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By Root 1719 0

of tackling the white race as he is doing today.” “When Malcolm went to Mason, you could see a change in him,” Wilfred recalled. “Some for the better, some for the worse. . . . He would complain about some of the things the teachers would try to do—they would try to discourage him from taking courses that black people weren’t supposed to take; in other words, keep him in his place.” It hadn’t bothered him particularly during the previous year when white students who had befriended him continued to call him nigger. But now Malcolm was keenly aware of the social distance between himself and others. An English teacher, Richard Kaminska, sharply discouraged him from becoming a lawyer. “You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger,” Kaminska advised him. “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. . . . Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” Malcolm’s grades plummeted and his truculence increased. Within several months, he found himself expelled.

Already burdened by the demands of a large family, Wilfred and Hilda soon found they could not handle their wayward younger brother. Once again, Ella felt compelled to intervene. Several months earlier, in a letter to Malcolm, she had written:

We miss you so much. Don’t swell up and bust but honest everything seems dead here. Lots of boys called for you. . . . I would like for you to come back but under one condition. Your mind is made up. If I would send your fare could you pay all your bills? Let me know real soon.

Ella believed that Malcolm would be better off under her care, and his older siblings agreed. In early February 1941, three months shy of sixteen, nearly six feet tall and still growing, Malcolm boarded the Greyhound bus at Lansing’s depot. He took pains to wear his best suit, a dark green; the sleeves stopped some way short of his wrists. He wore a narrow-collared light green topcoat. Twenty hours later, his first major reinvention would begin.

CHAPTER 2

The Legend of Detroit Red

1941-January 1946

Even before the bus carrying Malcolm Little pulled into Boston’s main bus terminal, Ella had decided that her half brother would no longer make his own decisions about school. Without checking with him, she enrolled him in a private all-boys’ academy in downtown Boston. Malcolm made at least a halfhearted effort. He arrived at the school the first morning, learned that there were no girls there, and promptly walked out, never to return to a classroom.

It was the first test of wills between the two siblings. As headstrong as her young charge, Ella did not normally allow herself to be overruled. Born on December 13, 1913, in Georgia, she had moved north as a teenager at the beginning of the Great Depression. For a short time she lived in New York City, employed as a floorwalker at a major department store. Standing five feet nine and at 145 pounds, with jet-black skin, Ella cut an imposing figure; store executives “decided she looked evil enough to possibly frighten off potential shoplifters.” After about six months, suspecting her job was going nowhere, she quit. Relocating to Everett, a suburb of Boston, she met and married Lloyd Oxley, a physician at Boston City Hospital. Oxley, a Jamaican, was a strong supporter of Garvey, which she found admirable, but tensions over money, and Ella’s refusal to be dominated, led to divorce in 1934.

Sometime after her marriage ended, Ella began seeing a married man named Johnson, but her money troubles continued. According to her son, Rodnell P. Collins, Ella had used her time catching shoplifters to learn their tricks, and soon she had joined their ranks. Boosting clothing and food items became almost routine as Ella scrambled to assist her relatives. Her transgressions quickly escalated to more serious crimes, and in August 1936 she was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and “lewd and lascivious cohabitation.” She was given a year’s probation on the latter charge, while she pled guilty and received additional probation on the assault and battery. Over the next three years Ella was arrested