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Tue Feb 26, 2008 at 22:46:09 PM EST
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When I was 20 years old, I was mugged by a
cliché in Kalamazoo. A black man, aged 18 to 25, wearing a
Georgetown
Starter jacket, ran up behind me, threw me to the ground, shoved a 9 mm
in my face, threatened to kill me, took all my cash, kicked me in the
face, and ran off into
the night.
It's an old, tired story. But it was also a
terrifying story. As a girl from lily-white up
north, the one piece of advice that I had dismissed when I
moved downstate, when my mother had told me
about how you didn't want to live in a poor neighborhood with black
people because "something might happen to you," turned out to be
something I should have heeded. (In my mother's defense, she grew up in
Michigan during the Detroit
riots in 1967.) However, after the self-pity cleared and I
wiped the sneaker print off of my face, I
started to think. How did this
happen? How could a child grow up thinking there was no other path than
the one down the barrel of a gun? Especially a child like the one who
had attacked me: He was tall, lean, well-spoken, and I thought, as
he ran away from me, that he ran with the graceful stride of a track
star.
As I do in all situations in which I don't know what to do, I headed
off to the
library. And that's where I discovered Malcolm X. I connected with his
Michigan connection on a deep level in that town still divided by train
tracks, and I soon realized the very environment I was
living in had created one of
our nation's most powerful and imperfect civil rights leaders.
Michigan, specifically Lansing, had laid the foundation for a path so
powerful that it would make a pilgrimage to Mecca and return with plans
to change the world, only to be cut short painfully ahead of its time.
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| joanb :: Black History Month: Malcolm X in Lansing |
Malcolm
X, then Malcolm Little, was born May 19, 1925 in Omaha,
Nebraska. In January of 1928, when he would have been almost two
years old, the family was run out of town by the Klan and moved to
Lansing. His
father, Earl Little, was a
follower of
Marcus
Garvey, and was, according to Malcolm X, again the subject of
violence from white supremacist groups in Michigan. In The
Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley,
he writes
that
this time, the get-out-of-town threats came from a
local
hate society called The Black Legion. They wore black robes instead of
white. Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were
reviling him as an "uppity nigger" for wanting to own a store, for
living outside the Lansing Negro district, for spreading unrest and
dissention among "the good niggers."
It was in this house in the Westmont subdivision that Malcolm
X writes he experienced what was to
become his "earliest vivid memory" on November 8,
1929:
I remember being suddenly snatched awake into a
frightening confusion
of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames. My father had
shouted and shot at the two white men who had set the fire and were
running away. Our home was burning down around us. . . The white police
and firemen came around and stood watching as the house burned down to
the ground.
On November 9, the Lansing
State
Journal--then just the State Journal--told
a different story on their front page: Earl Little was being held by
police "in the Lansing jail Saturday for investigation in connection
with the burning of his home west of the city early Friday morning."
The Journal continues:
Little was recently defendant in a suit brought by
the
Capitol View Land company, which objected to colored persons living on
their subdivision and Judge Lelan W. Carr, in circuit court, decided
that inasmuch as there were such restrictions on the property, that
Little could own property there but could not live there. This is the
same attitude taken by the supreme court in a number of cases.
Little went to pay his insurance premiums Friday to the Rouse Insurance
agency but made no mention of the fire at that time. He went back later
with another person and told of the destruction of his home and said
that he heard two explosions. Another witness said that the house burst
into flames almost immediately.
The
1930 city directory lists
their address as 401 S. Charles Street, between Lansing and East
Lansing.
Earl had begun building a new home at what is now 1099 Vincent
Court--near the corner of MLK and Jolly streets, which in 1930 was a
few miles
out in the country. X writes in his Autobiography
that "This was where my father built for us with his own hands a four
room house. This is where I really remember things--this home where I
started to grow up."
X attended kindergarten at the Pleasant Grove School, located at the
corner of Pleasant Grove and Holmes roads. X writes that "it was two
miles out of the city limits, and I guess there was no problem about
our attending because we were the only negroes in the area." J. D.
Burgess, in his 1979 essay "Malcolm
X: The Man from Lansing,
Michigan" writes that
Being out in the country, where they were able to
raise vegetables and
chickens and hunt, the family was better off than the blacks in
Lansing. Back then an elite job for a black man in Lansing was to be a
shoeshine boy at the state capitol. Growing up Malcolm liked to play
along the small creek that still runs behind the homesite. He enjoyed
raising peas in his own garden plot too.
But even this far out of town the family still experienced pressure
from Lansing whites,
according to X. The
Black Legion was continuing to threaten his father
with violence, and the tension broke on Monday night, September 28,
1931. The next morning's State Journal described
the tragic scene.
Earl Little, 41, living at Jolly Corners, sustained
fatal injuries late
Monday night when he was run over by a street car at Detroit street and
East Michigan avenue a block east of the city limits.
The car was operated by William Hart. . .
who told Coroner Ray
Gorsline that he did not see the man before the accident. It is
believed
that he fell under the rear trucks as he was running for the car.
<snip>
Coroner Gorsline planned to summon a coroner's jury for an inquest and
expected to take the members of the jury to the scene of the accident
Tuesday forenoon.
Little, a negro, leaves a widow, Mrs. Louise Little, 10 children, the
parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Little of Reynolds, Ga., three sisters, and
a brother, James Little of Albion.
Malcolm X describes the scene differently in his autobiography.
My mother was taken by police to the hospital, and to
a room where a
sheet was over my father in a bed, and she wouldn't look, she was
afraid to look. Probably it was wise that she didn't. My father's
skull, on one side, was crushed in, I was told later. Negroes in
Lansing have always whispered that he was attacked, and then laid over
the tracks for a streetcar to run over him. His body was cut almost in
half.
He lived two and a half hours in that condition.
The coroner completed his inquest, and three days later at
the bottom of the front page of the Journal ran a
small blurb next to the weather:
STREETCAR DEATH PURELY ACCIDENTAL
The death of Earl Little, 41, Jolly Corners, who was killed by
falling under the rear wheels of a streeet car Monday night, was
accidental, a coroner's jury determined.
The African-American community in Lansing had different ideas, X says
in his book, and the trouble for the family was just beginning. Louise
Little had difficulties collecting the larger of two life insurance
policies in her late husband's name.
The company that had issued the bigger policy was
balking at paying
off. They were claiming that my father had committed suicide. Visitors
came again, and there was bitter talk about white people: How could my
father bash himself in the head, then get down across the streetcar
tracks to be run over?
So there we were. My mother was thirty-four years old now, with no
husband, with no provider or protector to take care of her eight
children.
The state eventually removed all of the children from the Little house,
and X was sent to live with the Gohannas family at 1010 William Street
in Lansing. Not much later, Louise Little had a nervous breakdown and
was sent to the State Mental Hospital in
Kalamazoo.
Malcolm X was 13 years old.
I would call that traumatic. I don't know about you, but when I was 13
I was trying to figure out how to manage my freakish acne and somehow
get boys to make out with me without being called a slut. That was
traumatic enough. If I had been exposed to this level of chaos and
disorder at such a young age, you could be sure that it would lead me
to do more than commit armed robbery, which is how X spent the next
chapter of his life when he moved to Boston after dropping out
of Mason High School.
Aside from the trauma of losing his entire family either to death,
institutions, or a foster system far less "enlightened" than even the
one today, there is a sneakier, more insidious trauma: the fact that
his version of life, his truth that he witnessed, was repressed until
he was an adult, and then he was dismissed as a radical. Earl Little
said that he could live in a house that he owned: The justice system
said sorry, that's not legal. Little said that the fire that almost
killed his family and destroyed his home was set by white supremecists:
The authorities arrested him and held him for
questioning. Little was killed by a streetcar: The coroner
called it an accident and the insurance company called it a suicide.
Louise Little claims that no, her husband did not kill himself: The
insurance company denies payment.
Not only all this, but the local newspaper is listing these
events in your life on the front page. So not only is your life in
chaos, but everyone knows: Your parents' friends, your parents'
enemies, and the kids at school--and we all know how politely junior
high kids handle sensitive information.
Malcolm X may have been called a radical--the French government denied
him access to the country in 1965 because "his
presence was undesirable"--but he was understandably
radicalized. However, even greater than this radicalization was his
road to redemption: After his trip to Mecca, X made the turnaround that
eventually killed him by distancing himself from the Nation of Islam.
He wrote in his autobiography that
on the American racial level, we had to approach the
black man's
struggle against the white man's racism as a human problem, that we had
to forget hypocritical politics and propaganda. I said that both races,
as human beings, had the obligation, the responsibility, of helping to
correct America's racial problem. The well-meaning white people, I
said, had to combat, actively and directly, the racism in other white
people.
As a 20-year-old in Kalamazoo, I was drawn to action, and act I did. I
challenged my every thought, and strove the best I could to challenge
the thoughts of others as well. What about you, other well-meaning
white people? What have you been doing? Because somewhere in Lansing,
perhaps even in one of the unmarked, foreclosure-ridden
neighborhoods where Malcolm Little lived before he became
Malcolm X or in one of our great state's overcrowded prisons there is a
young man or woman making decisions on how they are going to
respond to
America's racial problem.
How can we help them?
Google Map of Lansing sites of interest for Malcolm X
For more information on Malcolm X:
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