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

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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 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.

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’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.

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 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.

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.