Malcolm X (8 page)

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 mother's 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:

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.

CHAPTER 2

The Legend of Detroit Red

1941-January 1946

 

 

 

E
ven 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 sister's 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 center's 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 mother's 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 father's 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.