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The Northampton National Bank Heist, the Biggest in U.S. History

On the morning of Jan. 26, 1876, a woman screamed from her bedroom window that burglars had robbed the Northampton National Bank and captured her husband.

The news sent Northampton, Mass., a small industrial city, into a frenzy. Several men walking to work at the shoe factory heard the woman and notified the police. What unfolded caused great excitement in the town and went down in U.S. history as the biggest bank robbery ever — until the next one. Two years later, the same burglars stole nearly $3 million from the Manhattan Savings Institution.

A short book published in 1876 tells the story of the Northampton National Bank Heist. It describes how robbers overpowered the cashier, forced him to give them the combination to the safe and then made off with $1.6 million in cash, bonds and other securities.

The haul in today’s dollars comes to more than $26 million. The Brinks Heist, in comparison, amounted to about $10 million in today’s money.

But that book leaves out one important detail about the leader of the ring that robbed the Northampton National Bank. That’s because police didn’t discover his identity until after his death two years later.

His name was George Leslie, a dapper young architect who moved in New York’s high society. However, he led a double life as a criminal mastermind. Police believed him responsible for 80 percent of the bank robberies in the United States between 1869 and 1878.

Northampton National Bank

The Northampton National Bank around 1876

Local businessmen established the Northampton National Bank in 1833, when banking began to take hold in country towns. With the opening of first a canal and then a railroad, Northampton grew into a thriving community of 25,000 people. Northampton National Bank grew with it into one of the leading country banks in the region with a good name and sterling character.

In 1874, Northampton National Bank officers decided to tighten security by installing a new cylinder pin-tumbler lock invented by Linus Yale. The lock required both a combination and key.

The bank hired Herring Safe Co. to install the new lock. Unfortunately, the Herring Safe employee who came from New York to install the lock had links to notorious bank robbers known as the Rufus Ring. William Edson, the employee, had made copies of keys used in previous bank robberies.

Rufus Ring

Edson copied the key to the vault of the Northampton National Bank. He then advised bank officials that only one man, Mr. Whittelsey, the cashier, should know the combination to the safe. They agreed.

For weeks the gang members traveled between Brooklyn, N.Y., and Northampton to plan the Northampton National Bank Robbery. They watched the bank and employees and the deputy sheriff.

They planned how they’d extract the combination from the cashier, how they’d escape and where they’d hide their loot.

Their leader, George Leslie, always insisted on such meticulous preparation.

The Heist

The masked men carried dark lanterns when they broke into the home of Mr. Whittelsey, where he lived with his wife, niece, an elderly woman, a married couple and an Irish servant. They bound and gagged them all in the same room, except for Mr. Whittelsey.

The thieves then choked and beat the cashier, demanding he gave up the combination. He refused, but they choked and beat him until he finally gave it up. The thieves knew the night watchman left work at 4 a.m., leaving the bank unguarded for several hours.

So just after 4 a.m., they marched Mr. Whittelsley to the bank, where they opened the vault, cleaned it of all its contents and made their getaway. Some of the men left by horse and carriage, while the others took the train back to New York.

At about 6:30 a.m., Mrs. Whittelsey freed herself from her restraints and rushed to her window. “They’ve taken my husband and are robbing the bank,” she screamed. “They’re all at the bank! Please help my husband!”

Caught

The Rufus Ring, however, had a problem. The securities were non-negotiable; only the person whose name was on them could cash them. They had no value unless the gang could sell them back to the bank.

Four days after the heist, the Northampton National Bank hired Pinkerton detectives. One month later, they received a ransom note for the securities with two stock certificates to prove their authenticity. Edson, still trusted by the bank, offered to act as a go-between.

The Northampton National Bank recently. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Negotiations went back and forth, the bank stalling for time while the Pinkertons tracked the thieves.

Nearly a year after the robbery, three of the ringleaders were arrested. Edson turned state’s evidence, and the three went to prison. The Northampton National Bank never got its cash back, and an estimated 75 depositors lost their money.

The securities, however, were returned to the bank.

George Leslie

Not until after his death did police suspect George Leslie had ever committed any crime. He was handsome, well-mannered and well dressed, an habitue of the opera and society parties.

He arrived in Manhattan in 1869 from Cincinnati, Ohio, where his wealthy father had paid $300 to keep him out of harm’s way during the Civil War. As a draft dodger, people scorned him as worse than a deserter and ostracized him from Cincinnati society. So he abandoned his architectural practice and came to New York to start a new life. His goal, he told friends, was to make some easy money.

Leslie then assembled the cleverest robbers into the Rufus Ring and fastidiously planned his crimes.

Before a robbery, he visited a bank to check out its layout, sometimes depositing his own money. His architectural training allowed him to draw up meticulous blueprints and to build a replica of the bank vault inside an abandoned warehouse.

For months he rehearsed each robbery with his gang, assigning each member a specific job. While they drilled over and over, Leslie timed each step down to the second. They even practiced in the dark.

George Leslie never got caught, but his weakness for women did him in. He carried on an affair with the 21-year-old wife of one of his gang members. When he and his gang planned to rob the Manhattan Savings Bank, she lured him to a rendezvous.

Police discovered his body in a field miles north of New York City, but couldn’t identify him right away. Eventually they concluded his mistress’s husband murdered him. Shortly afterward police found her body near the Brooklyn Bridge, her throat cut.

Northampton National Bank Building

The Rufus Ring carried out the Manhattan Savings robbery after George Leslie’s death. Police, however, tracked them all down and brought them to justice. And they eventually connected George Leslie to the Northampton National Bank heist, along with a string of others from upstate New York to Baltimore to Kentucky.

The Northampton National Bank building still stands at 135 Main St., the original vault intact. Owned for a time by Kevin Eastman, a creator of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” a new owner announced in 2017 the building would be restored.

Today, a smoke shop called The Vault operates out of the ground floor of the old Northampton National Bank. In 2019, the building’s owner commissioned an artist to paint a mural depicting the robbery.

If you enjoyed this story about the high-society criminal who robbed the Northampton National Bank, you may also be interested in the sporting gentleman who robbed the robber barons (click here).

With thanks to King of Heists by J. North Conway. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Prohibition Era Begins in Litchfield, Conn. in 1789

In 1789, Ephraim Kirby, Jebediah Strong, David Buel and more than 100 of their neighbors decided to swear off strong drink. They came together to form the beginnings of the Litchfield Temperance Association, a movement that would evolve into the Prohibition Era more than a century later.

The pact the men signed represented a radical departure in everyday thinking about alcohol that gained popularity after the American Revolution. At that time, cider, beer and wine were liberally consumed and distilled spirits were dispensed to workers. Many stores commonly provided a free dram of an alcoholic drink to customers at any time of day.

Benjamin Rush by Charles Wilson Peale

Birth of the Prohibition Era

As early as 1785, Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush challenged common assumptions about the health effects of alcohol. His temperance/intemperance thermometer ranked beverages in relation to their benefits and drawbacks. The likely outcomes to people who consumed each beverage accompanied the thermometer. Water, milk and small beer, he proposed, inspired serenity of mind, long life and a good reputation. Wine, porter and strong beer brought a person cheerfulness and nourishment when taken in small amounts at mealtime. People who restricted their drinking to these beverages were considered temperate, by Rush’s measures.

The Prohibition Era begins

From there Rush’s scale plunges into intemperance, ascribing outcomes to the various drinks. Punch: sickness, idleness, gaming and jail. From there matters got worse. The beverages increased in potency through toddys, cordials and straight gin, brandy and rum. Similarly, the consequences escalated from lying, swearing and racing horses to swindling, burglary and murder. Eventually they led to insanity, dropsy, epilepsy, hospitalization, life in prison and the gallows.

Litchfield Temperance

The men of Litchfield clearly accepted the wisdom of avoiding intemperance. The pact they signed read as follows:

So many are the avenues leading to human misery that it is impossible to guard them all. Such evils as are produced by our own folly and weakness are within our power to avoid. The immoderate use which the people of this State make of Distilled Spirits is undoubtedly an evil of this kind. It is obvious to every person of the smallest observation that from this pernicious practice follows a train of evils difficult to be enumerated.

Like Rush, they ascribed dire outcomes to strong drink.

The morals are corrupted, property is exhausted, and health destroyed. And it is most sincerely to be regretted that from a mistaken idea that distilled spirits are necessary to laboring men, to counteract the influence of heat and give relief from severe fatigue, that a most valuable class of citizens have been led to contract a habit of such dangerous tendency. Hence arises the inability to pay public taxes, to discharge private debts, and to support and educate families.

The Prohibition Era Begins

And then they took a pledge:

Seriously considering this subject, and the frowns of Divine Providence in denying many families in this part of the country the means of a comfortable subsistence the present year by failure of the principal crops of the earth, we think it peculiarly the duty of every good citizen to unite his efforts to reform a practice which leads so many to poverty, distress, and ruin. Whereupon we do hereby associate, and mutually agree, that hereafter we will carry on our business without the use of distilled spirits as an article of refreshment, either for ourselves or those whom we employ, and that instead thereof we will serve our workmen with wholesome food and common simple drinks of our own production.

Jebediah Strong

The temperance men appended to the pact a statement signed by Jebediah Strong only:

By necessity and on principle, in consequence of little experiment and much observation, I have effectually adopted and adhered to the salutatory plan herein proposed during several months past, and am still resolved to persevere until convinced that any alteration will be productive of some greater good, whereof at present I have no apprehensions whilst human nature remains the same.

The signers of the pact included Litchfield’s most influential men. Ephraim Kirby, whose name appears first on the list, was a Revolutionary War veteran and political leader who became a confidante of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson appointed him as tax collector for Connecticut and later a judge in the new territory of Mississippi. He was busy at work establishing the first court system in the territory that would become Alabama when yellow fever struck him down in 1804 at the age of just 47.

David Buel, meanwhile, championed the temperance movement for decades.

First Congregational Church of Litchfield, where Lyman Beecher preached his temperance sermons

Litchfield took center stage in the temperance movement again in 1826 when Rev. Lyman Beecher delivered six sermons on intemperance. They were published in multiple translations and were popular for decades. Buel, meanwhile, moved to Troy, N.Y. , where he lived to 90. He never stopped spreading the temperance message.

Jebediah Strong

For Jebediah Strong, however, the path of temperance proved too difficult. Strong, who had signed the addendum to the pact declaring he intended to abstain from spirits, resumed drinking.

Strong was a political leader, town official and lawyer. One uncharitable biographer labeled him a pettifogger, an unscrupulous and petty lawyer. An unpleasant, short, limping man, he held power by pretending to take all sides of an issue, depending on who he spoke to. He was especially unpleasant in his home. In 1790 he was arrested for beating his wife.

Tapping Reeve

Judge Tapping Reeve (who also signed the temperance pact), ordered Strong placed under bail of 1000 pounds and scheduled for trial. The Hartford Monitor reported: “Nothing could be more satisfactory than this sentence among his acquaintances in Litchfield and elsewhere, who have long known the infamy of his private character, while his hypocrisy and intrigues have been imposed upon the good people of the state at large.”

In the end, Strong’s wife, Susannah, divorced him. He died in 1802, a beggar and a drunkard.

Thanks to: Sketches and Chronicles of the Town of Litchfield, by Payne Kenyon Kilbourne. This story was updated in 2022.

Image of Congregational Church: Highsmith, C. M., photographer. (2011) First Congregational Church, Litchfield, Connecticut. Litchfield United States Connecticut, 2011. October. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2012631563/.

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Roger Ludlow and the 1650 Scourge of Shuffleboard

In 1646, Roger Ludlow had the task of establishing laws for Connecticut. It wasn’t an easy job, but after four hard years he produced the Code of 1650. Sometimes called Ludlow’s Code, it addressed all manner of evils up to and including shuffleboard.

Ludlow belonged to the stauncher group of Puritans who left England during the Great Migration. Arriving in America in 1630, he first lived in Dorchester in Massachusetts before moving to Windsor, Conn. Later he moved to Fairfield, which he founded.

The Hazard Room, a 1792 painting by Thomas Rowlandson.

Roger Ludlow

Ludlow, an Oxford-educated lawyer, had some success in politics – serving as deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and lieutenant governor of Connecticut. But his main contribution to the settlement of New England was his codification of laws for Connecticut. He also co-authored the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the first constitution in America.

Ludlow’s Code proceeded alphabetically from “Ability” to “Wrecks at Sea,” and it covers the typical crimes. Capital offenses included murder, perjury, witchcraft and smiting one’s parents. Burglars were to be branded with the letter “B” and so forth.

Ludlow didn’t stop with major crimes. His code outlawed swearing, heresy, idleness and stubbornness. And he also singled out shuffleboard for elimination.

Monument to Roger Ludlow in East Norwalk

Shuffleboard

Outlawing shuffleboard was not that unusual considering the Puritan’s general orientation and the nature of the game in Britain. Europeans had enjoyed playing it for at least 500 years. In England, it went by names like shove halfpenny and earlier shove groat.

The basics of the game were similar to today’s shuffleboard. People slid a disk down a board and got points based on where it stopped. It was played in public houses in England and was a time-waster that was generally harmless – except when disputes arose between players or large wagers resulted in hard feelings. The Puritans, who opposed most sports played with a ball, had little use for it.

King Henry VIII played at shuffleboard and outlawed it for commoners in England during his reign. There’s little doubt that the Puritans had no use for the people who pursued it. Some tavernkeepers kept the shuffleboard hidden and secret from any strangers, only brought out for trusted regulars.

Aftermath

Arthur Miller in his play about the 1692 Salem witch trials, The Crucible, notes that Bridget Bishop’s tavern had shuffleboard. That hints at the prejudice the residents of Salem would have held against her.

In the long run, of course, shuffleboard prevailed – morphing into various forms and enjoying popular revivals during the Roaring 20s and the 1950s. Even today shuffleboard can be found in its table and floor varieties.

Purchase of Norwalk, a WPA mural by Harry Townsend, in Norwalk City Hall.

As for Roger Ludlow, the publication of his code represented the high-water mark for his career in New England. He did purchase the land that became Norwalk, but he had also gotten involved in various property disputes.

His troubles included a conviction by a court for slandering a woman he had declared a witch. Ludlow left Connecticut to settle briefly with his brother in Virginia in 1654 and then travelled to Ireland. There he won an appointment to a post of magistrate. He did not return to America and died in the 1660s – well before Connecticut became the gaming and gambling capital of New England.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Stratford Knockings Brought Throngs of Spiritualists to Connecticut

In 1850, the Rev. Eliakim Phelps and his family returned to their home one day –the scene of what was known as the Stratford Knockings – to discover their house draped in black funeral crepe. It hung on the door and over the mirrors, traditionally a sign that someone had recently died.

On one of the beds, they discovered Mrs. Phelps’ nightgown laid out with the arms of her garments folded over the chest, as if worn by a body that was laid to rest in a coffin. While many might have taken this as a threatening sign to move along, for Phelps and his family it was just a fairly routine day in their house.

The Phelps mansion, as everyone at the time knew, was haunted. Two kinds of spirits inhabited it. There were evil ones who broke windows, pricked people with pins and committed other threatening acts like knocking people around. Then there were the helpful spirits who communicated with raps and knocking and brought people lost objects.

Welcome to the age of spiritualism. Spiritualism, within Christian circles, exploded in popularity in 1848 in New York when three young women – the Fox sisters – became celebrities claiming they were communicating with a spirit of a dead person in their home. At that point, the dead began to speak up in a number of places.

Stratford Knockings

On March 10, 1850, the phenomenon moved to Stratford, Conn. Eliakim Phelps, a Congregational minister, told of his shock the first time he discovered his house inhabited by spirits. It happened after church one day, when the family returned home to find the house invaded. Someone or something had thrown around clothes, opened drawers and strewn belongings about.

Suspecting burglary, Phelps took a quick inventory. While the family silver was plain to see, along with money and other valuables, nothing was missing. Puzzled, he assumed that perhaps the burglars had fled upon the family’s return, or had simply lost their nerve.

Illustration from an article about the Stratford knockings in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine

Phelps had owned the mansion for two years. Matthias Nicoll built the house for his daughter Elizah and her husband Captain George Dowdall in 1826. Dowdall made his living in the China trade, and the second floor of the house looked like the upper deck of a sailing vessel. Dowdall died in China several years after he built the house. He never used it as he intended — as a retirement home, as he intended.

Phelps acquired it and used it seasonally, also spending time in Philadelphia with his blended family. Both he and his wife had lost their spouses and both brought children to the marriage. They had a three-year-old together.

Potatoes and Books

In the days ahead, more strange things began occurring. Books, fireplace tools, a potato began appearing in odd locations. Things fell from the shelves and objects disappeared from locked containers. Windows were smashed.

Phelps began consulting others, including ministers and spiritual investigators, to figure out what was going on.

The newspapers, meanwhile, heard of the Stratford Knockings and began publishing accounts of the strange happenings. Since everyone loves a good haunting or curse, curious strangers began stopping by, hoping to glimpse an unusual event or witness the Stratford knockings first hand. The events were well documented in popular books about spiritualism, including Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions, published in 1855. Phelps spent a good deal of time explaining and defending the stories about the house.

Spiritualism, meanwhile, was exploding in popularity, with both defenders and detractors drawing crowds to debate its merits.

Harry Phelps

In the Phelps home, 11-year-old Harry seemed to receive the most visits by the spirits, and people declared him a medium. Séances were held, and the spirits tapped out answers to questions, explaining at one point that they were smashing windows and disrupting the house purely for the fun of it.

In the fall, the family left for Philadelphia. Phelps sent the rest of the family along ahead of him, curious to find out if the “happenings” would continue. They diminished, but he still observed the odd item falling to the floor. Or else he found it in the wrong place.

When the family returned in 1851, the strange occurrences restarted, with objects going missing. Conversations with ghosts via rapping on the table continued. Friendly spirits would help the family locate lost objects. But evil ones set fire to Phelps’ papers.

All the while, newspapers, ministers, spiritualists and skeptics had a field day arguing over the merits of the Stratford Knockings story. The Phelps family left Stratford in 1852 and sold the house to the publisher of the New York Sun, Moses Beach, in 1859. Beach’s paper, like many other publications, made hay with the Phelps story.

Witchcraft?

Over the years, the hauntings were legendary in town. Some speculated that they had a connection to the death of Goody Bassett, a woman hanged near the house in 1651 for witchcraft.

Most, however, believed Phelps’ bored, much-younger wife and his stepchildren created the story to liven up their sleepy lives in Stratford. Given that events largely started and stopped whenever Harry left or rejoined the household, most of the blame has focused on him. It’s unclear if Phelps had joined the conspiracy or if his family duped him.

The house itself has long since been demolished, and the Stratford Knockings haven’t been reported in many years.

This story about the Stratford Knockings was updated in 2022.

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Plymouth Colony Drafts the First Laws in North America

Democracy formally took root in colonial North America on Oct. 4, 1636, when Plymouth Colony drew up the first written legal code on the continent.

Plymouth Colony was settled in 1620 by Anglicans and Separatists, also known as Brownists, and later known together as the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims believed God commended them to adopt democracy as their form of government. And that government should enforce religious belief.

A typical house in Plymouth Colony, recreated at Plimoth Patuxet.

By 1636, Plymouth Colony had fewer than 3,000 inhabitants. The Massachusetts Bay Colony would eventually eclipse it in wealth and population and absorbed the entire colony.

In the beginning, the laws of Plymouth Colony only carried the weight of a proclamation by the General Court. But in 1636 the court put them into a code known as the “General Fundamentals.”

Plymouth Colony Bill of Rights

The legal code included a rudimentary bill of rights and guaranteed trial by jury. It levied taxes, decreed the distribution of land and set out punishments for specific crimes. Several crimes carried the death penalty: treason, murder, witchcraft, arson, sodomy, rape, bestiality, adultery, and cursing or smiting one’s parents.

The Book of the General Laws of the Inhabitants of the Jurisdiction of New-Plimouth

Plymouth magistrates, however, rarely meted out the death penalty. Only one sex crime ever resulted in an execution: Thomas Granger in 1642 for bestiality.

Edward Bumpus received a death sentence for “striking and abusing” his parents in 1679. But he received only a severe whipping due to his insanity. The alleged killers of a Praying Indian named John Sassamon in 1675, which set off King Philip’s War, also received the death penalty.

Rules for Adultery

Convicted adulterers were to be punished by wearing the letters ‘A’ and ‘D’ sewn on to their garments. Nathaniel Hawthorne, of course, used that in his short story, The Scarlet Letter. Anyone convicted of burglary got the letter ‘B’ branded onto his hand. Profanity got you not more than three hours in the stock. Whipping or a fine of 40 shillings went to those who traveled, worked or participated in sports on the Sabbath.

Watching their language.

The General Fundamentals began with a preamble that declared “the associates of the Colony of New Plimouth” as “free born subjects of the kingdom of England.” As such, they had all the privileges of Englishmen. They didn’t have a charter, but believed that God wanted democratic government.

The first article of the General Fundamentals was a declaration of self-rule, stating,

That no act, imposition, law or ordinance be made or imposed upon us at present or to come, but such as has been or shall be enacted by the consent of the body of freemen or associates, or their representatives legally assembled; which is according to the free liberties of the freeborn people of England.

The second article established the election calendar, including “a free election annually, of governor, deputy governor, and assistants. But only freemen –men of property who belonged to the church — could vote.

Plymouth Colony also drew up laws for preaching the Gospel to indigenous people and for admitting them as preachers.

Historic Thanksgiving Foods now available in paperback. Order your copy here from Amazon.

This story about Plymouth Colony last updated in 2023.

Images: Plymouth Colony house by By Ben Franske – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4459090.

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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in Boston: One City, Two Different Worlds

When Martin Luther King, Jr., moved to Boston in 1951 to study for his graduate degree in philosophy, Malcolm X was already there voraciously reading books. Malcolm X, though, read from the Charlestown State Prison as he finished his six-year sentence for burglary.

Together, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King spent about 15 years in Boston. The two men only met once, and not in Boston. They experienced two very different sides of the same city. Those differences became clear by the time of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin and Malcolm X

Martin, the son of a well-to-do Atlanta minister, lived the genteel life in Boston. He wore tailored suits to concerts, teas, sermons and classes. He owned his own Chevrolet and matriculated at Boston University. There he consulted renowned philosophers Paul Tillich and Reinold Neibuhr for advice about his dissertation.

Malcolm X in 1964.

Malcolm X matriculated in Boston’s streets and prisons during the dozen years he lived there on and off. Parentless and poor, the 15-year-old first moved to the Roxbury section of Boston in 1941. There he stayed with his older half-sister, the formidable Ella Little Collins. She saw theft as her only way to make it into the black bourgeoisie. Police arrested her 21 times, but received only one conviction.

Her rebellious little brother took from her a lesson about evading personal responsibility. He dropped out of ninth grade after one day, smoked pot, hustled, stole, ran numbers and seduced loose women.

Fame

By 1963, the ex-con and the former graduate student had achieved international fame. Martin Luther King, Jr., earned international celebrity for preaching nonviolence and integration, Malcolm X for preaching separatism and self-defense. Where Martin said he had a dream for America, Malcolm X said he saw an American nightmare.

That was the year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Both Martin and Malcolm had only a few years left. The two men were coming closer – certainly not to each other, but to the same views and strategies. Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, repudiated his earlier racism and advocated a program of economic advancement. Martin Luther King, Jr., increasingly embraced the labor movement as a force for the economic justice required for social justice. Many forget he died while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike.

Martin Luther King in 1964.

Malcolm X Meets the Cradle of Jazz

In February 1941, Malcolm X, still known as Malcolm Little, rode the Greyhound bus from Lansing, Mich., to Boston. He wore a too-small dark green suit and a light green topcoat. He moved in with his older half sister Ella at 72 Dale St. in Roxbury. The modest house sits a block from what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard and three miles from what would be Martin’s apartment at 397 Massachusetts Ave. in the South End.

Malcolm X frequented Boston’s jazz clubs.

Malcolm’s mother had been committed to an insane asylum in Kalamazoo. His father, a Baptist lay preacher, was killed by a streetcar when Malcolm was six. Though Earl Little’s death was ruled an accident, Malcolm believed his father had been pushed in front of the oncoming trolley by white racists. Earl followed Marcus Garvey, leader of the black separatist and Pan-Africanism movement. So did his half-sister Ella.

Boston made an enormous impression on the small-town boy from Michigan.

Malcolm X on Mass. Ave.

“I didn’t know the world contained as many Negroes as I saw thronging downtown Roxbury at night, especially on Saturdays,” Malcolm X wrote in his 1964 autobiography. “Neon lights, nightclubs, poolhalls [sic], bars, the cars they drove! Restaurants made the streets smell-rich, greasy, down-home black cooking. Jukeboxes blared Erskine Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, dozens of others.”

Ella had offered to take him in and enrolled him in a private boys’ academy in downtown Boston. On his first day he saw no girls in school and decided to end his formal education. Soon he met his mentor in the ways of the underworld, Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis. Jarvis, a trumpet player, introduced him to Boston’s demimonde.

“The stretch of Mass. Ave. between Huntington and Columbus was, by the late ’40s, Boston’s answer to 52nd Street in Manhattan. It had not only the Roseland, but the Savoy Café, the Hi-Hat, Wally’s, and a handful of smaller clubs,” according to Nat Hentoff in a 2001 Boston Globe article.

Malcolm conked his hair, bought a zoot suit and learned how to hustle and dance. He deliberately set himself apart from African-American strivers like the preacher’s son from Atlanta.

The “M” in Martin

Martin Luther King, Jr., 22, arrived in Boston in 1951, the son of a well-to-do Baptist pastor. He too had skipped ninth grade – but because he was such a precocious student. Martin went right to the tenth and, right after 11^th grade, enrolled in Morehouse College at age 15. He had graduated in 1948 with a degree in sociology and then received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa.

Boston University along Commonwealth Ave.

King adopted an elite persona as he moved between his classes, the library and his Massachusetts Avenue apartment. In Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch writes: “King continued to wear tailored suits whenever he stepped out of his apartment, and he worked consciously to develop habits befitting an intellectual. Doodling on the back of a notebook, he practiced increasingly ornate signatures, until the “g” in King looped all the way back to the “M” in Martin.

Martin was influenced by his advisor, theologian Howard Thurman, the first black dean of a predominately white university. He listened to Thurman’s sermons at the University’s Marsh Chapel. Thurman, who had visited Mohandas Gandhi in India, educated his young student in the mahatma’s philosophy of nonviolent protest.

Martin surrounded himself with books and pursued an elegant social life. He wanted to find the proper wife for an ambitious Baptist minister. One of his friends called him “the most eligible and popular bachelor in town.” His dating began to affect his grades.

Courtship

Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott in Boston.

Martin wooed Coretta Scott, an Antioch College graduate studying to become a classical singer at the New England Conservatory of Music. He treated her to concerts and the theater and showered her with poetic prose. In a letter written in 1952, he wrote “My life without you is like a year without a spring time which comes to give illumination and heat to the atmosphere saturated by the dark cold breeze of winter.”

They wed in 1953, and moved into a new apartment in Boston. They didn’t stay long. In September 1954 he became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Nine months later, he would receive his Ph.D. from Boston University. Soon after that he would be plunged into the civil rights movement.

Menial Jobs, Prison

Malcolm would get a series of menial jobs in Boston: as a soda jerk, as a warehouse worker at a South Boston wallpaper company, at a Sears Roebuck warehouse in the Fenway, as a waiter at the posh Parker House.

When the United States entered World War II, jobs opened up on the railroad, and Malcolm got a job as a fourth-class cook. He traveled to Washington, D.C., and to New York, where he fell in love with Harlem. By 1943 he had moved there, supporting himself by dealing drugs, gambling and stealing. He drifted back and forth between Boston, New York and his family in Lansing for the next few years. Police arrested him several times.

Police mugshot of Malcolm X after his arrest in 1944.

Finally, in 1946 police arrested him for burglary. He had dropped off a stolen watch for repair at a Roxbury jewelry store. Detectives were waiting for him when he came to pick it up. He received a sentence of six to eight years of hard labor at the notorious Charlestown prison.

Charlestown State Prison is now the site of Bunker Hill Community College. Malcolm was incensed about his imprisonment, and his cellmates called him “Satan.” He furiously paced his tiny cell, insulted the guards, ranted profanely and got high on ground nutmeg.

Malcolm X Turns Around

And then Malcolm Little started to turn his life around. A fellow inmate persuaded him to begin formal study through correspondence courses. Malcolm threw himself into his self-education. Prison officials, noting his good behavior, moved him to a slightly better institution, the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord.

By then, he’d convinced Ella of the sincerity of his good intentions. She began a letter-writing campaign to move him to a more humane facility. She succeeded. He then moved to the Norfolk Prison Colony, where he could read extensively in the prison library and practice his debating skills.

Prodded by his family, Malcolm began to follow the Nation of Islam, a new movement that preached self-reliance and Pan-Africanism. He left prison in 1952 and moved to Detroit. There he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X.

To read Part 2 this story, click here. This story about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., was updated in 2022.

Image; Malcolm X in 1964, By Ed Ford, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c15058, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3515550.

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