. But it also suggests that he was never himself a hardened criminal.
As the war continued to drag on overseas, it had a powerful if unanticipated impact upon black culture in cities back home—and particularly in music. Big band jazz and swing music’s enormous popularity among white middle-class Americans during the war years had brought it from the margins of entertainment to wide prominence in mainstream popular culture. Around 1943, however, there was a precipitous drop in popularity for swing bands and their showmanship. It was a consequence of both practical concerns and aesthetic ones. Many big bands lost their best musicians to the armed forces. Gasoline was rationed, making it difficult for thirty-piece orchestras to travel. Then, in 1942, the Musicians Union initiated a strike because its members did not receive royalty payments when their records were played on the radio. In solidarity, union members boycotted record production until September 1943, and the lack of new big band singles sapped the genre’s popularity. But the production strike gave artists the space for experimentation and innovation. It was the younger black musicians, the hepcats, who broke most sharply from swing, developing a black-oriented sound at the margins of musical taste and commercialism.
A new sound developed in dark Manhattan, in smoky late-night sessions. Musicians no longer attempted to present themselves as entertainers. They limited the time of songs by stripping down the melodic form, emphasizing improvisation as well as complex chord changes and complicated beats. When this music, which came to be called bebop, was reproduced on records after the strike, the sound seemed bizarre, almost alien to some jazz enthusiasts. But the new movement’s key artists, such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, were constructing an experimental form in a radically different environment from the Depression-era thirties that had fostered swing. Bebop reflected the anger of the zoot-suiters and the enterprise of black artists who opposed mainstream white culture. These musicians sought to create a protest sound that could not be so easily exploited and commodified.
Many who favored the radical new jazz coming from Harlem nightclubs described the 1943 insurrection as another “zoot suit riot.” The term had become a common metaphor for black activities that seemed subversive to white order. One zoot-suiter who had taken part in the Harlem riot linked black resistance to the U.S. war effort with urban unrest: “I’m not a spy or a saboteur, but I don’t like goin’ over there fightin’ for the white man—so be it.” Even African-American social psychologist Kenneth Clarke characterized the new militancy he had observed in Harlem as “the Zoot Effect.” As the critic Frank Kofsky observed of the bebop movement, “Jazz inevitably functioned not solely as music, but also as a vehicle for the expression of outraged protest.”
Malcolm was thoroughly immersed in this world, and well aware of the new sound and its implications—the frisson of outsiders shaking up mainstream culture. Like the zoot-suiters, beboppers implicitly rejected assimilation into standards established by whites and were contemptuous of the police and the power of the U.S. government over black people’s lives. Both sought to carve out identities that blacks could claim for themselves. Jazz artists recognized the parallels and, not surprisingly, later became Malcolm’s avid supporters in the 1960s. His version of militant black nationalism appealed to their spirit of rebellion and artistic nonconformity.
One major lesson Malcolm absorbed from the jazz artists’ performances in the forties was the power of black art to convey celebrity status. Young Malcolm wistfully dreamt about the adoration of the crowd. In Harlem, he would escort Reginald backstage to join the artists and the musicians at the Roxy or the Paramount, intimating that they knew who he was. “After selling reefers with the bands as they traveled, I was known to almost every popular Negro musician around New York in 1944-45,” he would boast. In July 1944, he even found work at the Lobster Pond nightclub on Fortysecond Street. The proprietor, Abe Goldstein, is identified as “Hymie” in the Autobiography:
“Red, I’m a Jew and you’re black,” he would say. “These Gentiles don’t like either one of us.”
Hymie paid me good money while I was with him, sometimes two hundred and three hundred a week. I would have done anything for Hymie. I did do all kinds of things. But my main job was transporting bootleg that Hymie supplied, usually to those spruced-up bars which he had sold to someone.
What the Autobiography fails to reveal is that Detroit Red, under the stage name Jack Carlton, was allowed to perform as a bar entertainer. At last, on a lighted nightclub stage, Malcolm could display his dancing ability; he even sometimes played the drums. The stage name was his way of honoring his late half brother, Earl, Jr., who had performed as Jimmy Carlton. It isn’t clear whether Goldstein paid Malcolm primarily to entertain or to transport illegal alcohol (if his account is true). But in October 1944, Malcolm was fired. A few years later, on the occasion of another arrest, Goldstein described his former employee as “a bit unstable and neurotic but under proper guidance, a good boy.”
Unemployed and desperate, and probably nursing a drug habit, Malcolm soon drifted back to Boston, and to Ella. He may have reasoned that, given her own continuing illegal activities, she could hardly turn her back on him, and he tried to convince her that he would turn over a new leaf and return to the upright upwardly mobile life she still thought to be her own destiny. To demonstrate his sobriety, in late October he obtained a menial job at a Sears Roebuck warehouse. The wages were a paltry twenty dollars a week, and the work strenuous. Malcolm had never been physically strong; years of alcohol addiction and cocaine use could not have helped. Over a six-week period, he failed to get to work six times. By Thanksgiving, he had had enough, and quit. In desperation, he stole a fur coat from Ella’s home, pawning it for five dollars. The coat belonged to Ella’s sister, Grace; Ella was so outraged that she summoned the police. Malcolm was duly arrested and taken to jail. The Roxbury court gave him a three-month suspended sentence, with probation to last one full year. This was Detroit Red’s first offense to result in arrest and conviction. He was nineteen years old.
The Christmas season was only weeks away, and Goldstein consented to let Red work for him in New York City for a few weeks. In January 1945, with several hundred dollars in his pocket, Malcolm set off for Lansing. He had sent home small sums of money since 1941 and figured that his family owed him. Through Ella or Reginald, the Little siblings undoubtedly knew about their brotherʹs downward slide, and his drug dependency. He anticipated resistance, especially from Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert, so he arrived wearing a conservative-looking suit. His days of crime, he claimed, were long gone. For several weeks, seemingly true to his word, he worked at East Lansing’s Coral Gables bar, then as a busboy at the city’s Mayfair Ballroom. But he used these jobs as opportunities for petty theft. Traveling into Detroit, he brazenly robbed an acquaintance, a black man named Douglas Haynes, at gunpoint. Haynes filed a complaint with the Detroit police, who contacted the Lansing police. On March 17, 1945, Malcolm was arrested and turned over to the Detroit Police Department, charged with grand larceny. Wilfred posted a bond of a thousand dollars, and for a short time Malcolm found menial jobs at a Lansing mattress maker and then a truck factory. When his trial was postponed, he decided that his best move was to get out of town. Sometime in August 1945, he fled the jurisdiction; a warrant was issued for his arrest.
The Autobiography is completely silent about these events. Undoubtedly, Malcolm was profoundly ashamed about this phase of his past. He likely felt that the deepest violation he had committed was the humiliation he inflicted on his family through his career as a petty criminal. But he may have also dropped these incidents from his history as part of the attempt to shape his legend. His amateurish efforts at gangsterism in Boston and Lansing—the clumsy theft of his aunt’s coat, the ridiculous armed robbery of an acquaintance—undermined the credibility of his supposed criminal exploits in New York, and even he must have realized that the Michigan arrest warrant, combined with his parole violation from Massachusetts, would follow him across the country. If he was ever arrested again for even a minor crime, these other violations would be brought against him.
He first returned to New York City and subsequently to Boston, desperately trying to survive through a variety of hustles. It was during this time that Malcolm encountered a man named William Paul Lennon, and the uncertain particulars of their intimate relationship would generate much controversy and speculation in the years following Malcolm’s death.
Lennon was born on March 25, 1888, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Bernard and Nellie F. Lennon. His father was a successful merchant and newspaper publisher and active in local Democratic Party politics. The eldest son of eight children, Lennon enrolled in Brown University in 1906 as a “special student,” described in the school’s catalog as a category for “mature persons of good character who desire to pursue some special subject and who have had the requisite preliminary training.” After attending Brown for several years, Lennon drifted, seeking to establish himself in some suitable profession. During World War I, he served as chief petty officer in the navy, stationed out of Newport, Rhode Island, and upon his discharge he lived briefly with his parents before getting hired as a hotel manager in Pawtucket. Within five years he had become manager of Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue in midtown. Apparently he embarked on a successful career in hotel management, but—contrary to Malcolm’s later assertions that his patron was a multimillionaire—there is no record indicating that Lennon ever became truly wealthy. Sometime during the 1930s or early 1940s, Lennon had relocated to Boston, where he began to employ male secretaries in his home.
Malcolm’s initial contact with Lennon may have come through classified advertisements placed in New York newspapers. What is certain is that sometime in 1944 Malcolm had begun working for Lennon as a “butler and occasional house worker” at Lennon’s Boston home, on an affluent stretch of Arlington Street overlooking the Public Garden. Soon something deeper than an employer–employee relationship developed. (After Malcolm’s later arrest, in 1946, he would give the police Lennon’s name and address as a previous employer, convinced that Lennon would use his financial resources and other contacts to help him during his time in prison.) The Autobiography describes sexual contacts with Lennon, except that Malcolm falsely attributed them to a character named Rudy:
[Rudy] had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem. Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.
Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon. The revelation of his involvement with Lennon produced much speculation about Malcolm’s sexual orientation, but the experience appears to have been limited. There is no evidence from his prison record in Massachusetts or from his personal life after 1952 that he was actively homosexual. More credible, perhaps, is Rodnell Collins’s insight about his uncle: “Malcolm basically lived two lives.” When he was around Ella, “he enthusiastically participated in family picnics and family dinners. . . . He saved some of his money to send to his brothers and sisters in Lansing.” But in his Detroit Red life, he participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters. Keeping the two lives separate from each other was never easy, due to his unstable material circumstances. But Malcolm had the intelligence and ingenuity to mask his most illegal and potentially upsetting activities from his family and friends.
Well-to-do white men were one thing, white women another. During the war, his old paramour Bea Caragulian had married a white man, Mehan Bazarian, but he was serving in the military and was largely away. Malcolm’s sexual relationship with Bea had continued after her marriage, although it eventually grew chaotic and frequently abusive. By early December 1945, he was back in Boston, with no place to go except Ella’s. Once again, his disgusted half sister had no choice but to allow him to stay; after all, blood was blood. Malcolm quickly ran down Shorty Jarvis, who complained to him about his wife and their money problems. Within several days, Malcolm organized a gang, with the intention of robbing homes in Boston’s affluent neighborhoods. His motley crew consisted of another African American, Francis E. “Sonny” Brown; Bea; her younger sister, Joyce Caragulian; a third Armenian woman, Kora Marderosian; and Shorty. Early in the evening of December 14, 1945, Malcolm and Brown robbed a Brookline home, absconding with $2,400 worth of fur coats, silverware, jewelry, and other items. The next night, they struck a second Brookline house, stealing several rugs and silverware valued at nearly $400, in addition to liquor, jewelry, and linen. For these break-ins, the gang followed a general pattern. Sonny would jimmy the home’s rear door, then open the front door for Malcolm and Shorty. The premises was quickly looted, with a focus on items that could easily be sold on the black market. The women stayed in the automobile, acting as lookouts. On December 16 they drove to New York City to sell part of their merchandise. Some items that failed to find a buyer were dumped, but most of the loot was distributed among gang members, a mistake no veteran burglar would ever have made.
One of the gang’s most lucrative hauls took place the day after their trip to New York. Entering a home in Newton, Massachusetts, the young criminals managed to grab jewelry, a watch, a vacuum cleaner, bed linen, silver candlesticks, earrings, a gold pendant and chain, and additional merchandise, with a total value estimated by police at $6,275. Over a period of one month, they robbed about eight homes. When they were finally caught, Malcolm was primarily responsible for tipping their hand. He gave a watch to a relative as a Christmas gift; the relative sold it on to a Boston jeweler, who, suspecting it had been stolen, contacted the police. The authorities bided their time. In early January 1946, Malcolm took another stolen watch to a repair shop. When he returned for it, local police were on hand to arrest him. Malcolm was carrying a loaded .32 caliber pistol at the time. During his interrogation, detectives disingenuously promised not to prosecute him on the gun charge if he agreed to give up his accomplices. He readily complied, naming his whole crew. With the exception of Sonny Brown, who managed to elude authorities, everyone in the gang was promptly arrested.
Malcolm was charged with the illegal possession of a firearm in Roxbury court on January 15. The next day, at the Quincy court, charges of larceny and breaking and entering were added. The court set a bail of ten thousand dollars. Because the burglaries had taken place in two Massachusetts counties, Norfolk and Middlesex, two trials were held. Shorty Jarvis’s account provides a vivid description of his and Malcolm’s ordeal: “We were urged by the district attorney and our white lawyers to plead guilty as charged; we were also told that if we did, things would go real easy and well in our favor (meaning the sentence).” Both men had been “damn fools” not to have anticipated a legal double cross. Bea was subpoenaed and turned the state’s evidence against Malcolm, largely reading the script the prosecutors wrote for her. Jarvis claimed that the district attorney had even attempted unsuccessfully “to get the girls to testify that we had raped them; this was so he could ask the judge for a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence or life in prison.” To Malcolm and Shorty, as well as to Ella, it seemed that the prime motivation for their prosecution was racial. “As long as I live,” Shorty reflected, “I will never forget how the judge told me I had had no business associating with white women.” Ella’s son, Rodnell, observed: “In court [Ella] said, the men were described by one lawyer as ‘schvartze bastards’ and by another as ‘minor Al Capones.’ The arresting officer meanwhile referred to [the women] as ‘poor, unfortunate, friendless, scared lost girls.’”
Both Malcolm Little and Shorty Jarvis pled guilty and were sentenced in a Middlesex County court to four concurrent eight-to-ten-year sentences, to be served in prison. While this was read out, they were confined behind bars in a steel cage in the courtroom. Shorty snapped, shaking the bars and screaming at the presiding judge, “Why don’t you kill me? Why don’t you kill me? I would rather be dead than do ten years.” In Norfolk County Superior Court eight weeks later, Malcolm received three concurrent six-to-eight-year sentences. The court could hardly have imposed more. When Malcolm remarked to a defense attorney that “we seem to be getting sentenced because of those girls,” the lawyer replied angrily, “You had no business with white girls!” Bea pleaded to the courts that she and the other white women were innocent victims of Malcolm’s vicious criminal enterprise. He had coerced them. “We lived in constant fear,” she told the court with emotion. She ultimately served only seven months of a five-year sentence.
Bea’s self-serving actions left a profound impression on Malcolm. “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak,” he observed. “They are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.” His misogyny had been reinforced during his time as a steerer for Harlem prostitutes. Reflecting on his experiences, Malcolm wrote, “I got my first schooling about the cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women.” Bea’s actions underlined what he perceived as women’s deceptive, opportunistic tendencies. Malcolm rarely examined his own behavior—his broken relationship with Gloria Strother, his physical abuse of Bea Caragulian—let alone his betrayal of his partners.