Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [20]
Several hours earlier Baril had been summoned to the scene of a streetcar accident. This was the first serious accident that the young officer had investigated; his vivid impression, his widow, Florentina, later recalled, was that “the man had been cut in two . . . the accident was quite violent.” Police had immediately hypothesized that Earl had somehow slipped and fallen while boarding a moving streetcar at night. Perhaps he’d lost his footing and was pulled under the streetcarʹs rear wheels, they speculated. The possibility that Earl could have been the victim of racist violence was never considered.
Earl suffered terrible pain for several hours after being taken to hospital. His left arm had been crushed, his left leg nearly severed from his torso. By the time Louise reached him, he was dead. The Lansing coroner ruled Earl’s death accidental, and the Lansing newspaper account presented the story that way as well. Yet the memories of Lansing blacks as set down in oral histories tell a different story, one that suggested foul play and the involvement of the Black Legion.
Wilfred recalled attending the funeral and viewing his fatherʹs corpse. “While my mother was talking, I slipped into the back where they had the body on the table,” he remembered. “The streetcar had cut him just below the torso and it had cut his left leg completely off and had crushed the right leg, because the streetcar. . . had just run right over him. He ended up bleeding to death.” Malcolm’s most vivid memory of his fatherʹs funeral was his motherʹs hysteria, and later her difficulty in coping with what had happened. He believed that he and his siblings “adjusted” to the challenging reality of Early Little’s death better than Louise did. Nevertheless, the children were deeply disturbed by swirling rumors about their father’s violent death. Philbert, then eight years old, was told that “somebody had hit my father from behind with a car and knocked him under the streetcar. Then I learned later that somebody had shoved him under that car.”
A forensic reconstruction of Earl Little’s death suggests that the story Philbert had heard may have been true. Before leaving home on the night of his death, Earl had told his wife that he was traveling to North Lansing. However, according to a local newspaper, his body was discovered at the intersection of Detroit Street and East Michigan Avenue, one block east of the town’s boundary line. Few blacks lived in the area. The odd location of the body suggests the possibility that Earl was struck by a car or perhaps bludgeoned in one location, and then moved under a streetcar at another site, making it appear to have been a terrible accident. Earl Little’s possible murder may have served the same purpose that lynchings did in the South—to terrorize local blacks and to suppress their acts of resistance.
Louise harbored no doubts that her husband had been murdered, possibly by the Black Legion. Although she identified Earl’s body, she does not appear to have challenged the police report or otherwise tried to search out the truth. Malcolm remained throughout his life both haunted by his fatherʹs tragic end and ambivalent about how it occurred. In 1963, while visiting Michigan State University, he described Earl’s death as accidental, yet the following year cast his father as a martyr for black liberation.
With their patriarch’s sudden death, the Little family was plunged into an