Malcolm X (4 page)

To appreciate how Malcolm’s resurrection occurred, first among African Americans and later throughout America, we need to reconstruct the full contours of his remarkable life—a story that begins in a small black community on the north side of Omaha, Nebraska.

CHAPTER 1

“Up, You Mighty Race!”

1925-1941

 

 

 

M
alcolm X’s father, Earl Little, Sr., was born in Reynolds, Georgia, on July 29, 1890. A farmer's son who was frequently called Early, he had barely three years of formal schooling, although as a teenager he learned carpentry, which provided him with a livelihood. In 1909, he married a local African-American woman, Daisy Mason, and in quick succession had three children: Ella, Mary, and Earl, Jr.

Reynolds, a small town in Georgia’s southwest corner, had a population of only twelve hundred people around 1910, but it was an impressive manufacturing hub with a large cotton milling factory, producing seven to eight thousand bales each year. Like most of the South in the decades after Reconstruction, it was also a dangerous and violent place for African Americans. Between 1882 and 1927, Georgia’s white racists lynched more than five hundred blacks, putting the state second only to Mississippi in lynching deaths. The depression of the 1890s had hit Georgia particularly hard, unleashing a wave of business failures twice the rate of that in the rest of the United States. As jobs grew increasingly scarce, skilled white laborers faced increasing competition from blacks, especially in masonry, carpentry, and the mechanical trades. Earl’s status as a skilled carpenter probably provoked tensions with local whites, and his parents and friends feared for his safety.

Well over six feet tall, muscular and dark skinned, Little frequently got into heated arguments with whites who resented his air of independence. Reynolds and surrounding towns had seen several lynchings and countless acts of violence against blacks. His home life was only slightly less tumultuous: Daisy’s extended family liked neither his brawling nor the way he treated his wife. By 1917, tired both of fighting his in-laws and of white threats of violence, Earl abandoned his young wife and children as part of the great northern migration of Southern blacks that began with World War I. Following the path of the Seaboard Air Line railroad, a common route for blacks headed north from Georgia and the Carolinas, he stopped first in Philadelphia, then New York City, before finally settling in Montreal. He did not bother to get a legal divorce.

It was within Montreal’s small, mostly Caribbean black community that Earl fell in love with a beautiful Grenadian, Louisa Langdon Norton. Born in St. Andrew, Grenada, in 1897, she had been raised by her maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Langdon. Louise, as she was known, had a fair complexion and dark, flowing hair; in everyday encounters she was often mistaken for white. Local blacks gossiped that she was the product of her mother's rape by a Scotsman. Unlike Earl, she had received an excellent Anglican elementary-level education, becoming a capable writer as well as fluent in French. Thoughtful and ambitious, she had emigrated to Canada at nineteen, seeking greater opportunities than her small island homeland could provide.

Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites that brought Louise and Earl together—although a more likely explanation is that they shared an interest in social justice, the well-being of their race, and, with it, politics. In 1917, black Montrealers started an informal chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), founded by a charismatic Jamaican activist, Marcus Garvey. Although not officially established as a branch organization until June 1919, the Montreal UNIA exerted tremendous influence on blacks throughout the city. It sponsored educational forums, recreational activities, and social events for blacks, even sending delegations to international conventions. The two militant Garveyites fell in love, and were married in Montreal on May 10, 1919. They decided to dedicate their lives and futures to the building of the Garvey movement in the United States. Garvey was to play a pivotal part in their lives and, a generation later, in that of their son Malcolm.

On the eve of America’s entry into World War I, black American political culture was largely divided into two ideological camps: accommodationists and liberal reformers. Divisions in tactics, theory, and ultimate goals concerning race relations would persist through the century. Led by the conservative educator Booker T. Washington, the accommodationists accepted the reality of Jim Crow segregation and did not openly challenge black disenfranchisement, instead promoting the development of black-owned businesses, technical and agricultural schools, and land ownership. The reformers, chief among them the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and the militant journalist William Monroe Trotter, called for full political and legal rights for black Americans, and ultimately the end of racial segregation itself. Like the nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, they believed in dismantling the barriers separating blacks and whites in society. The establishment of the liberal National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910, led by Du Bois, and the death of Washington in 1915 advanced the national leadership of the reformers over their conservative rivals.

It was at this moment of intense political debates among blacks that the charismatic Marcus Garvey arrived in New York City, on March 24, 1916. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey had been a printer and journalist in the Caribbean, Central America, and England. He had come to the United States at the urging of Booker T. Washington to garner support for a college in Jamaica, a project which came to naught but which launched the flamboyant young man on a different mission, a new and ambitious political and social movement for blacks. Inspired by Washington’s conservative ideas, Garvey did not object to racial segregation laws or separate schools, but astutely he paired these ideas with a fiery polemical attack on white racism and white colonial rule. Unlike the NAACP, which appealed to a rising middle class, Garvey recruited the black poor, the working class, and rural workers. After establishing a small base of supporters in Harlem, he embarked on a yearlong national tour in which he appealed to blacks to see themselves as “a mighty race,” linking their efforts not only with people of African descent from the Caribbean but with Africa itself. In uncompromising language, he preached self-respect, the necessity for blacks to establish their own educational organizations, and the cultivation of the religious and cultural institutions that nurtured black families. In January 1918, the New York UNIA branch was formally established, and later that year Garvey started his own newspaper,
Negro World
; the following year the UNIA set up its international headquarters in Harlem, naming their building Liberty Hall.

Central to Garvey’s appeal were his enthusiastic embrace of capitalism and his gospel of success; self-mastery, willpower, and hard work would provide the steps to lift black Americans. “Be not deceived,” he told his followers, “wealth is strength, wealth is power, wealth is influence, wealth is justice, is liberty, is real human rights.” The purpose of the African Communities League was to set up, in his words, “commercial houses, distributing houses, and also to engage in business of all kinds, wholesale and retail.” Starting in Harlem, the league opened grocery stores and restaurants, and even financed the purchase of a steam laundry. In 1920, Garvey incorporated the Negro Factories Corporation to supervise the movement’s growing list of businesses. His best-known and most controversial start-up, however, was the Black Star Line, a steamship company backed by tens of thousands of blacks who bought five- and ten-dollar shares. Ironically, all this activity depended on the existence of
de facto
racial segregation, which limited competition from white businesses, all of which refused to invest in urban ghettos.

Racial separation, Garvey preached, was essential for his people’s progress, not only in the States but worldwide. His program was an informal mélange of ideas extracted from such disparate sources as Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, and Benjamin Franklin, set now in a framework of achievement occupying a separate sphere from whites. Blacks would never respect themselves as a people so long as they were dependent upon others for their employment, business, and financial affairs. Like Booker T. Washington, Garvey sensed that Jim Crow segregation would not disappear quickly. It was logical, therefore, to turn an inescapable evil into a cornerstone of group advancement. Blacks had to reject the divisive distinctions of class, religion, nationality, and ethnicity that had traditionally divided their communities. People of African descent were all part of a transnational “nation,” a global race with a common destiny. The UNIA's initial manifesto of 1914 called for people of Negro or African parentage “to establish a Universal confraternity among the race; to promote the spirit of race, pride and love . . . [and] to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa.” Later, many middle-class blacks dismissed Garveyism as a hopelessly utopian back-to-Africa movement, which underplayed its radical global vision. What Garvey recognized was that the Old World and the New were inextricably linked: blacks throughout the Caribbean and the United States could never be fully free unless Africa itself was liberated. Pan-Africanism—the belief in Africa’s ultimate political independence, and that of all colonial states in which blacks lived—was the essential goal.

Garvey also recognized that creating a mass movement required a cultural revolution. Generations of blacks had endured slavery, segregation, and colonialism, producing a widespread sense of submission to white authority. Black power depended on activities that could restore both self-respect and a sense of community—essentially the development of a united black culture. For these reasons, “cultural nationalism” occupied a central role in his project. Garveyites sponsored literary events and published the writings of their followers; they organized debates, held concerts, and paraded beneath gaudy banners of black, red, and green. They were encouraged to write nationalist anthems, most popular among these being the “Universal Ethiopian Anthem,” which featured the powerful if ungainly chorus:

Garvey used pageantry to great effect in building the culture of his movement. Exalted titles and colorful uniforms created a sense of historical import and seriousness, and gave poor African Americans a sense of pride and excitement. At a 1921 Harlem gathering, six thousand Garveyites launched the “inauguration of the Empire of Africa.” Garvey himself was crowned president general of the UNIA and provisional president of Africa, who with one potentate and one supreme deputy potentate constituted the royalty of the empire. Garveyite leaders were bestowed titles as “Knights of the Nile, Knights of the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia and Dukes of Niger and of Uganda.” The fact that Garvey’s movement controlled no territory in colonial Africa or the Caribbean did not matter. Blacks were identifying themselves as a nobility in exile, working toward the day when Europeans would be expelled from the Motherland and they would claim inheritance.

The UNIA assimilated themes from various African-American religious rituals. Although a nominal Catholic, Garvey held that people of African descent had to embrace a black God and a black theology of liberation. This was not an open rejection of Christianity, although he did declare at one rally, “We have been worshipping a false god. . . . We just create a god of our own and give this new religion to the Negroes of the world.” In 1929, Garvey went so far as to say that “the Universal Negro Improvement Association is fundamentally a religious institution.”

Garveyism created a positive social environment for strengthening black households and families that confronted racial prejudice in their everyday lives. As in any all-encompassing social movement, enthusiastic members often find the best companionship within the group. Whatever initially brought Earl Little and Louise Norton together, they shared a commitment to Garvey’s ideals that would sustain them in the future. They made their first home among Philadelphia’s black community, where they would reside for nearly two years. By 1918, Philadelphia had become the hub of extensive UNIA activities, and soon the chapter’s growth exploded; between 1919 and 1920, more than ten thousand people, mostly working class and poor, joined the local organization, putting Philadelphia behind only New York City in total membership. Here, the religious side of Garveyism drove its popularity, thanks largely to the commanding presence of the chapter’s charismatic leader, Reverend James Walker Hood Eason. In 1918, Eason and his spiritual followers had formed the People’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Disillusioned with the lack of militancy within the NAACP, Eason joined forces with Garvey, and his rise was immediate. In 1919, without consulting his congregation, the pastor sold the church building to Garvey’s Black Star Line for twenty-five thousand dollars, and the next year Garvey appointed him “Leader of American Negroes” at UNIA's first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. Known as “silver-tongued Eason,” he was selected by the Harlem-based Liberty Party as its presidential candidate in the 1920 elections.

At the party’s convention that year, before a crowd of twenty-one thousand in Madison Square Garden, Eason emphasized the international dimensions of the UNIA’s mission. “We are talking from a world standpoint now,” he proclaimed. “We do not represent the English Negro or the French Negro . . . we represent all Negroes.” By 1920, there were at least a hundred thousand UNIA members worldwide in more than eight hundred branch organizations or chapters. Garveyites enthusiastically told the world their followers numbered in the millions. A more objective assessment would still place the total number of new members in the 1920s and 1930s at one million or more, making it one of the largest mass movements in black history.