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 Milwa
ukee 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.
The police assigned Detective George W. Waterman to investigate the Little family’s house-burning case. White residents in the neighborhood told the detective that a local gas station proprietor, Joseph Nicholson, had called the fire department but it had refused to come. Yet almost immediately, rumors circulated in the neighborhood that Earl had started the fire himself, and Waterman decided to pursue this line of inquiry vigorously. His suspicions were reinforced when he learned that Earl held a two-thousand-dollar home policy with the Westchester Fire Insurance Company, as well as a five-hundred-dollar policy on household contents with the Rouse Insurance Company. Waterman and another officer interviewed Nicholson, who claimed that Earl Little gave him a revolver the previous night. Nicholson produced the gun, which had five remaining bullets and one empty cylinder. Meanwhile, newly homeless, the Littles had decamped to Lansing, to stay temporarily with the family of a man named Herb Walker. That same evening, Waterman drove out to the Walkers’ house while Earl was away and interviewed Louise, who explained to him that she had no knowledge of the fire until she was awakened by her husband. The police next interviewed Wilfred, then nine years old. It was dark by the time Earl finally returned to the Walker house, and Waterman and another officer took him outside to their car to interrogate him. Because some of Earl’s responses did not exactly coincide with those of Louise and Wilfred, Waterman reported later, “We decided to lock Mr. Little up for further investigation.” The police were now convinced that Little had set fire to his house to acquire the insurance money. Their problem was that the district attorney concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Earl. Instead, he was charged only with being in possession of an unregistered handgun; he pled not guilty, and bond was set at five hundred dollars. The weak case was repeatedly delayed by the county prosecutor’s office until February 26, 1930, when it was quickly dismissed.
Waterman’s final report did not indicate that the investigation into Earl’s possible arson had been closed. At the time of the fire, moreover, the Littles’ attorney had been appealing their eviction to the Michigan State Supreme Court. Further, Earl had allowed one of the insurance policies on his home to lapse. On the morning after the fire, he visited a local insurance office and made a late payment on his old policy, saying nothing about the blaze that had just destroyed his home. His hasty actions indicate that he probably did not start the fire: had he intended to do so, he would surely have made the late payment first.
The destruction of a black family’s home by racist whites was hardly unique in the Midwest at this time. In 1923, the Michigan State Supreme Court had upheld the legality of racially restrictive provisions in the sale of private homes. Most Michigan whites felt that blacks had no right to purchase homes in predominantly white communities. Four years before the Littles’ fire, in June 1925, a black couple, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife, Gladys, purchased a single-family home in East Detroit, a white neighborhood, escaping Detroit’s largest ghetto, known as the Black Bottom, and were forced to pay $18,500 even though the fair market value of the modest bungalow was under $13,000. On the night the Sweets moved in, despite the presence of a police inspector, hundreds of angry whites surrounded the house and began smashing its windows with rocks and bricks. Several of the Sweets’ friends shot into the mob, killing one man and wounding another. Ossian and Gladys Sweet plus nine others were subsequently charged with murder. The NAACP vigorously took up the case, hiring celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Despite an all-white jury, eight of the eleven accused were acquitted; the jury divided on the remaining three. The judge subsequently declared a mistrial, and ultimately the Sweets were freed.
This latest setback did not destroy Earl Little’s resolve. He was by now an experienced master carpenter, with the skills necessary to construct a new home. In only a few months, on the extreme south side of Lansing, close to the educational campus of what would later become a part of Michigan State University, the Littles found an inexpensive six-acre plot next to sprawling woodlands. Its owner, a white widow, agreed to sell it to them. Only a few months later, however, the Littles learned that a lien on one half of the property had been filed against her for nonpayment of back taxes. Once again frustrated by the law, they had no recourse but to forfeit the disputed land.
Earl’s anger at his continued misfortunes was largely channeled into his work for the UNIA. Meanwhile, Malcolm, by then five years old, was fast becoming his favorite child, and the two would travel together to UNIA gatherings, usually held in a member's home. Such meetings rarely attracted more than two dozen people, but they were filled with energy and enthusiasm fueled by Earl’s leadership. Malcolm remembered this vividly, writing, “The meetings always closed with my father saying several times and the people chanting after him, ‘Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!’”
As he had in Omaha, however, Earl found recruitment in Lansing difficult. Although as early as 1850 several black families had lived in the area, even by 1910 blacks totaled only 354—about 1.1 percent of the town—of whom about one-fifth had migrated from Canada; the majority had been born in the upper South—states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. The migration of millions of African
Americans from the Deep South (beginning about 1915) drew a steady stream of poor blacks into Michigan’s state capital, so that by 1930 1,409 lived there. It did not take long for class divisions to emerge. The earliest wave of migrants had possessed relatively high levels of education and vocational training. By the 1890s, the majority owned their own homes and some their own businesses, mostly in racially mixed neighborhoods. A small number were employed as stone and brick masons, teamsters, painters, carpenters, and plasterers. At the turn of the century, only 10 percent of the men had been classified as “unskilled and semiskilled.” By contrast, most of those who arrived after 1915 often had no trade to speak of, and the sense of invasion brought about by their sheer numbers provoked new laws that drew sharper racial divisions. With the emergence of segregation laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, restrictive racial covenants on the mortgages of private houses were widely adopted in many states, including Michigan. Such codes had the effect of forcing a second wave of black emigrants to occupy a poor neighborhood in west central Lansing. Although blacks were allowed to vote, their civil and legal rights were restricted in other ways. With only slight exaggeration, Wilfred Little later described blacks’ lives in Michigan in the 1920s and 1930s as “the same as being in Mississippi. . . . When you went into the courts and when you had to deal with the police, it was the same as being down South.”
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