LITTLE, LOUISE HELEN (née Langdon, 1894 or 1897–18 December 1989), Grenadian-born activist. Her grandparents Jupiter and Mary Jane were captured and sold into slavery in West Africa in their youth before being freed by the British Navy. They were taken to Grenada, where they had a daughter, Edith. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding Louise’s conception but there is speculation that when Edith was eleven years old she was raped by Edward Norton, a much older Scotsman. Louise was raised by her grandmother and educated in an Anglican school; she spoke fluent English, French, and Grenadian Creole.
Following her grandmother’s death she migrated to Montreal to live with her uncle Edgerton. There he introduced her to the activities of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an organization founded by Marcus Garvey that advocated Black separatism and the return of all Black people to their homeland in Africa. Louise was drawn to the UNIA’s message, as was Earl Little, a Baptist minister she met at one of the organization’s events. They soon married and moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where they worked to establish a new UNIA chapter. Louise served as the chapter secretary for the UNIA and reported for Negro World, the organization’s newspaper.
The couple had seven children, though many accounts of the family’s history maintain that Earl, deeply traumatized by his upbringing in Jim Crow Georgia, was an abusive husband. Because of their work for the UNIA they were constantly harassed by White neighbors and police and had to move frequently. In 1929 their home in Lansing, Michigan, was burned down. After Earl was run over by a streetcar in 1931, the family’s insurance company refused to pay out their policy, claiming his death had been a suicide, and Louise was forced to accept federal relief and the accompanying intrusive scrutiny of White officialdom. Though a new romantic partner offered respite, he abandoned her once she became pregnant. Having long been a target of White authorities, Louise was now uniquely vulnerable, and the delinquent behavior of her son Malcolm, her fourth child, only exacerbated the situation. A judge had Malcolm removed from the family home, and soon all of Louise’s children were placed in foster care. The same judge ultimately had her committed to a mental institution, where she would spend the next twenty-five years before spending her last years living with her daughter in the Black community of Woodland Park, Michigan. Malcolm, who would become known as Malcolm X, one of the twentieth century’s most forceful voices in the struggle for Black liberation, wrote of his complicated relationship with his mother in his autobiography.