Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [19]
Perhaps because thousands of poor Southern migrants constituted the majority of Detroit’s black working class, the city continued to be a Mecca for the cause. In 1924, Garveyites estimated membership in the city at seven thousand. Its African-American migrant population was predominantly between the ages of twenty and forty-four, and most were unmarried men, semiskilled or unskilled. Hundreds had found employment in Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant, but others were routinely hired only in dangerous jobs in the foundries. These young migrant workers continued to be a prime constituency for the Garvey movement.
Even well into the early 1930s, Garveyite branches thrived in Michigan’s smaller cities and towns, despite—or perhaps because of—the advent of the Great Depression. Between 1921 and 1933, fifteen UNIA divisions or branch organizations were established there. Earl organized fleets of cars of local Garveyites to travel to UNIA gatherings (usually held in Detroit) and imposed the movement’s principles in his own household. African-American and even Caribbean newspapers were read at home, Wilfred Little recalled, and the children were regularly tutored about “what was going on in the Caribbean area and parts of Africa,” as well as on news of the movement from around the country. From these educational efforts grew the Pan-African perspective that would become so crucial for Malcolm later in life.
The Little children were constantly drilled in the principles of Garveyism, to such an extent that they expressed their black nationalist values at school. For example, on one morning following the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the national anthem at school, Wilfred informed his teacher that blacks also had their own anthem. Instructed to sing it, Wilfred complied: “It began with the words . . . ‘Ethiopia, the land of the free . . ’ That creates some problems,” Wilfred recalled, “because here is this little nigger that feels he is just equal to anybody else, he got his own little national anthem that he sings, and he’s proud of it. . . . It wasn’t the way they wanted things to go.”
As the family continued to grow, Louise did her best to care for them all with a meager income. To learn the Garveyite principles of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, each older child was allotted a personal patch of garden. They continued to raise chickens and rabbits, but the daily pressures of poverty and their reputation as Garveyite oddballs took its toll. Earl was prone to physical violence with his wife and most of his children. Yet Malcolm, who idolized his father, would routinely escape punishment. Somehow the small boy sensed that his light color served as a kind of shield from Earl’s beatings. As an adult, Malcolm recalled the violent incidents, admitting that his parents quarreled frequently; however, nearly all of his whippings as a boy came from his mother.
As the Great Depression deepened, impoverished whites in the Midwest became attracted to a new vigilante formation, the Black Legion. Starting as the Klan Guard in late 1924 or early 1925 in Bellaire, Ohio, the formation employed a blend of anti-black and anti-Catholic rhetoric. Black robes instead of white were used; “burning crosses on midnight hillsides were in; noontime parades down Main Street were out.” The Black Legion successfully attracted many law enforcement personnel and some union members in public transport. By the early 1930s, its members routinely engaged in night riding and policing of town and village morals, with their victims subjected to any number of humiliations, including whippings, being tarred and feathered, or just being run out of town.
Early in the evening of September 8, 1931, shortly after supper, Earl