1.+Childhood

Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. As a young boy, his mother told him an account of how racist violence had threatened the life of his family even before he was born. This heritage of racial violence places him symbolically in a long line of black freedom fighters. // Still shouting threats, the Klansmen finally spurred their horses and galloped around the house, shattering every windowpane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come. // From Omaha, Earl Little, Malcolm's father, moved his family first to Milwaukee and finally to East Lansing, Michigan. He was "belligerent toward all the children, except me," Malcolm recalled. "I actually believe that, as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child." Of all the children, Malcolm alone was allowed to attend UNIA, Universal Negro Improvement Association, meetings with his father. In East Lansing, as in many Michigan towns, blacks were forbidden by law to be on the streets after dark. UNIA meetings were necessarily conducted by day, and in secret. The last time he saw his father alive, Malcolm was about six. His parents had been fighting. As his father was walking up the road that afternoon after a particularly nasty scene, his mother, who was given to prophetic visions, had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. "Early!" she screamed, running out to the porch after him; but he had already gone. The next anybody saw of him, Earl Little lay bleeding across the streetcar tracks, his head bashed in, his body torn almost in two. The corner called it an accident. The insurance company claimed suicide. Some said it was murder- most likely by the Black Legion, a Klan-like group that had burned down the Little house two years before. Louis Little, Malcolm's mother, was a West Indian who looked white. She had, in fact, a white father of whom she was bitterly ashamed. Louis tended to favor the darker children, punishing Malcolm more severely than she otherwise might. Although better educated than her husband, she had no means of supporting the family after her husband's death. Everyone in the family was suffered from hunger. Bad got worse during the Depression of the 1930s. Dizzy with hunger, Malcolm and his brothers supplemented the dandelion greens that grew wild along the roadside with whatever they could steal. His life of crime had already begun. Louis Little began to lose touch with reality. She was put in a mental institution, where she languished for twenty-six years. Malcolm was sent first to a foster home, and then to a detention home in the small town of Mason, Michigan. He was thirteen. Later, at mostly white Mason Junior High, Malcolm was a smart, focused student and graduated from junior high school at the top of his class. However, he experienced too much racial inequalities that he lost interest in school. For example, once in a class, a favorite teacher told Malcolm his dream of becoming a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger." He dropped out, spent some time in Boston, Massachusetts working various odd jobs, and then traveled to Harlem, New York where he committed petty crimes. By 1942 Malcolm was coordinating various narcotics, prostitution and gambling rings.

media type="youtube" key="tiSS7h3p1L4" height="461" width="576" (Childhood of Malcolm; 2:17- 4:47)