Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19, 1925. His parents were Grenada-born Louise Little (née Norton), a multilingual seamstress by trade, and Georgia-born Earl Little, a Baptist preacher and handyman. Before he married Louise in 1919, Earl had fathered and abandoned his first wife and their three children in Georgia. Malcolm was their fourth-born child. His parents were politically active followers of Marcus Garvey.
Jamaican expatriate Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) launched in Harlem in 1916. In the 1920s Garvey published the “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” a call for displaced Africans and their descendants around the world to return to their homeland continent, where they would liberate sub-Saharan Africa from its European colonizers. Garvey’s campaign in the U.S. to unite “all people of African ancestry around the world into one great country” opposed the position taken by the NAACP, which regarded the U.S. as Black Americans’ hard-earned homeland. To the NAACP, Black Americans staked the moral high ground in their legislative and judicial struggle for civil rights and sought unimpeded opportunity to participate equally with whites in all venues of power. In 1924, after a surveillance campaign waged against him by the Bureau of Investigation (established in 1908, later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation), Garvey was imprisoned and later deported to Jamaica on a $25 charge of mail fraud. Until his death in 1940, Garvey directed his followers from Jamaica.
Having been threatened by torch-bearing Ku Klux Klanspeople, the Littles left Omaha in 1928, traveling first to Milwaukee, then to Lansing, Michigan. They lost their first house to a fire, after which Earl purchased a six-acre plot just south of the city. Here the family had a big garden and raised chickens and rabbits while Earl attended to UNIA work. During the Great Depression, Earl acted as Garvey’s representative in the Midwest, and the preacher-organizer took young Malcolm with him to UNIA meetings in different people’s houses. At home and on the road, the precocious Malcolm was imbued with a strong sense of Black pride. In 1931, Earl Little was killed by a Lansing streetcar, a bizarre and gruesome mishap that the Lansing coroner ruled accidental—though Malcolm believed his father was murdered by a Ku Klux Klan-like hate group, the Black Legion.