“Malcolm X at 100” is Word In Black’s series honoring the life, ideas, and legacy of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz on what would have been his 100th birthday.
Smack in the middle of America, Omaha, Nebraska, is known for its steaks, being the hometown of wealthy financier Warren Buffett, and the headquarters of Union Pacific Corporation railroad. With just under 500,000 residents — about 1/16th the population of New York City — It’s the largest city in a state of 2.5 million souls, just 6% of whom are Black.
Yet this tiny, mostly-white city and the small, overwhelmingly white state in the nation’s literal heartland both have embraced their most famous Black native son: Malcolm X.
A Nebraska historic plaque marks his birthplace, and the city has designated his birthday, May 19, as Malcolm X Day. Scholars gather in Omaha each year to discuss his life and legacy. The man known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz when he was assassinated in April 1965 is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame; the institution’s only Black entrant, he keeps company with other notable Cornhuskers like novelist Willa Cather and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
Omaha’s official claim on El-Shabazz stands in contrast to cities several times its size, like Chicago, Boston and New York, where he has stronger ties but no official historic markers or municipal celebrations. And given El-Shabazz himself was ambivalent about the city — in part because the Ku Klux Klan drove his family out of town when he was an infant — Omaha’s decision to celebrate him is more than a little surprising.
“Yes, that’s a common reaction,” says JoAnna LeFlore-Ejike, executive director of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation (MXMF), headquartered in North Omaha, not far from Malcolm X’s birthplace.
The story of how Omaha came to celebrate its connection to El-Shabazz unofficially begins in 1971 when Rowena Moore, a North Omaha resident who wanted a marker placed on the spot where the child named Malcolm Little was born. That drive evolved into the MXMF, which spearheaded a decades-long drive to recognize El-Shabazz as part of Omaha’s history.
Promise and Peril
Malcolm X’s links to Omaha are rooted in the Great Migration, when Black people escaping the Jim Crow South arrived in the early part of the last century. The city’s meatpacking plants, dealing with unionized white workers on strike, recruited Black Southerners as replacements, with the opportunity to multiply their earning power and leave sharecropping behind.
Drawn by positive stories in the Black press, Omaha’s Black population more than doubled to around 10,000 between 1910 and 1920, according to the website — second only to Los Angeles among major cities west of the Mississippi River. As Black newcomers thrived, however, white Omahans seethed; tensions boiled over in 1919, when a white mob stormed the city jail and lynched Will Brown, a Black man accused of raping a white woman.
Not long afterward, Earl Little, a minister, arrived in the city around 1924 with his pregnant wife and children to start a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Marcus Garvey-led, Black-empowerment fraternal organization, according to the website North Omaha History. Little’s wife, Louise, was the chapter secretary.
He returned to his birthplace just once in almost four decades.
But the assignment didn’t last long: the Klan’s “good Christian white people” said they ”didn’t want trouble,” so they violently harassed the family into fleeing to Milwaukee in 1926, 18 months after Malcolm was born, according to the website. The son of Omaha, who would become one of the most consequential leaders in American history, returned to his birthplace just once in almost four decades.
In a June 30, 1964, speech to a North Omaha Elks Lodge, “he said, ‘In Omaha as in other places the Ku Klux Klan has just changed its bed sheets for policeman’s uniforms,’” according to North Omaha History. Eight months later, Malcolm X lay dying in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, his body torn from shotgun blasts fired by a team of assailants.
Claiming Malcolm X as Omaha’s Own
Moore, the driving force behind the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, spent years lobbying for a plaque at 3448 Pinkney Street, his birthplace, finally succeeding in 1971, according to the organization’s website. Over the years, according to the website, the foundation won state government funding for the foundation, purchased 17 acres for a dedicated memorial, organized birthday celebrations and convinced lawmakers to designate a day in his honor.
The crowning event, however, was Malcolm X’s induction as the 27th member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 2024. It took three different nominations over nearly two decades — in 2004, 2007, and 2022 — before a governor-appointed commission approved his induction.
Leflore-Ejike, the MXMF executive director, acknowledges that there’s tremendous irony in Malcolm X, a Black nationalist and iconoclast being honored by the same state in which white supremacists terrorized his family into leaving. Still, she says, Omaha is “home to many great things and people, and it’s truly one of the most important hidden gems of the Midwest.”
“We have about 10,000 visitors a year, and that will soon increase as we enter into the 100th birthday year of Brother Malcolm,” she says. “I am proud to have been raised by this village into the woman I am today.”
