Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [15]
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 KKKʹs 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