Malcolm X (5 page)

The UNIA never acquired a formal affiliation with any religious denomination, but given Earl Little’s lifelong background in the black Baptist Church, religious Garveyism had a special appeal, and no one in the country better personified it than Eason. With Louise at his side, Earl attended many of UNIA’s conferences and lectures in Philadelphia and Harlem, where Eason was frequently the star attraction, and from whom Earl would learn practical lessons in public speaking. As he grew within the movement, so did his family; on February 12, 1920, Louise gave birth to the couple’s first child, Wilfred, but they were not much longer for Philadelphia. The UNIA routinely selected capable young activists as field organizers, and in mid-1921 the Littles agreed to move halfway across the continent to start a fledgling outpost in Omaha, Nebraska.

Their appointment coincided with the explosive rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in America’s heartland. Created in the aftermath of the Civil War, the first Klan had been a white supremacist vigilante organization, employing violence and terror chiefly against newly freed African Americans. The second KKK, prompted by the waves of xenophobia among millions of white Americans following World War I, expanded its targets to include Jews, Catholics, Asians, and non-European “foreigners.” Nebraska’s local branch, called Klavern Number One, was set up in early 1921. Before that year’s end, another twenty-four such groups had been born, initially recording an average of eight hundred new members statewide every week. Their forums were well advertised, and by 1923 membership totaled forty-five thousand. Within the year, Klan demonstrations, parades, and cross-burnings had become common throughout the state. According to Michael W. Schuyler, a leading local historian, the KKK’s 1924 state convention in downtown Lincoln “featured 1,100 Klansmen in white robes. Klan dignitaries rode in open cars; hooded knights marched on foot, frequently carrying American flags; others rode horses.” It was hardly the clandestine group it would be forced to become in later decades.

Omaha’s small black community felt under siege. A few militants had already joined the NAACP, and they used their newspaper, the
Monitor
, to appeal to sympathetic local whites to join them against the KKK. In September 1921, the
Monitor
declared that with “the combined efforts of the Jews, the Catholics and the foreign-born, the Klan may expect the battle of its life. If actual bloodshed is desired, then the allies are prepared to do battle. If the war is a social and industrial one, then the allies are ready to meet that kind of warfare. The common enemy will drive the common allies together.” Still, they found it difficult to match their rhetoric with action in the rigged political machinery of middle America. In January 1923, the anti-KKK coalition petitioned Nebraska’s state legislature to outlaw citizens from holding public meetings while “in disguise to conceal their identities” and to require local police to protect individuals accused of crimes while in their custody. The bill easily passed the state house, sixty-five votes to thirty-four, but failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority in the state senate, where Klan supporters ensured its failure.

By 1923, two to three million white Americans—including such rising politicians as Hugo Black of Alabama, and later Robert Byrd of West Virginia—had joined the Klan, and it had become a force in national politics. The secret organization ran its members in both the Democratic and Republican parties, holding the balance of power in many state legislatures and hundreds of city councils. Their significant presence led Garvey to extrapolate that the KKK was both the face and soul of white America. “The Ku Klux Klan is the invisible government of the United States,” he told his followers at Liberty Hall in 1922, and it “represents to a great extent the feelings of every real white American.” Given this, he reasoned, it was only common sense to negotiate with them, and so he did, taking an infamous meeting with Klan leader Edward Young Clarke. From a practical standpoint, the groups shared considerable common ground, with both the KKK and the UNIA opposing interracial marriage and social intercourse between the races. However, many prominent Garveyites directly challenged Garvey’s initiative, or simply broke from the UNIA in disgust. Even more members criticized their organization’s chaotic business practices such as the Black Star Line, condemning the authoritarian way it was run. Many former UNIA members rallied around the leadership of Reverend Eason, who now created his own group, the Universal Negro Alliance, and whose popularity in some quarters exceeded Garvey’s. Loyal Garveyites responded by isolating or, in some cases, eliminating their critics. In late 1922, Eason traveled to New Orleans to mobilize his supporters. After delivering an address at the city’s St. John’s Baptist Church, surrounded by hundreds of admirers, he was attacked by three gun-wielding assailants, shot in the back and through the forehead. He clung to life for several days, finally dying on January 4, 1923. There is no evidence directly linking Garvey to the murder; several key loyalists, including Amy Jacques Garvey, his articulate and ambitious second wife, were far more ruthless than their leader and may have been involved in Eason’s assassination.

Neither dissension within the UNIA's national leadership nor their leader's erratic ideological shifts discouraged Louise and Earl. The young couple’s life was hard; they had few resources, and Louise had given birth to two more children—Hilda in 1922 and Philbert in 1923. Earl supplemented the family’s needs by hiring himself out for carpentry work; he shot game fowl with his rifle, and raised rabbits and chickens in their backyard. But his constant agitation on behalf of Garvey’s cause led local blacks to fear KKK reprisals against their community. Earl’s UNIA responsibilities occasionally required him to travel hundreds of miles; during one such trip, in the winter of 1925, hooded Klansmen rode out to the Little home in the middle of the night. Louise, pregnant again, bravely stepped onto her front porch to confront them. They demanded that Earl come out of the house immediately. Louise told them that she was alone with her three small children and that her husband was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. Frustrated in their objective, the Klan vigilantes warned Louise that she and her whole family should leave town, that Earl’s “spreading trouble” within Omaha’s black community would not be tolerated. To underline their message, the vigilantes proceeded to shatter every window. “Then they rode off,” Malcolm wrote, recalling what he had been told about the event, “their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.”

The apex of Klan activity in Nebraska came in the mid-1920s. By then the Klan numbered tens of thousands, drawn from nearly every social class. In 1925, a women’s branch was established, and soon they were singing, listening to lectures by national spokeswomen, and joining their menfolk marching in parades. Thousands of white children were mobilized, boys joining the Junior Klan, girls the Tri-K clubs. Their influence in both Omaha and Nebraska was pervasive, some white churches even acquiescing when the Klan disrupted their services. That same year, 1925, the KKK's annual state convention was staged to coincide with the Nebraska State Fair, both held in Lincoln. Crosses were burned while a KKK parade with floats mustered fifteen hundred marchers and a public picnic drew twenty-five thousand followers.

It was during this terrible time that, on May 19, 1925, at Omaha’s University Hospital, Louise gave birth to her fourth child. The boy, Earl’s seventh child, was christened Malcolm.

Despite continuing threats, the Littles struggled to build a UNIA organization. On Sunday, May 8, 1926, the local branch held a meeting that featured “Mr. E. Little” as its principal speaker. In her role as secretary, Louise wrote, “This division is small but much alive to its part in carrying on the great work.” By the fall of 1926, however, they concluded that their community, beleaguered by Klan depredations, could not sustain a militant organization. The UNIA’s troubles nationally compounded their difficulties. The Justice Department had for years aggressively hounded UNIA leaders, and in 1923 Garvey had been convicted of mail fraud in connection with the financial dealings of his Black Star Line and given a five-year sentence. He spent the next two years exhausting his appeals before finally entering federal prison in Atlanta in February 1925. In many urban areas, especially in the Northeast, his imprisonment created major schisms and defections, but across the rural South and in the Midwest thousands continued to join the movement. Loyal Garveyites sent funds and letters of encouragement to local chapters and national offices, and made appeals to reverse Garvey’s conviction.

Louise and Earl and their four children soon moved on to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an urban center with an expanding African-American community. Between 1923 and 1928, industries in the city were hiring hundreds of new workers, and blacks migrated there in droves. In 1923, the black residential population was estimated at five thousand; by the end of the decade, it had grown by 50 percent. Common laborers’ jobs paid up to seven dollars a day, higher than in many other cities. What also attracted the Littles was black Milwaukee’s robust entrepreneurship and racial solidarity. There were a good number of black-owned restaurants, funeral parlors, boardinghouses, and hotels; many proprietors saw their entrepreneurial efforts as realizing “the dream of a black city within the city.”

Though relations between Garvey and the national NAACP leadership were cold, if not frequently antagonistic, on the local level chapters of both groups often found themselves on the same side of issues and were open to collaboration. Despite their differing visions for the future of race relations, both could agree on the immediate need for less racial violence and more black jobs. In 1922, for instance, the local Milwaukee UNIA had drafted a resolution, endorsed by the NAACP, opposing the employment of blacks as strikebreakers on local railroads, aimed at preventing racial strife between striking workers. That year, the UNIA chapter claimed one hundred members; by the early 1930s more than four hundred had joined. This success was due largely to the efforts of a local clergyman, the Reverend Ernest Bland, under whose leadership the local UNIA pursued a strategy to appeal to low-income black workers, holding parades and cultural events and opening its own Liberty Hall. Many Milwaukee UNIA leaders also became Socialist Party activists; unlike at the national level, they frequently participated in civil rights protests and campaigns to elevate African Americans to elective office. Earl Little was involved as an officer in the International Industrial Club, a black working-class organization, and it was in that capacity, rather than as a UNIA leader, that he and two other club officers wrote to President Calvin Coolidge on June 8, 1927, asking for Garvey to be released. The Littles left town shortly after this petition was mailed, their departure delayed only by the birth of yet another son, Reginald. (Shortly after his birth Reginald was diagnosed with hernia problems; poor health would plague him into manhood.)

The family’s next stop was East Chicago, Indiana, but their stay was even briefer, since the state proved to be another KKK hotbed. By 1929, they had moved on again, purchasing a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse on a small three-lot property on the outskirts of Lansing, Michigan. Curiously, it was a neighborhood where few blacks lived. The Littles failed to realize that the deed for the property contained a special provision—a racial exclusion clause that voided the sale to blacks. Within several months, their white neighbors, well aware of such clauses, filed to evict them, and a local judge granted the request. Earl retained the services of a lawyer, who filed an appeal.

Waiting on the due processes of law was not enough for local racists. Early in the morning of November 8, the Littles’ house was shaken by an explosion that Earl would later attribute to several white men, none of whom he recognized, dousing the back of the house in gasoline and setting it afire. Within seconds, flames and thick smoke engulfed the farmhouse. Four-year-old Malcolm and his siblings would relive this event for the rest of their lives. “We heard a big boom,” remembered Wilfred.

When we woke up, fire was everywhere, and everybody was running into the walls and into each other, trying to get away. I could hear my mother yelling, my father yelling—they made sure they got us all rounded up and got us out. The fire was spreadin’ so fast that they couldn’t hardly bring anything else out. My mother began to run back and bring our bedclothing, whatever she could grab, and pulled it to the porch and then out into the yard. She made the mistake of laying my baby sister down on top of some quilts and things that were there and then went back for something else. When she came back, she didn’t see the baby—what had happened, they’d put somethin’ else on top of the baby. And my mother almost lost her mind. I mean they were hanging on to her to keep her from going back into the house. And then finally the baby cried, and they knew where the baby was.

The terrified family huddled together in the cold night air. Enraged, Earl “took a shot at somebody he said was running away from the house,” Wilfred recalled. No fire wagon arrived to rescue them, and their home burned to the ground.