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Louise Little

Louise Little (1897-1989) was a Grenadian-American political activist and the mother of Malcolm X.

Biography[]

Louise Langdon was born in La Digue, Grenada in 1897, the daughter of a mother of Nigerian descent; her mother had been raped by a significantly older Scottish man when she was 11, resulting in Louise's birth. In 1917, she emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where she lived with her uncle and became a follower of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey and his UNIA movement. Through the NIA, she met the craftsman and lay minister Earl Little, and, seeking to marry a dark-skinned man so that her children would not share her light complexion, she married him on 10 May 1919. They moved to Philadelphia a year later and then to Omaha, Nebraska in 1921. She had seven children with him, with the future Malcolm X being their fourth child. Because of the Ku Klux Klan's threats, they relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1926 and then to Lansing, Michigan, where their home was burned down by white supremacists in 1929. Earl died in a streetcar accident in 1931, but the family theorized that he had been murdered by the same white supremacist group. During the 1930s, Little and her family became Seventh-day Adventists, and, in 1938, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized after one of her boyfriends abandoned her after impregnating her. In 1963, her son Malcolm secured her release from the hospital, and she died in 1991 at the age of 94.

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