Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [26]
It probably did not take Malcolm long, once he reached Boston that February of 1941, to realize that his half sisterʹs idyllic middle-class existence hid an erratic lifestyle supported by petty crime. In temperament, Ella turned out to be neither a stable parental figure nor a particularly pleasant housemate. Her repeated run-ins with the law testify to her belligerent and paranoid behavior, a recklessness that only worsened through the years. Two decades after these events, she was admitted to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, after charges of being armed with a dangerous weapon. There, she was interviewed by the centerʹs director of psychiatry, Dr. Elvin Semrad. Even though he reported that she had been “a model patient, entirely reasonable, showing wit, intelligence, and charm,” he was far from won over. Ella was also “a paranoid character,” he observed, who “because of the militant nature of her character . . . could be considered a dangerous individual.”
During Ella’s trip to Lansing to check in on her siblings, she had met Kenneth Collins, a twenty-four-year-old blessed with good looks and a suave dancing style, and the two became involved. Early in 1941, Collins had moved to Boston, whereupon he almost immediately enraged Ella by hanging out with her brother, Earl, Jr., at dance halls and nightclubs. Still, on June 20, 1942, she married him anyway.
In the 1940s, Ella Collins and her family lived among a growing cluster of black homeowners and renters in the Waumbeck and Humboldt Avenue section of Boston, known colloquially as the Hill. This neighborhood was one of several distinctly different black communities that developed in the city during the first half of the twentieth century. The most important, and largest, was Boston’s South End, home to working-class and low-income blacks, with its heart located along Columbus and Massachusetts avenues. Another was the Intown section, located in Lower Roxbury and the blocks just beyond the South End. Yet these inner-city areas had not become all-black ghettos—yet. Thousands of white ethnic immigrants—Lithuanians, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and others—who had arrived earlier in the century, still lived together in close proximity with their new black neighbors. Like other cities in the Northeast at that time, Boston was multiethnic and expanding.
The Hill was a neighborhood in transition. A pleasant community of middle- and working-class families, largely single-family houses, and smaller apartment buildings, it had been predominantly Jewish at the turn of the century, but saw its racial composition change with the rising fortunes of blacks in the years leading up to World War II. Even before Pearl Harbor, Boston’s employment began picking up. Local industries and companies that had previously hired few or no blacks began lifting the color bar, including the Navy Yard, the Quincy Shipyard, and passenger railroad companies. Plus a new era of black migration had opened. In the years just before and during World War II, nearly two million Southern blacks relocated to other sections of the United States, with extended families first sending one or two of their members to a city to find work and locate housing before the rest followed. Relatives on Ella’s motherʹs side of her family, the Masons, moved in large numbers to Boston. Rodnell Collins estimated that by the mid-1940s Ella had as many as fifty members of her extended family living in greater Boston.
The population influx, combined with new opportunities and income for African Americans, created a major shift in the demographics of Boston neighborhoods. By the late 1930s hundreds of Boston blacks had risen to become police officers, clerical workers, schoolteachers, and white-collar professionals, and their success led them to seek out better housing in places