Malcolm Little Grew Up Here

On a quiet stretch of South Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard, a historical marker stands near the site where Earl and Louise Little built a house in nineteen thirty. Their son Malcolm, born in Omaha, Nebraska on May nineteenth, nineteen twenty-five, grew up in this neighborhood. He would later be known to the world as Malcolm X.

Earl Little was a Baptist minister and a devoted follower of Marcus Garvey, the Black nationalist leader whose Universal Negro Improvement Association chapters spread across Northern cities in the nineteen twenties. In Lansing, Earl served as a local chapter leader. His advocacy made powerful enemies. The family had already fled one Lansing house in the Westmont neighborhood after it burned down under suspicious circumstances in nineteen twenty-nine. The records here go quiet on exactly who was responsible. The family believed it was the Black Legion, a white supremacist organization that had splintered from the Ku Klux Klan and was estimated to have tens of thousands of members across Michigan.

Earl built a new home two miles outside town on Logan Street, a road later renamed for Martin Luther King Junior. On September twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-one, he was found dying on the streetcar tracks on Michigan Avenue. The official ruling was accident. Louise Little and the children believed it was not. The full truth of what happened that night was never established by any court.

Louise Little struggled through the Great Depression, caring for eight children while fighting off state welfare officials who sought to remove the children from her custody. She was committed to the Kalamazoo State Hospital in nineteen thirty-nine. Malcolm was placed in a series of foster homes before eventually leaving Michigan for Boston and New York.

He would return to Lansing once, briefly, as a young man. By the time he became one of the most significant voices in twentieth-century American politics, the house on this street was already gone. The marker is what remains.