Places of Malcolm X

Malcolm X in March 1964. Library of Congress.

Malcolm X told his own story in an autobiography written with Alex Haley and published after his death; historians have since added interviews with his family and friends. Five places listed in the National Register of Historic Places mark turns in that life.

A life in brief

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha in 1925, and racism shaped his life from the start. Klan threats drove the family from Nebraska, a white supremacist group burned their house in Lansing, Michigan, and his father died in 1931. The police called Earl Little's death an accident; Malcolm and his mother believed the Black Legion, a white supremacist group based in Michigan, had killed him. As a teenager in foster care, Malcolm was elected eighth-grade class president at Mason Junior High School, but when he said he wanted to be a lawyer a teacher used a racial slur and told him to aim for something more "realistic."

In prison for stealing, he took up the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which also drew followers such as the boxer Muhammad Ali. He replaced his family name with "X," for the African name his ancestors lost under slavery, and after his release in 1952 became a minister of the NOI's Temple Number 7 in New York and the organization's public face.

He preached Black empowerment, Black nationalism and separation from white society, believing white Americans would never treat Black Americans fairly. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by contrast, preached nonviolence, a strategy encouraged by Bayard Rustin, and cooperation. Malcolm distinguished separation from segregation: the "separate but equal" laws of his day shut Black people out of white facilities, businesses, homes and schools, while separation, as he put it at Michigan State University in 1963, meant Black communities running their own economy, politics and society.

He met Betty Sanders, later known as Betty Shabazz, in 1955; they married in 1958 and had six children. In late 1963 Elijah Muhammad suspended him for 90 days over his public remarks on President Kennedy's assassination, and Malcolm accused Muhammad of not living by his own teachings. He made the hajj to Mecca as Malik El-Shabazz, the name on his headstone, and on his return left the NOI to become a Sunni Muslim. No longer bound by Muhammad's opposition to a movement whose goal was integration, he grew more open to civil rights work, founding the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He was assassinated during a public appearance in Manhattan on February 21, 1965.

1. Malcolm X House Site, Omaha, Nebraska

Earl and Louise Little came to Omaha from Philadelphia with their first child, Wilfred, after Earl's brother found work at a meatpacking plant there. Like many Black families in the Great Migration, they went where the jobs were. They founded a local chapter of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which promoted pride in African heritage, with Earl organizing and Louise as secretary and branch reporter. White residents harassed them for it. Family accounts tell of hooded Klansmen on horseback breaking the windows one night while Earl was away, and of Louise, pregnant, ordering them off until they left.

After Malcolm's birth on May 19, 1925, the family built a small house on lots at the edge of town. No photographs or descriptions survive; Wilfred remembered a cabin of about 600 square feet at 3448 Pinkney Street, with a garden and chickens. As the Klan grew stronger, Earl sold it, and in December 1926 the family left for Milwaukee. The house was torn down in the 1960s, and the site was listed in the National Register in 1984.

2. Malcolm X–Ella Little-Collins House, Boston, Massachusetts

Within a year the family moved again, to Lansing. Malcolm later described waking there as a small child, in 1929, to gunshots, smoke and flames, his father firing at two men running from the fire they had set, and his mother reaching the yard with the baby just before the house fell in. After Earl's death they lived in deep poverty; Malcolm remembered being dizzy with hunger. He recalled watching his mother's health fail before a court sent her to the state hospital, and the dread the children felt as they saw it happen.

In 1941, after years in foster care, Malcolm moved to the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston to live with his half-sister, Ella Little-Collins. He had visited her the year before on his first trip to a big city, and had never seen so many Black residents, businesses and gathering places. In his autobiography he said Boston made him feel, for the first time, part of a great mass of his own people.

Just before he arrived, Ella had bought a two-and-a-half-story house at 72 Dale Street. She gave him the top floor, set up as a flat with a kitchenette, and he lived there for three years while working odd jobs. The house was listed in the National Register in 2021.

3. Malcolm X / Wilfred and Ruth Little House, Inkster, Michigan

In 1952, after six years in prison on charges connected with a Boston burglary, Malcolm turned up at his brother Wilfred's door at 4336 Williams Street. Living there was a condition of his parole. Family had shaped his time in prison: Wilfred urged him to educate himself, and several siblings encouraged him to join the NOI, and he did both. Wilfred later recalled that his brother came out a changed man, and that he still worried the street might pull him back.

Wilfred, a manager at the Cut Rate Department Store, found Malcolm a job there. The brothers lived, worked and prayed together, and Wilfred took Malcolm to an NOI mosque, Detroit Mosque Number 1. Inspired by the NOI's celebration of Blackness, Malcolm began recruiting members and met Elijah Muhammad, who by the end of 1952 gave him the surname "X." In June 1953 he became assistant minister of the Detroit mosque. From then on the NOI was his main vehicle for change, and the house marks where that path began. It was listed in the National Register in 2021.

Saving the house. Dr. Tareq Ramadan, a professor of anthropology at Wayne State University who grew up about five miles away, learned only in 2018 that his childhood hero had lived there, when his sister told him the nonprofit Project We Hope Dream & Believe was restoring the house as a museum. The group, founded in 2014 by Aaron Sims and Geonisha Washington to support Inkster's young people, sees the work as carrying on the hopes of both brothers; Wilfred, a teacher, had focused his own activism on youth. Ramadan joined in 2020, researched the National Register nomination, applied for a National Park Service African American Civil Rights grant, and organized a community archeological dig with Dr. Krysta Ryzewski. Residents have given furniture and time at every stage.

4. Hotel Theresa, Harlem, New York

Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Library of Congress.

The 13-story Hotel Theresa, built in 1913 and financed by the manufacturer Gustavus Sidenberg, stands out in Harlem for its white brick and terra-cotta, and its corner at 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard made it a gathering place. Although Harlem was mostly Black when it opened, the hotel admitted no African American guests until 1940. After that it became a favorite of Black travelers at a time when many places were still segregated; in 1946 Ebony magazine called it the most famous Black hotel in America.

Malcolm first came to the hotel as a porter for the New Haven Railroad, exploring Harlem on layovers from Boston. In 1960 he visited Fidel Castro there when the Cuban leader came to address the United Nations General Assembly. Later, after leaving the NOI, he made the Theresa the headquarters of the OAAU. The hotel was listed in the National Register in 2005.

5. King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan

A gifted speaker, Malcolm X gave the keynote at the Northern Grass Roots Leadership Conference at King Solomon Baptist Church in 1963, a meeting meant to push Black communities to demand more than civil rights. His speech, "Message to the Grass Roots," gave the Black nationalist answer to the March on Washington and to Dr. King. It became one of his best-known speeches and was among his last before he broke with the NOI.

He returned in April 1964 to deliver "The Ballot or the Bullet." Detroit's Black ministers, who opposed his call for Black communities to live apart from white society, tried to keep him out, but the hall had already been rented. It was an election year, and civil rights leaders were urging Black men and women to vote. The church was listed in the National Register in 2015.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Places of Malcolm X," in the series Curiosity Kit: Malcolm X, by Dr. Katherine Crawford-Lackey and Maya Goldenberg; interview with Dr. Tareq Ramadan, July 2024. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-malcolm-x.htm
• The article draws on The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Les and Tamara Payne's The Dead Are Arising (2020), Wilfred Little's recollections (1995–96) and each site's National Register nomination. Quotations from these are paraphrased here.
• Photographs of the Omaha marker, the Boston and Inkster houses, the Detroit church and the autobiography's cover carry outside credits on the Park Service's page and are not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.