Malcolm X - Early Years

Early Years

Malcolm Little was born May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of seven children of Grenada-born Louise Little (née Norton) and Georgia-born Earl Little. Earl was an outspoken Baptist lay speaker, admirer of Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey, and local leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) who inculcated self-reliance and black pride in his children. Malcolm X later said that violence by whites killed three of his father's brothers, including one who was lynched.

Because of Ku Klux Klan threats—Earl Little's UNIA activities were "spreading trouble"—the family relocated in 1926 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and shortly thereafter to Lansing, Michigan. In Lansing the family was frequently harassed by the Black Legion, a white supremacist group; when the family home burned in 1929, Earl Little accused the Black Legion.

When Little was six, his father was killed by a streetcar. Though police said the dying man declared he had slipped, at the funeral someone told one of the children their father had been pushed onto the tracks; some blacks suspected the Black Legion. After a dispute with creditors, a life insurance benefit (nominally $1,000—about $15,000 in 2010 dollars) was paid to Louise Little in payments of $18 per month; the issuer of another, larger policy refused to pay, claiming suicide. To make ends meet Louise Little rented out part of her garden, and her sons hunted game.

In 1937 a man Louise Little had been dating—marriage had seemed a possibility—vanished from her life when she became pregnant with his child. In late 1938 she had a nervous breakdown and was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she remained until Malcolm and his siblings secured her release 24 years later. The children were separated and sent to various foster homes.

Malcolm Little excelled in junior high school but dropped out after a white teacher told him that practicing law, his aspiration at the time, was "no realistic goal for a nigger". It made Malcolm feel that the white world offered no place for a career-oriented black man, regardless of his talent.

After living in a series of foster homes, at age 15 Little went to live with a half-sister, Ella Little Collins, in Roxbury, a largely African-American neighborhood of Boston, where he held a variety of jobs. After a short time in Flint, Michigan, Little moved to Harlem, New York, in 1943, where he engaged in drug dealing, gambling, racketeering, robbery, and pimping; according to recent biographies, he also occasionally had sex with other men, usually for money. He was called "Detroit Red" because of the reddish hair he inherited from his Scottish maternal grandfather. Little was declared "mentally disqualified for military service" after he told draft board officials he was eager to "steal us some guns, and kill us crackers".

In late 1945, Little returned to Boston, where he embarked on a series of burglaries targeting wealthy white families. In 1946, he was arrested while picking up a stolen watch he had left for repairs at a jewelry shop, and in February began serving an eight-to-ten year sentence at Charlestown State Prison. There he met John Bembry, a self-educated man he would later describe as "the first man I had ever seen command total respect ... with words"; under Bembry's influence, Little developed a voracious appetite for reading.