Early years
The young Malcolm XMalcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Earl Little and Louise Helen (née Norton). He lived briefly at 3448 Pinkney Street in the North Omaha neighborhood. His father was an outspoken Baptist lay speaker and supporter of Marcus Garvey, as well as a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
According to Malcolm, three of Earl Little's brothers died violently at the hands of white men, and one of his uncles had been lynched.
Earl Little had three children (Ella, Mary, and Earl, Jr.) by a previous marriage before he married Malcolm's mother. From his second marriage he had eight children, of whom Malcolm was the fourth. (Earl and Louise Little's children's names were, in order, Wilfred, Hilda, Philbert, Malcolm, Reginald, Wesley, Yvonne, and Robert.)
Louise Little was born in Grenada and, according to Malcolm, she looked more like a white woman. Her father was a white man of whom Malcolm knew nothing except what he described as his mother's shame. Malcolm got his light complexion from him. Initially he felt it was a status symbol to be light-skinned but later he would say that he “hated every drop of that white rapist's blood that is in me.” As Malcolm was the lightest child in the family, he felt that his father favored him; however, his mother treated him harshly for the same reason.
One of his nicknames, "Red," derived from the reddish tinge of his hair. He was described as having, at birth, "ash-blonde hair ... tinged with cinnamon," and at four, "reddish-blonde hair." His hair darkened as he aged but resembled the hair of his paternal grandmother whose hair "turned reddish in the summer sun."
According to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, his mother had been threatened by Ku Klux Klansmen while she was pregnant with him in December 1924; his mother recalled that the family was warned to leave Omaha, because his father's involvement with UNIA was, according to the Klansmen, "stirring up trouble".
The family relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1926, and then to Lansing, Michigan, shortly thereafter. In 1931, Malcolm's father was found dead, having been run over by a streetcar in Lansing. Authorities ruled his death a suicide.[8] Malcolm claimed that this cause of death was disputed by the black community at the time, and he later disputed it himself, saying that his family had frequently found themselves the target of harassment by the Black Legion, a white supremacist group his father accused of burning down their home in 1929.
Malcolm wondered how his father could bash himself in the head and then lay down across street tracks to get run over.
Though Malcolm’s father had two life insurance policies, his mother received death benefits solely from the smaller policy. Malcolm claimed that insurance company that had issued the larger policy claimed that Earl Little's death had been a suicide, and accordingly refused to pay.[11] Louise Little had a nervous breakdown and was declared legally insane in December 1938. Malcolm and his siblings were split up and sent to different foster homes. Louise Little was formally committed to the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo, Michigan, and remained there until Malcolm and his brothers and sisters had her released 26 years later.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X states that, following the death of his father, Malcolm Little lived on Charles Street in downtown East Lansing. However, the 1930 U.S. Census (released in 2002) shows him living on a different Charles Street, in the low income Urbandale neighborhood in Lansing Township, between Lansing and East Lansing. Later, at the time he was in high school, he lived in Mason, an almost all-white small town 12 miles (19 km) to the south.
Quote:
|
Malcolm Little graduated from junior high school at the top of his class but dropped out soon after a teacher told him that his aspirations of being a lawyer were "no realistic goal for a nigger".
|
After enduring a series of foster homes, Malcolm was first sent to a detention center and then later moved to Boston to live with his older half-sister, Ella Little Collins. In Boston he held a variety of jobs and intermittently found employment with the New Haven Railroad. In 1942, Malcolm became "involved with Boston's underworld fringe."