Malcolm X, a lauded and controversial leader in the Civil Rights Movement, would have turned 100 years old this year. What’s often forgotten are his roots as a Michigander, with deep ties in Lansing and Detroit.
The latter is where writer and activist Herb Boyd first met Malcolm X. Boyd credits his political and educational development to the Civil Rights leader.
Boyd recalled Malcolm X’s February 1965 visit to Detroit’s Ford Auditorium. At the time, he was working a graveyard shift in Hamtramck when he heard that Malcolm X’s house had been firebombed. Boyd assumed the Detroit visit, which was later that day, would be canceled. To his surprise, Malcolm X still showed up.
“Friends of mine told me that they could smell the smoke on him because all he could salvage from his house in East Elmhurst was what he had on,” Boyd said.
It was this resilience that inspired Boyd to continue pursuing his education. Malcolm X was assassinated the following week.
Chronicling Malcolm X’s Childhood
Before Malcom X grew to be an influential social leader, he spent his childhood in Lansing. John Aerni-Flessner, an associate professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, didn’t know of Malcolm X’s Michigan connection until a colleague informed him.
“One of my colleagues, Dr. Lisa Biggs [. . .] noted that Malcolm was from this area, and I said [. . .], ‘Well, I'll be. I didn't realize that, and I study African and world history,” Aerni-Flessner said.
Upon digging deeper, Aerni-Flessner found that there wasn’t much publicly-available documentation of Malcolm X’s childhood in Lansing. With the help of his students, he decided to create a resource of their own.
“The more we dug, the more we realized that the story of the Little family and Malcolm, here in Lansing, was very complex,” Aerni-Flessner said. “And, that it also encompassed a lot of the issues that still engulf our world today.”
The group of students found that Malcolm X and his family faced red-lining, suspicious house fires when they bought houses outside of certain neighborhoods, prejudice within the education system, and structural racism.
Aerni-Flessner believes that part of the reason Malcolm X and his roots aren’t discussed much is because of his nature as a controversial figure. His statements were meant to be provocative, but that also caused a fear of backlash in the African American community.
“That has made the legacy of Malcolm a complicated one to this day,” Aerni-Flessner said. “Unlike Dr. King, whose more radical statements are often ignored, [. . .] it's hard to understand Malcolm without looking at controversial statements.”
Teaching Malcolm X
Kidada Williams, a historian and associate history professor at Wayne State University, believes Malcolm X isn’t talked about as much because people may not fully understand what he stood for.
“I think that the root of that is the fact that he was unapologetic in his love for Black people, and his willingness to point out the harms of white supremacy, and the moral bankruptcy at the root of it,” Williams said.
Williams teaches her students about Malcolm X every year by having them read his words. Most of her students don’t know much about his time in Michigan, she said. In fact, their reactions shift from shock, to outrage, to frustration with their previous education systems, Williams said.
“They feel, like, this sense of betrayal, like they have been denied knowledge that would be very useful to them,” Williams said.
Northern states used to treat racism as something that was practiced elsewhere, Williams said. Malcolm X’s own experience as a young Black man growing up in the Midwest proved otherwise. Educators told him he should aim to be a janitor, instead of a lawyer. Meanwhile, his father experienced race-based violence.
“All of those things, including [Malcolm X's] incarceration, are rooted to this sort of the realities of the white power structure that existed in northern spaces, just as it did in southern ones,” Williams said.
This episode was originally published February 7, 2022.
Hear the full conversation with Herb Boyd, John Aerni-Flessner, and Kidada Williams on the Stateside podcast.
