In this third part of a three-part episode, Lanstories host David Siwik concludes his look at Lansing during the childhood of Malcolm X in the 1920s and 1930s. Topics discussed include housing discrimination, foster care, the death of Malcolm X's father and the threats the Little family faced from the state authorities and local white supremacist terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion.

Topics/Tags/Keywords

• Malcolm X
• Malcolm Little
• Earl Little
• Louis Little
• Ella Little
• Lansing
• Michigan
• Michigan History
• United States History
• 1920s
• 1930s
• Housing Discrimination
• Grand River Avenue
• Pleasant Grove Elementary School
• Pleasant Grove Avenue
• Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)
• Mason
• Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital
• Ku Klux Klan
• Black Legion

From Lansing Community College. This is LCC Connect and this is Lanstories with me, David Siwik.

Each episode explores a different topic, such as the people, business, neighborhoods, communities, buildings and other phenomena that make up the history of our college and our region. We tell stories and in doing so we connect the past to the present.

We are going to conclude our look at Lancy and Malcolm X at this time period by beginning to look at the city of Lansing as it would have appeared at the time.

And these maps, as I mentioned in the previous episodes, had different colors on them that distinguished neighborhoods of varying economic values according to the distinguishing factors the mapmakers used, which would be property values and who lived in the neighborhood. And that second part is going to be absolutely critical.

It is a area of the city that laid in the grand river floodplain and at the time ended up consisting of mostly small rental properties.

So much so that the term red line came out of these maps and the term redlining came to be a commonly used term to explain when a neighborhood had been divided along racial lines, divided by the various agencies and companies that were involved in planning neighborhoods and selling houses to people who would eventually move there. So we have maps that come out of this era that contained red lines on them. And if we. Red lines that distinguish where whites and blacks lived.

They had very limited housing options to them because of the racial discrimination that MEPs from the homeowners Loan Corporation themselves very clearly stated and outlined.

It was one of the places that he believed the family would be safe from the discriminatory housing practices that pervaded the city at the time.

What actually ends up happening is after Earl Little and the family move onto the property, the property are confronted with their white neighbors claiming that they are not allowed.

They that would be the black Little family are not allowed to live in that neighborhood because a covenant deed on their property forbid that property from being sold to and thereby purchased by an African American family. This practice known as a covenant deed.

And that would be a covenant or something in writing on the deed of the property in question that would determine who it could or could not be sold to. The U.S. supreme Court eventually struck down this practice, finding it violated the 14th Amendment, the United States Constitution.

So the Little family, we could surmise using historical evidence that they were somewhat aware of the legal ramifications for them having been accused of possessing a property that they weren't legally allowed to buy because the white. The Little family obtained an attorney. Earl Little hired a lawyer.

Records show this in attempt to defend himself, should the folks come and attempt to exert that they had a legal right to take the property or at least prevent the Little family from occupying it. Ultimately, the situation was very bad for Malcolm X and his family. Their house ended up being torched. It was burned down.

And when the police were called to investigate, a detective by the name of George Waterman showed up to investigate the case using very little evidence. The evidence that he claimed that he had to support his assertion was his inspection of the fire scene.

Waterman determined that Earl Little himself had arsoned his own property in an attempt to gain money from the homer's insurance policy that he had on the property.

Now, there was very strong evidence to suggest that this had not happened, the strongest of which being that Earl Little himself actually went and made a payment in person on his past due homeowners insurance property to a local agent after the fire.

One would think that if an individual was attempting to fraudulently claim insurance on his house, number one, he would have ensured that he had the policy up to date on the payment.

And number two, it seems highly unlikely had he not that he would have attempted to make himself, well, very publicly involved in the fire of a property by making insurance claim on it.

So there's strong evidence not only in that claim, but in a lack of evidence that shows Earl Little would have actually set the fire that disputes the claim made by Watermen. Now, after this destruction of the property, the family had to move and they ended up moving to the south side of Lansing.

And at this point they encountered another problem that is an example of the type of difficulties that black families such as Little would have had in trying to live in Lansing at the time.

And what happens with this piece of property is Earl Little purchases what he believes to be a property that the individual selling it has full title over and therefore full right to sell it.

But after he obtains the deed and starts doing improvements on his property that he's just purchased, it becomes known that the previous property owner still owed taxes on the property. And that outstanding property tax balance at the time was deemed to have negated the totality of the sale to the Little family.

And ultimately Malcolm X's family ends up having to move out of the property. And this happens at the exact same time the other things are going on in the Little family.

They had a profound influence on Malcolm X's life, evident, in effect, he would write about it and speak about it. Several of these events I'm going to discuss here momentarily.

We really want to consider what kind of sources, what kind of evidence does a historian such as myself have when we are trying to reconstruct this life. The little family ended up having a presence in Lansing that extended beyond Malcolm X himself.

And the family in this area have made a major mark, a major influence on the significance of Malcolm X's life to American history as a whole. The evidence that we get from this time period, therefore, comes from some of the writings, interviews that people did with Malcolm X's siblings.

A couple of them in particular, did have somewhat of a public presence.

When he was a teenager, he ended up moving out east and ended up being involved in various activities, one of which was criminal activity that got him sent to prison for several years.

And after he was released from prison, he ended up becoming involved in recruiting efforts into a militant Islamic sect called the Nation of Islam that would ultimately lead to a variety of other organizations that Malcolm X would be involved in now. That is where his civil rights activism is best known for. But again, that is actually after the years that we are considering in these episodes.

And so I want to get us to that point. And getting us to that point is, of course, looking at the childhood of Malcolm X and what it was like for him to live in Lansing.

Where did he go to school at? Did he have friends in the area when he was a child? Of course he did.

What happened in his life when he was a kid that ended up making it to the point where he didn't live in Lansing anymore by the time he was in the 8th or 9th grade. Let's consider these things for a moment. Malcolm X ended up leaving for history, a very important work on his life.

This work is called the Autobiography of Malcolm. I mentioned this in the previous two episodes in the series of Lanstories discussing Malcolm X.

And the way the Autobiography of Malcolm X came into existence is it was a book that was published by an author. The author is named Alex Haley.

Halley himself was a young journalist and an up and coming author at the time who wrote for a variety of publications around the country and had arranged for a series of sit down meetings with Malcolm X. At first, the meetings resulted in very little of any productive material that Alex Haley could turn into an autobiography.

But eventually the two ended up becoming comfortable with one another to the point where Malcolm X opened up and told Alex Haley his life story. Which is why when the book was published, it was called the Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley.

Now, in the autobiography, as told Alex Haley, Malcolm X talks quite extensively about his childhood in Lansing and he offers us an insight into what that world was like.

And in this book, Marble really seeks out to, as he stated very clearly in the beginning of the book, number one, try to either prove or disprove many of the things that Malcolm X stated and Alex Haley published in the autobiography. But then he also really wanted to look at trying to determine who ultimately was responsible for killing Malcolm X.

And so the two sources provided for the historian or for anybody who is really interested in learning about Malcolm X and his life in greater detail, Interesting two sort of anchors of narrative that tell the story of Malcolm X and then provide us with, from the bibliographies within those books or the source material that the authors used avenues into other sources that we might have that would show us what life was like for Malcolm X at the time.

But then at the same time, the story that Malcolm X encountered would have differed quite a bit from what white children would have experienced at the time.

And Malcolm X's childhood, it should never be overlooked, was one that contained many traumatic episodes that would have disturbed any child's development, regardless of broader social situations. At the time. Malcolm X attended Pleasant Grove Elementary School on the south side of the City.

He later on would go to attend a junior high school nearby in South Lansing. And this is a very tumultuous time in the Little family's life.

A Michigan State trooper had instead visited the Little home and had to make an announcement to Louise Little, and that would be Malcolm X's mother, that Earl had been found lying on the street in Lansing, badly injured from what appeared to be a streetcar accident and that he was at a local hospital and that she should go see him immediately because his condition looked serious.

So Louise Little did indeed travel to the hospital and what she encountered was her husband, who was on the brink of death, and he died shortly thereafter. And the police investigation then went underway to try to determine what happened to Earl Little.

The police ruled that Earl Little had been involved in an accident involving a streetcar.

He had been found lying in the street on East Kalamazoo street, actually on the east side of Lansing, near the intersection of Kalamazoo in Detroit, just outside of the city limits, actually. And the wounds that his father had obtained indicated very much that he had been run over by a streetcar.

It's actually quite graphic, the descriptions that exist of what happened to his father.

One of his legs was almost completely severed by a streetcar, which, if you do not know what a streetcar is, it's a train that ran down the middle of the road.

In the Pre World War II era of the United States, almost every city had electrified train service that went all around it, including smaller cities like Lansing.

And then after World War II, these streetcar lines were eliminated because Americans decided the personal automobile was going to be the primary means of getting around a town like Lansing.

This isn't something that typically happens. The police, however, did not investigate this incident beyond the determination that they made that it was a accident.

In fact, he mentioned in the autobiography that he believed the Black Legion might have been partially responsible for the death of his father. But later on, in other speeches or other writings, Malcolm X would also refer to his father's death as an accident.

So even with the historian looking at Malcolm X's own mentions of his father's death, it's hard to determine what exactly happened.

But it is not hard to determine the prominence of the Black Legion and their terror that they unleashed on black families, such as the Little family in cities such as Lansing. At the time. The Black Legion themselves were an organization similar to the Ku Klux Klan.

They were white supremacist group that had been spawned in Ohio out of local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. And like the Klan, they were anti black, anti Catholic, anti labor union, anti Jewish.

And like the Ku Klux Klan, tried to implement their racist ideology through violence by assaulting, murdering and destroying the property of black families. They were a thuggish organization, true and true. And their activities were quite notorious actually, around the state of Michigan.

The Black Legion, in fact, had a entire separate political group, a political wean of them called the Wolverine Republican League.

And they were so prominent that they ran candidates for public office, including state and national offices in Michigan, and used the offices of a very prominent attorney in downtown Detroit as their mailing address. So they were actually quite bold in their assertion of their power at the time.

And all of this background information is absolutely vital in understanding why the family would have suspected foul play to begin with.

Upon receiving the news that their father had been murdered or had been found injured and later on would die, there would be a reason why the family might suspect murder. But again, the police investigation was inconclusive and the police never made a formal declaration that the father had been murdered.

After Earl Little's death, however, the family situation gets much and much worse. Earl Little was primary breadwinner from the family.

And his death, like the death of any primary breadwinner at the time, would have absolutely devastated the family. The situation turned into one where Malcolm X's mother was left as a single mother caring for several children under the age of 18.

And she eventually ended up being involved in a relationship with another man. Out of that relationship, she gave birth to another child.

And then shortly after that, the state of Michigan actually forcefully committed Louise Little to the state psychiatric facility in Kalamazoo. And broke the little family up. Malcolm X himself ended up in the care of two foster families, one of which were the Gohanas.

They were a family that lived in the same neighborhood as Malcolm X on the south side of Lansing. After that, Malcolm X was reassigned into a new living arrangement.

This time he was sent to live in a home for orphaned boys in Mason, and there he ended up attending the Mason public schools.

Now, at this point in life, Malcolm X is 14 or 15 years old, and we know from reading the autobiography they had some interactions with fellow classmates and school teachers that would go on to have a profound impact on his life.

He tells a couple stories in particular out of the autobiography of Malcolm X that are really, really telling, one of which is a story where he relates to the absolute desperation of poverty that him and his siblings had in making attempts to hunt animals out of backyards in neighborhoods to try to get something to eat. Malcolm X tells over and over again the autobiography of him and his siblings being on the brink of starvation. Things were so desperate.

But then the other thing that comes out of this period in the autobiography of Malcolm X is Malcolm X as an adult relates what he was thinking at the time when he was a child, of these terrible events that he witnessed, and then also attempts to go back and revisit that with the mind of an adult.

He has a profound experience when his sister, Ella Little, who was a sister of his from a previous marriage his father had. So some folks might refer to her as a half sister because we can't have half of peoples.

I personally don't really refer to people as half siblings, but others do.

And his sister, therefore, from his father's first marriage, came to Mason and the Lansing area, really to check on Malcolm and see how he and his siblings were doing.

And what she encountered were siblings that had been strewn about the region, the Lansing region, because the family had been broke up in foster care. She ends up arranging for visits to go visit Malcolm X's mother, Louise Little, at the psychiatric hospital in Kalamazoo.

Malcolm X is profoundly influenced by what he sees there and visiting his mother in the facility. And eventually Ella would invite Malcolm X to come live with her in Massachusetts.

She actually lived in Roxbury, which is a working class area of Boston at the time was an area that had a prominent African American community in it. Malcolm X ends up leaving Lansing, therefore the Lansing area.

I should say more accurately speaking when he is 15 years old and he moves therefore in with Ella. That is going to conclude Malcolm X's childhood in Lansing.

And if you want to find out more about what happens to his life as he leaves Michigan, read the Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. Read the biography of Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention by Manny Marble and consult other sources too.

We will keep telling Lance stories and I will see you all next time. You've been listening to Lanstories with me, David Siwik. For more information on this program and to stream past episodes, visit lccconnect.org.

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Hosted by faculty, staff and community members, LCC Connect explores our college's work in the community, important topics in higher education, and our vision for the future. Catch the vibe on 89.7 FM or online at LCC connect. Org. Until next time. Remember, keep telling good stories.