Malcolm X and Lansing

“but people, knowing I was from Michigan, would ask me what city. Since most New Yorkers had never heard of Lansing, I would name Detroit. Gradually, I began to be called “Detroit Red”—and it stuck.”
— The Autobiography of Malcolm X

It is May 19, 2010 and I am in Lansing, Michigan. This is the city where Malcolm X, born May 19, 1925 (he was born in Omaha, Nebraska), lived for several years as a youngster.

I drove out to the corner of Vincent Court and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Lansing, May 19, 2010, where there is a sign marking the lot of the former home of Malcolm X. Someone has placed a wreath here today. Someone has remembered.

The area is not a slum area but people are struggling here. You can see it. Low income housing, third hand automobiles, no name greasy food joints, dollar stores, a lot of people, black, white, or Hispanic, just standing around doing nothing.

Lansing is a city that is often forgotten. But it is the city that not only gave us Malcolm Little, but it gave us Detroit Red, and also, Malcolm X. We know he was here in Lansing at least until 8^th grade before he went to Boston to live with his sister, Ella.

But it is a bittersweet place this Lansing for Malcolm Little.

Allegedly, the family's first home in Lansing was burned to the ground in 1929. This was, according to more than a few writers, and historians, because Malcolm’s father, Earl, was a member of Marcus Garvey’s black Pan-African organization, the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Malcolm’s father was eventually killed in Lansing. He was run over by a streetcar. Malcolm’s suggestion was always that his father was put under that streetcar by the KKK. Nothing definitive was ever revealed.

According to a newspaper account of his death at the time, Mr. Little died “because he forgot coat…” The same account states that Mr. Little, 41 years old, was “thought to have fallen under truck.” There was a coroner’s inquest but the damage was done; Earl Little, the glue of the family was gone. The Littles, a mother and 10 children, Malcolm included, were scattered throughout the local foster care system. His mother, Louise Little was committed to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo.

It was in Lansing that Malcolm X became disillusioned with becoming something in life, He was a very good student and became class president of his mostly white class. But in a very famous exchange, Malcolm’s English teacher, Mr. Ostrowski told him that becoming a lawyer was not a realistic goal for a black boy. He, Malcolm, should focus in on perhaps becoming a carpenter. Malcolm, as the story goes, was finished with school after that incident.

He left for Boston not long thereafter and became “Detroit Red.” He wound up in prison, and after his rehabilitation, and commitment to a new life in the Nation of Islam, he was now Malcolm X, the revolutionary leader who has come to symbolize the black experience in America even today.

That Lansing experience framed Malcolm X. His father’s pride and death, the destruction of a black family, the racial hatred of an educator telling a very bright black boy that he was nothing.

Then “Detroit Red” and the resurrection years later as our black shining prince.

There are two positive anecdotes from the world of Lansing, Michigan worthy of note.

First, in 1958, Malcolm X married the love of his life Betty Dean Saunders or Betty X (later Betty Shabazz) in Lansing. Who knows why Lansing was chosen to make their union real?

The couple gave birth to five daughters and by all indications, their marriage was a dedicated and faithful union. When she died after being burned in a fire started by her grandson in June 1997, she was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery, in New York, beside her husband.

Also, on January 23, 1963, Malcolm returned triumphantly to East Lansing (Lansing) and gave a speech at Michigan State University. The speech (it is available online with the right computer software), entitled, “Twenty Million Black people in Political, Economic, and Mental Prison,” lasts 21 minutes and to Malcolm’s personal satisfaction, several of his former white classmates from grade school attended.

His former classmates could not believe some of the “fearsome aspects of" Malcolm's "national image.” They came to witness for themselves what their Malcolm had become. One of his classmates, a female, who had not laid eyes on Malcolm since he dropped out of school after his disillusionment, left the Michigan State speech “bewildered that this fiery podium speaker had no trace of… her gentle friend…

This is Malcolm X and the city of Lansing. May 19, 2010.

(a version of this essay originally appeared in Ebony Magazine online - May 20, 2010)