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Happy 95th Birthday to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X.
When discussing Malcolmâs life & legacy, what is rarely mentioned is the great influence Ella Little-Collins, his half-sister, had on his politics & his faith. |
: Malcolm with Ella Little-Collins.
When discussing Malcolmâs life & legacy, what is rarely mentioned is the great influence Ella Little-Collins, his half-sister, had on his politics & his faith. |
: Malcolm with Ella Little-Collins.
Ella Little-Collins (1914 â 1996) was a Muslim civil rights activist and educator. She worked as congressman Adam Clayton Powell's secretary, the manager of her mother's grocery store, and an investor in house property, which she let out as rooming houses.
She joined the Nation of Islam in the mid-1950s and helped establish its mosque in Boston and a day-care center attached to it, although she left the Nation in 1959 to become a Sunni Muslim.
She supported Black and ethnic studies programs in universities across the United States and founded the Sarah A. Little School of Preparatory Arts in Boston.
In his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote about the impact his first meeting with Ella Little-Collins had on him.
Little-Collins came to visit when he was in seventh grade, and he described her as "the first really proud Black woman I had ever seen" and wrote "I had never been so impressed with anybody.â
At the end of the school year, he moved to Roxbury to live with her, and she was his guardian until he turned 21.
When Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964, Little-Collins paid for him to make Hajj.
She also paid his funeral & business expenses after his assassination & took over his Organization of Afro-American Unity, includ. his project of giving 35 scholarships from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt & from the University of Ghana to students wishing to study overseas.
