Did you know Civil Rights leader Malcolm X lived in Milwaukee as a young boy? The city would like you to.
Malcolm Little was born in Omaha in 1925, and his family relocated to Milwaukee from 1926 to 1928. Their Bronzeville home, at 1012 W. Galena St., was razed decades later for the construction of I-43. This March, the city’s Historic Preservation Commission unanimously approved a plan to place a historic marker on the Walnut Street bridge over the freeway, not far from where a mural of escaped slave Joshua Glover is located.
“Marking where Malcolm X lived in Milwaukee isn’t just about honoring one person. It’s about making sure our city’s history isn’t forgotten,” says Ald. Lamont Westmoreland, who co-sponsored the resolution along with Ald. Russell Stamper. “Every story, every voice, every part of our past deserves to be remembered.”
The Wisconsin Department of Transportation, which has sway over the bridge, has approved the location, and the Milwaukee Common Council must approve the funding for the project. While that is often a formality once the Historic Preservation Commission greenlights a project, the council is seeking a more cost-effective manufacturer and material for the plaque than the initial estimates.
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Malcolm X, who later became Malik El-Shabazz, was the fourth of seven children born to Louise and Earl Little. His brother Reginald was born while the family was living in the Galena Street home.
While in Milwaukee, Earl Little, a Baptist minister, organized for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization founded by Jamaican-born Black nationalist Marcus Garvey that promoted racial pride and economic self-sufficiency.
The family moved to Lansing, Michigan, after their brief time here.
Malcolm Little would eventually join the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organization headed by Elijah Muhammad, and dropped his last name, which he considered his slave name, and replaced it with “X.” Malcolm X went on to become a powerful voice – both influential and controversial – for Black empowerment.
He was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City while preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a group he formed. He was 39 years old.
The assassination was one of four killings of high-profile leaders in the United States in the 1960s, coming less than two years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, and three years before the assassinations of another and perhaps best-known civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, and Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of the president and a United States senator and presidential candidate, in Los Angeles in 1968.
Westmoreland said the city will be considering additional historical markers so that the “full, diverse history of Milwaukee is preserved and visible for generations to come.”
