In part one of a three part episode, host David Siwik discusses life in Lansing in the 1920s and 1930s as the childhood home of Malcolm X, with a focus on broader socioeconomic realities in the city and elsewhere at the time.  Siwik discusses the arrival of the Little family into Lansing in the 1920s and the broader cultural dynamic their arrival into a growing industrial city with strained race relations.

Keywords/Tags:

• Malcolm X
• Earl Little
• Louise Little
• Lansing
• Michigan
• United States
• Michigan History
• 1920s
• Great Migration
• Harlem Renaissance
• American history 1920s-1940s
• Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley, by Alex Haley
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable
• Federal Housing Administration
• Home Owner’s Loan Corporation
• New Deal
• National Housing Act, 1934

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.

Telling stories is indeed what we do here on Lanstories and I wish to welcome back all of my listeners. It has been a minute, actually it's been a few since we last explored a land story, and that means we have a lot to talk about and we do today.

So welcome, welcome. This will be the start, really of our third season of the Lanstories program.

And in researching the topic for today, one of the themes that we are definitely going to explore throughout our season three episodes of Lanstories is very much how places change over time and how much of that change that a place undergoes over time is due to the changing of the generations, the changing of the people who live in those places.

And the place we're talking about primarily on this episode and many that we have on Lanstories would be Michigan's capital city, the city of Lansing.

That is this episode of Lanstories. And Malcolm X himself spent quite a bit of time in Michigan throughout his entire life, actually.

And the reason why Malcolm X's life story is also a land story is because, because of that fact, much of the time that he spent in Michigan was spent here in Lansing.

And taking a look at Malcolm X's life in Lansing does not only give us that opportunity to look at lansing in the 20s and 30s of the last century using one person's story and the story of a person as a child and a teenager growing up in Lansing at the time to look at smart things that were going on in the community. And Malcolm X is a person whose legacy continues to be a legacy of great importance here in the United States and here in Lansing as well.

Malcolm X did not begin his life in Lansing, though. He's actually born in omaha, Nebraska.

And now it is called the Shabazz center, named for Malcolm X and his wife.

And during that period of time in his life, many things are going on and we're going to get into all that stuff as we look at Malcolm X's life. But we definitely want to focus on the Lansing connections to all of this. It is Lance stories, after all.

That is the purpose of our being and there are many. But as I said, his life did not begin in Lansing. He was actually born in Omaha, Nebraska, as I said.

And from what we know about Malcolm X's life, part of the reason why they moved was because of pressures that his family faced because of certain activities his father was involved in. Malcolm X moves to Lansing as a 2 year old boy with his parents. His parents were Earl Little and Louise Helen Little.

Earl was born in Georgia and his mother, Louise Helen Little was actually born in Granada and ended up immigrating to the United States. Now Earl and Louise Helen then were married. They started a family.

And Earl Little was involved in the Baptist churches that he and his family attended.

And he was also involved in something called the Universal Negro Improvement association or the UNIA and was very interested in and expressed some of the beliefs to that organization's founder, Marcus Garvey. And Marcus Garvey and the UNIA advocated for an idea, a movement called Pan Africanism.

And so when it comes to the United States, the what would become the United States was actually founded way back when as a series of colonies from the British. But then other nations colonized parts of North America as well.

And all of those national entities that colonized in North America ended up in one place or another at one point or another, involving slavery and setting up slave labor plantations or other slave labor economic systems as a primary modality. So this had resulted in Africans being enslaved and spread around the world.

Marcus Garvey believed that the remedy for the plight of African Americans living in the United States at the time.

And that in order to remedy all the negative consequences the centuries of the situation had brought about, people of African ancestry around the world, including, including those living in the United States who are the descendants of former slaves, should unite, be reinvigorated in their African heritage and African culture, and sort of reassemble the power of African culture and African unity as a means of not only helping African Americans when it comes to the American component of this, but Africans who had been hyphenated, if you will, spread around the world through colonialism and through slavery along the same lines.

Now, one of the things that Marcus Garvey advocated for in order for this impact to occur in the American black community was for African Americans to start their own businesses. This is an idea, by the way, that is going to be influential in Malcolm X's life later on, as we'll see.

And actually, there are several connections between the ideas of the Universal Negro Improvement association and those that Malcolm X would later express when he became involved in community activism and community organization and what we would eventually call the civil rights movement in the United States and that included, or those ideas, I should say, continuing to speak in Plural included not only black entrepreneurship and the ownership of businesses by African Americans, but also African Americans taking control of many other aspects of culture of their society that people like Malcolm X, and to an extent folks like Marcus Garvey who had come before him, advocated, had been misappropriated and taken over by white culture. So there's a lot, a lot of ideas that are, that are circulating in the world at the time Malcolm X comes into it.

And his father and his family were very aware of those ideas.

And with Earl Little being involved in the Universal Negro Improvement association and being involved in the churches that he attended with his family, Malcolm X was exposed to a wide range of ideas, but most of which were along the lines of black liberation and African American unity while he was a child. Now, as I had mentioned a few moments ago, Malcolm X then moves to Lansing with his family.

And Malcolm X would later describe his childhood in Lansing quite extensively to a few people that he met throughout his life.

Haley, through a fairly strained early on relationship with Malcolm X, eventually was able to establish enough trust with him that Malcolm X and Alex Haley sat down and had a.

I would call it a series, but it was really hundreds of conversations and meetings where they talked about Malcolm X's life and the work that came out of this. It was published after Malcolm X died, was a book called the Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley.

Because what ends up happening is Malcolm X doesn't actually spend all of his childhood in Lansing after the family moves here. And there are a lot of reasons for that. I'll get into them momentarily.

Malcolm X eventually ends up for a period of time living in foster care, including in a small town outside of Lansing.

But before we get to that part of the story, we need to explore in further detail not only what Malcolm X told to Alex Haley as a source of us now, many years after the fact, trying to figure out what life was like for Malcolm X and his family in Lansing in the time under exploration. But at the same time we want to consider that what Malcolm X told Alex Haley is exactly that. It's what Malcolm X told to Alex Haley.

And the autobiography of Malcolm X has for a long time, since it was published, which was not long after Malcolm X died, stood as a major source not only for Malcolm X, but it's a source that people look at in looking at aspects of the civil rights movement, aspects of family life, race relations, crime and punishment, the situation in urban America, many facets of American life we can glean from looking at the autobiography of Malcolm X if we were trying to understand what life was like in the United States for a person like Malcolm X at that time period. So it's a fascinating source. With all of that said, it is by no means an exclusive source.

And in fact, as any historian should do, was certainly not the only source used in me researching the content and the materials for this episode.

And for those of you who have listened to Lance stories for a while, or maybe if you haven't listened to it for a while, if you only listened to a few episodes, you would have noted that oftentimes an important component of our individual stories in Lanstories is that behind the scenes look of how a historian works with evidence and materials and how a historian is able to take this evidence and develop a story, a story of what happened in the past.

And when it comes to looking at this type of evidence, the life of Malcolm X, the existence of a work like the autobiography, that has existed for quite some time now, the book's been in print for over 50 years now. That existence of a source like that can be both a help and a hindrance to the historian. The help aspect of it, I think is quite obvious.

The book runs several hundred pages. It's probably, I don't know, 130,000 words, if not more. So there's a lot of stuff in there.

And because the autobiography was created in a slightly different scenario than, and I suspect most autobiographies have been, it was created by somebody telling his life story to another individual who then actually wrote the words down. That gives us a dynamic to the source that we need to keep in mind.

The practical reality is when somebody tells somebody a story, there's an immediate introduction into that story of a second person involved. Right? So, for example, Malcolm X told hundreds of stories about his life to Alex Haley.

All of those stories that he would have told them were events being relived that Alex Haley did not himself witness or live through.

And when we throw into the fact that the fact of the matter that the book was ultimately published after Malcolm X died, we have to take into the fact that this work is going to introduce ideas from the mind and the pen of Alex Haley that an autobiography that had only been written by Malcolm X with nobody else being involved in it, likely would not have.

The autobiography of Malcolm X has actually taken on very much a life of its own as not only a historical source, but also as an object of its own investigation. In the same way that Malcolm X life was the object of investigation, if you will, in the autobiography.

Quite frankly, Americans at the time weren't used to reading about or having people tell them about things like family dynamics that happen when a family is broken up or put into foster care.

Part of the autobiography of Malcolm X involves Malcolm X recounting from the eyes of a child some fairly traumatic events that he witnessed as a child.

So even taking out of the autobiography, which isn't really possible to do, quite frankly, all of the aspects that historians and others have studied since all race and race relations and Malcolm X's involvement in all kinds of very important nationwide movements that eventually had a major impact on American history, that personal aspect of it is something that shouldn't be overlooked, nor should it be overlooked that it is and would have been at the time and emotionally challenging endeavor for anybody to do to recount trauma that he witnessed as a child.

Now, since Malcolm X passed away, a great amount of academic research, and not just academics, but every other individual who is interested in looking at the history of America in the timeframe that Malcolm X was active.

There's been a lot of interest in his life with those folks as well, and that has encountered a good plethora of historical and other type of academic studies since then on Malcolm X.

And now one can peruse the literature of various academic subjects that approach Malcolm X or subjects that might be related to his life and have no shortage of source material to look at.

With that said, the autobiography remains an important source, and it was certainly one that I used in researching and producing this episode, but there were certainly others as well.

And the comparison of what Malcolm X discussed about his life, not only his life as a child in the Lansing, Michigan area, but other aspects of his life with what other sources tell us about comparable events or cross reference to individuals that are mentioned. Scenarios that have played out is an interesting aspect of studying Malcolm X's life now all these years later.

So what does the autobiography and other historical sources that are out there say about, well, Malcolm X's childhood, his adolescence in Lansing and then in general, what would it have been like living in Lansing at the time period, regardless of who you were?

Those are things that we can absolutely glean out of our historical sources and thankfully we have and we are going to look at what some of those sources tell us.

So as is oftentimes the case, when we approach a historical subject and then get into it in detail, we have to be able to properly place people in places, in context.

And this sometimes, well, you all know who've listened to this program a while, this sometimes means that we are about to take a walk and we are, we're going to take a walk on land stories. This is a little bit different of a walk than we've taken before. Our walks usually involve us walking through time.

This time, our walk through time is going to take us to a different part of Lansing though than we've walked through before. Usually on land stories when we have gone through through walks through time, we walk down streets in downtown Lansing or that's Vincinity.

I want you to walk down a different street with me though. Right now we are not in downtown Lansing. We are instead on the north side of Lansing.

And why is this important to us or why would we want to know this when we are trying to learn about Malcolm X? Well, walk with me through time and you'll find out.

So we're going to go for a little bit of a walk and it's going to take us a few minutes because this stroll takes us away from downtown Lansing. We're going to walk all the way up through the neighborhood that we now call Old Town in Lansing.

For those of you that do not live in Michigan's beautiful capital city, well, it's a little bit too bad we miss you, because those of us that do know this is a great place to live. And I will say this because I am in Lansing right now recording this episode.

But for those of you that aren't quite familiar with our town, Old Town refers to a neighborhood in Lansing that's just north of what we call downtown Lansing nowadays. And basically, if you were to walk on Washington Avenue north of downtown, you would end up at the corner of Washington and Grand River Avenue.

And we are going to snake our way up along the grand river and end up on North Grand River Avenue. And we're going to walk and we're going to walk in the direction heading towards Waverly Road.

We've got a little over a mile to walk if we were to walk all the way down Grand River Avenue to Waverly Road. But we're walking through time, so we can walk wherever we want.

And one of the neighborhoods that was being put in as the roaring 20s wind down in Lansing was one of a few houses that were being built on residential streets being put in off Grand River Avenue on Lansing's northwest side. This is the exact same time that the modern day mortgage industry as we know it, with consumer mortgages being made available to the masses.

So urban and suburban residents were becoming homeowners in a way that people who had lived in cities hadn't up to that point. This is all going on at this exact same time period.

And a little family is going to learn this in a very harsh way that is going to have a tremendous impact on Malcolm X's life, not only as he grows up in Lansing, but as he moves away as a young adult and lives elsewhere. And that part of the story of Malcolm X and Lansing is going to have to wait until the next episode of Lance Stories.

So you all will be back for that, I have no doubt. Until then, you're gonna have to wait for the second part of the story.

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.