One of the features of the upcoming annual Omowale Malcolm X Observance on Umoja-day (Sun) 25th February from 1pm to 6pm at the Chestnuts Community Centre, 280 St. Anne’s Road, London, N15 5BN is the narrative of the life of Omowale Malcolm X, as well as paying homage to his family and his ancestors. Tonight we explore some previously lesser known aspects of his mother’s life and lineage. The theme on the 25th is Omowale: Waging the Cultural Revolution delivered by ShakaRa which will be part two of his tour de force message at Shumira (Omowale & The Vision of Freedom) earlier this month.
Author Alex Haley recounts that in the process of interviewing Omowale Malcolm X for his autobiography he was struggling to penetrate the stoic facade of the senior Nation Of Islam official – until he asked him about his mother. That “chance question” brought forth a torrent of memories and emotions, arguably setting the tone for the multi-million selling classic that is The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. (1)l
For subsequent decades, this remained the predominant source of information on the mother of the Black Nationalist hero. However, in recent years, particularly in the last half-decade or so, there has been a flurry works shedding new light on the life of this proud daughter of Grenada such as Erik S. McDuffie’s 2016 paper The Diasporic Journeys of Louise Little: Grassroots Garveyism, the Midwest, and Community Feminism and books like The Dead Are Arising (2020) by Les Payne & Tamara Payne and The Life of Louise Norton Little (2021), by Jessica Russell (with contributions by Little family members). More recently — poet, novelist, filmmaker, scholar, and professor emerita at University of Maryland, College Park Merle Collins, Ph.D. has written an historical fiction novel Ocean Stirrings (2023), based on the life of Louise Langdon Norton Little. (2)
Studies of Louise Little’s life can provide valuable insights into post enslavement colonial narratives as well as adding to the growing and welcome body of work on Black Nationalist women by authors like Keisha Blain, Natanya Duncan, Asia Leeds and Nzingha Assata. (3)
The exact date of birth of Mama Louise Little is not known. She was born in La Digue, St. Andrew, Grenada in 1896 or 1897. Her grandparents, Jupiter and Mary Jane were “liberated Africans” from the west of the continent who arrived on the island in the 1860s and were given the Langdon appendage after the owner of the estate where they lived. They celebrated their Afrikan roots while farming their own land plied their trades as carpenter and herbalist respectively. (4) The couple had six children, including Edith Langdon, louise’s mother, who was not yet in her teens when she became pregnant by a man of Scottish descent, called John Norton. (5) To many, including Malcolm X who shares the account, presumably from his mother in his autobiography, the pregnancy was the result of rape. Yet, curiously, there are those that entertain the notion that it could have been the result of a consensual relationship, or, are discomforted at his characterisation as a rapist. (6)
Louise was still a baby when Edith died, leaving caring responsibilties to her grandparents and aunt Gertrude but her grandparents also passed away when Louise was small. Nevertheless, she grew as a proud, confident student, attending a local Anglican school where she excelled in writing, spoke English, French and Creole and absorbed (an albeit skewed, colonial) world history. (7)
In her late teens/early twenties she left Grenada for Canada where her uncle Edgerton Langdon lived and introduced her to the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and she fully embraced their philosophy of Black Nationalism and self-determination, becoming active in the movement. It was here that she met fellow activist Earl Little and they married soon after. Moving south to the USA the newley-weds set about founding UNIA-ACL chapters in the cities they moved to like Philadelphia, Omaha, Wisconsin and Michigan. In Omaha, they established their own Liberty Hall with Earl as branch president while Louise was a chapter secretary and reporter for The Negro World newspaper. Such was their standing in the organisation that Marcus Garvey himself, used their home as a safe house whilst evading the FBI. (8)
Earl and and Louise not only preached self-reliance but practiced it too. Just like her grandparents, her and her husband farmed and hunted on land they owned. Similarly, Earl was a skilled carpenter while Louise worked as a seamstress and sold her own designs.. But tragedy struck in 1931 when Earl was killed after being struck by a streetcar. The received version that Earl, reviled by whites for his Garveyite principles, was murdered by them, as were three of his brothers. Other research indicates that the incident was indeed an accident. Whatever, the truth of the matter the crooked insurance company ignored both theories and declared the death a suicide and thus refused to pay out on the $10,000 policy. (9)
Though suffering this immense loss, Mama Louise demonstrated her resilience in caring for her seven children, now of school age. She went to war with the school system challenging, often in person, the negative representation of her people. Proactively, she sought to provide them with a broad education religiously, linguistically and politically, including getting them to read aloud from The Negro World and exposing them to the work of Grenadian political thinker T.A. Marryshow. One example of the impact of these efforts was that by seventh grade, Malcolm had become class president. (10)
Unfortunately, the unrelenting assault of the state agencies took its toll and by the late 1930s her now eight children were placed in foster care and in an act of further vengeance, the judge that forced the removal of her children also engineered her incarceration in a state mental institution, where she remained for a quarter of a century. All of her children united for her release in 1963. She initially lived with her son Philbert in Detroit In her last years, Little lived quietly with one of her daughters in Woodland Park, Michigan until her death, on December 18, 1989. Her ashes were scattered there after her death. She was believed to be 91. (11)
Letters from Omowale Malcolm X written to his brother Philbert in 1949 while his mother was incarcerated but not surfacing until 2003 are a poignant testament to her, asserting that she had suffered at the hands of the state, Malcolm wrote, because the authorities knew that “she was not ‘deadening our minds.”:
“My accomplishments are ours, and yours are mine, but all of our achievements are Mom’s, for she was a most Faithful Servant of the Truth years ago. I praise Allah for her.” (12)
There are now calls, spearheaded by the La Digue Community Heritage and Honours Organising Committee to make the Third Monday of February La Digue Heritage Honours Day and that a monument and/or plaque in honour of Louise Langdon Little and Malcolm X should be erected to memorialise and commemorate their legacy. One of the committee members, noted calypsonian Black Wizard has also written a song in tribute to her which is scheduled for release. (13)
(1) Alex Haley (1968) The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. Penguin Books. p. 17-8
(2) Jolie Solomon (21/03/22) Overlooked No More: Louise Little, Activist and Mother of Malcolm X. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/obituaries/louise-little-overlooked.html; Taylor Ha (24/01/24) Scholars Explore the Legacy of Malcolm X’s Mother. https://news.fordham.edu/arts-and-culture/scholars-explore-the-legacy-of-malcolm-xs-mother/
(3) Keisha N. Blain (2019) Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. University of Pennsylvania Press; Natanya Duncan (2023) An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. University of Illinois Press; Asia Leeds (2013) Toward the “Higher Type of Womanhood”: The Gendered Contours of Garveyism and the Making of Redemptive Geographies in Costa Rica, 1922–1941. Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International State University of New York Press Volume 2, Number 1; Nzingha Assata (2008) Women In The Garvey Movement. N. Assata
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(4) Merle Collins (26/08/20) Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X. pp. 346-369, Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture, Volume 66.; Solomon. Op. cit.
(5) Curlan Campbell (21/02/22) Veteran calypsonian pays tribute to mother of Malcolm X. https://nowgrenada.com/2022/02/veteran-calypsonian-pays-tribute-to-mother-of-malcolm-x/#:~:text=A%20song%20paying%20homage%20to,was%20born%20around%20the%201900s.; Collins. Op. cit.
(6) Jessica Russell (30/01/21) More Louise Little – Less Malcolm X. https://onwishesandhorses.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/louise-little-malcolm-x/. Russell states that it was “the result of a possibly consensual relationship, but very possibly not”; Collins. Op.cit recounts a telephone conversation with Attallah Shabazz where she “voiced her discomfort with this characterization of the man who was her grandmother’s father.”
(7) Solomon. Op. cit.
(8) Ibid. Collins. Op. cit.; Campbell. Op. cit.
(9) Solomon. Op. cit
(10) Ibid.; Ha. Op. cit.
(11) Jessica Russell, Deborah Jones Hilda Little Steve Jones Sr. (2021) The Life of Louise Norton Little: An extraordinary woman: mother of Malcolm X and his 7 siblings. Independently Published. p. 345. Solomon. Op. cit.
(12) Solomon. Op. cit.
(13) Campbell. Op. cit.
we ask the question
Who is Louise Langdon Little?
1) What is the truth around the circumstances of her birth?
2) Was there something in Louise Little’s upbrigning that enabled her to embrace the Black Nationalist philosophy of the UNIA?
3) Why does there appear to be renewed interest ih her life?
4) Should Grenada claim Malcolm X?
Our Special Guests:
Bro. Ldr. Mbandaka: Resident guest who is Spiritual Leader of the Alkebu-Lan Revivalist Movement and an Afrikan-Centred Education Consultant. Bro. Ldr is a veteran activist of over 40 years standing, a featured columnist in The Whirlwind newspaper and author of Mosiah Daily Affirmations and Education: An African-Centred Approach To Excellence.
Mama Merle Collins: was born in 1950 in Aruba to Grenadian parents. She was taken to Grenada shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in the parishes of St Patrick and St George, Grenada. Her secondary education was at the St. Joseph’s Convent high school, Grenada. She graduated from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where she took a degree in English and in Spanish. After graduating in 1972, she returned to Grenada, where she taught History and Spanish for the next two years. She has also taught in St Lucia. In 1980 she was awarded a Masters in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from the London School of Economics, University of London.
During the period of the Grenada Revolution, she served as a coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean for the Government of Grenada. She left Grenada in 1983.
Her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks was published by Karia Press in 1985. At this time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime and African music. The collaboration with African Dawn followed her encounter with the group when they all participated in a London performance of the Kenyan writer Ngügi wa’Thiongo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. In 1987, she published her first novel Angel, which follows the lives of both Angel and the Grenadian people as they struggle for independence. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Rain Darling in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995 and will be republished as a Caribbean Modern Classic in 2023. She has also published a biography, The Governor’s Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe.
Her critical works include “Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today” in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World, “To be Free is Very Sweet” in Slavery and Abolition, “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” chapter in Raphael and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition.
She is currently Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, College Park.