Product Description

SINCE MALCOLM X EXPLOSIVE AUTOBIOGRAAPHY THIS IS THE M0ST IMPORTANT BOOK YOU'LL EVER READ. SEVENTH CHILD

A family memoir of Malcolm X
Rodnell P. Collins, nephew Of Malcolm X with A. Peter Bailey

Malcolm X The Man Behind The Myth
A Loving Sister's Blood Memories of a Challenged "son"
His Controversial Analysis about American Foreign Policy
Never-Before-Published Family Photographs and Letters

Seventh Child, Seventh Son: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X. offers invaluable contribution and insight to one of twentieth century americas most charismatic, controversial and provocative figure. On Malcolm X Of the forty publications in eight languages, none provided such insight on a man and his time's, excepting, his own Autobiography. Through the eyes of a compassionate loving sister, Ella Little-Collins, knew him best and her son, Rodnell Collins, to whom Malcolm X was a much-loved and admired uncle and mentor,

Ella's enduring and tenacious loyalty to her brother permeate the entire book. She was Malcolm's protreptic, not his inhibitor, Malcolm-Little (the child) was an inherent pedagogue, Ella felt. To accomplish this task she became his legal guardian brought Malcolm into her home after their father was lynched and Malcolm mother was Institutionalized, Late in his teenage years he Was very rebellious, this contributed to his incarceration to prison, Ella arranged for his transfer to a progressive prison colony, with a large open library, the prison. offered University course's in theology, Malcolom debated University students, and recieved his certificate in theology from one of the participating Universities.

While in the nation of Islam, Ella often served as confidant he confided his growing concerns about the rampant corruption in nation of Islam headquarters. Ella and Rodnell lived those moments with Malcolm and his family, when attempts were made on his life, The night Malcolms home was fire bomb, his sister and nephew came to their rescue. Rodnell along with members of Malcolms organization were publicly attacked by three car loads of nation of, Islam thugs and informents in Boston, Massachusetts trying to make and attempt on the life Of Malcolm X 1964. It was his sister Ella who finance his trips abroad and to the Holy city of Mecca Saudia Arabia.

In the early dawn hours before Malcolms assassination Ella and Rodnell were his discussant's, on the human-right's violations of Africans americans and Native Americans by the Untied States, an issue he intented to bring before The United Nations World Court. A public pronouncement, he make in relationship to that, The African and Asian American diaspora and their connection to United States foreign policy, the two speeches both In New York City, April 8, 1964 and December 12, 1964 "Communication and Reality", he knew his pronouncement and position with the N.O.I. at that time may I mean his life, Malcolm forebode, Ella, that of my death " I feel like a grain of sand on the sea shore, if in someway I have change the course of the tide" It would have been with his life, he knew he had to answer to god for any of his own mistakes the import of those words did not take heart of Ella in those early hours before his death that day, But it would come.

African and Asian numeral science and the science of cosmology use base numeral seven. It is practiced among these society the seventh child or son will emerge and perform great works or a leader. Malcolm X was his father's seventh child.

Twenty five years before her death, in august 1996, Ella worked on a memoir of her brother and the little family through the generations with several author's James Baldwin, Louis Lomax, and Art Aveilhe to no avail. A first cousin, educator Oscar V. Little, began researching the Little family genealogy, she was enthusiastic and elated when his diligence came to fruition with the discovery of great-grandparents, Tony and Clarrie, and family primogenitor AJAR, brought from West Africa to enslavement in the Carolina's. in early 1800s. " It was Malcolm found wish to know his ancestor who first arrived on these shores", Ella told Rodnell, whose earliest memory of his uncle being held in his arms as an Infant while Ma prepared family dinner". When illness incapacitated his mother in the mid 1980s, Rodnell inherited the memoir project. Ella L. Little Collins passed all archived information, Letters, Photographs, several documents and her memories on to him. " I became as committed to the project she cherished all those years".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #226964 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 238 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project and author of A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., has pieced together an incomplete study of King's life by supplementing his extant autobiographies (e.g., Stride Toward Freedom and Where Do We Go from Here) with previously unpublished and published writings, interviews and speeches. If King's rhetorical flourishes and use of the word "negro" sometimes seem outdated, the compilation still offers a concise first-person account of his life from his birth in Atlanta in 1929 to his awakening social consciousness and discovery of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. History propelled King to center stage in the struggle for black liberation. When Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in 1955, the "once dormant and quiescent Negro community was now fully awake" and King, along with many others in Montgomery's black community, organized the bus boycott that would launch King into his leadership role in the civil rights movement. The book offers glimpses of King's family life as well a view of famous Americans such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and JFK. (In 1960, King did not feel "there was much difference between Kennedy and Nixon." He writes, "I felt at points that he was so concerned about being President of the United States that he would compromise basic principles.") But what is most evident throughout Carson's study is the moral courage that sustained King and allowed him to inspire a largely peaceful mass movement against segregation in the face of bloody reprisals. (Dec.) FYI: In November, Carol Publishing will release Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X, by his nephew Rodnell P. Collins. ($21.95 230p ISBN 1-55972-491-9)
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ajar

It was the summer of 1985. Over one hundred members of the far flung Little family had gathered together in Memphis, Tennessee, for its first ever family reunion. A family member who was present described it as an awesome, electrifying, and unforgettable moment when Oscar V. Little, the convener of the reunion and the family's unofficial historian, announced that his extensive research, done at the archives in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, had finally revealed the name of the Little ancestor whom a few of us knew vaguely as an African kidnapped and delivered into slavery in South Carolina in the early 1800s. "His name was Ajar," Uncle Oscar told our stunned family members, "and he was brought to enslavement in South Carolina in 1815." Uncle Oscar told them that he first heard the name Ajar from an elderly Chicago-based relative named Tempie Little. She was the daughter of one of the twenty-two children born to Tony (Ajar's son) and Claire Little, Ma and Uncle Malcolm's great-grandparents. Cousin Tempie Little was a member of the Little family branch that married into the Binon family in the Southwest. She told Uncle Oscar that she had often heard her parents speak of a great grandfather named Ajar.

The Littles could hardly wait to pass on the incredible revelation to family members who were not present in Memphis. One of those was my mother, Ella Little Collins. Because of illness, she had been unable to attend the reunion. "When I heard about Ajar," Ma later said, "one of my first thoughts was I wish Malcolm was here to share in our joy. We finally had a name for the great-great-grand father I had mentioned to him but whose name I didn't know. With Malcolm's love of history and his deep awareness of the crucial role of family, he would have enjoyed every minute of it."

NOT only did Uncle Oscar do extensive research on the Littles' family history, he has also been the driving force behind family reunions. Following the first one in Memphis in 1985, others were held in Chicago (1986), Los Angeles (1987), Washington, D.C. (1989), Montgomery, Alabama (1991), New York City (1993), Orlando, Florida (1995), and Jackson, Mississippi (1997).

Like thousands of other black folks, Uncle Oscar was inspired to seek out family history after seeing Roots, Alex Haley's record-smashing television program, in 1977. "Not too long after seeing Roots," Uncle Oscar explained, "I visited my aunt Florence Scott, in Memphis. While there, I had a long conversation with her and one of my uncles, Elgin Scott, whom I thought was long-since dead. It didn't make sense to believe that a family member was dead because we had lost contact with each other. My commitment to doing research on our family, and later the family reunions, both began with those conversations in the late 1970s."

"It's ironic," noted Ma, "that Oscar was inspired by Alex Haley's Roots, because I'm convinced that Haley was at least partially inspired to write Roots because of his conversations with Malcolm about the importance of history and family when they were working on the autobiography."

Uncle Malcolm noted in his autobiography that when he joined the Nation of Islam in 1952, "The Muslims' X symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my X replaced the white slave master name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. . . ." Some people have wrongly interpreted this as Malcolm's rejection of Little family members. "It's extremely important to remember that Malcolm rejected the name dumped on us by slave owners, not our ancestors," Ma said. "Our ancestors were proud black people who, though enslaved physically, were never enslaved mentally."

One of those proud ancestors, the man whose name Uncle Oscar revealed to us that summer evening, was the African called Ajar. "We don't know how he got that name," Uncle Oscar noted, "but after going through many documents, I am convinced that that's the name he was known by." Ma, who by that time was an orthodox Muslim, believed that Ajar may have had a Muslim name, maybe something like Haja, which was then deliberately or unknowingly mispronounced by his enslaver.

Uncle Oscar told us that Ajar possibly came from the Bambara people of Nali, West Africa, the home region for many Africans who ended up enslaved in South Carolina. According to historian Dr. Kennell Jackson in his book American Is Me, South Carolina enslavers preferred "Africans from the Gambia region because [they] were useful in rice farming." He wrote that they often advertised for "a Talle {sic} able People."

Ajar's West African beginnings before ending up in South Carolina also conform to an observation made by Frederic Bancroft in his book Slave Trading in the Old South. Noted Bancroft, "Cargoes of Africans brought to Charleston, South Carolina, were variously advertised as ,very prime Congo slaves,' or 'prime Mandingo Africans,' or 'Choice Gold Coast Negroes,' or 'prime Windward Coast Africans.'" It's hard to believe that those placing such ads were describing human beings, not livestock. But that was the reality-and the inhumanity of the times.

Ajar, during the brutal trip across the Atlantic Ocean, must have shared the feelings expressed by Olaudah Equiano, another African kidnapped and enslaved in the United States. Equaino was kidnapped as an adolescent in 1756. In 1789 he wrote a book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the Afican. in which he noted that during the trip across the Atlantic Ocean, "I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me." When reading this statement, I thought that bad spirits are the same as devils, so the labeling of white supremacists as devils didn't begin with Uncle Malcolm and the Nation of Islam. Brother Olaudah Equiano did so in 1789. It's for certain that Ajar and millions of other Africans enslaved in the misnamed "New World" shared his belief of having gotten into a world of bad spirits that would kill them.

Ajar was delivered into a world of bad spirits in which an enslaver could advertise in a respectable Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper the sale of fifty Africans whom he had "purchased for stock and breeding Negroes, and to any Planter who particularly wanted them for that purpose, they are a very choice and desirable gang." After hearing about Ajar from Ma, I recalled a trip made to the Goree Islands, off Senegal, West Africa, in 1978. The islands are one of the Sites where African men, women, and children were held before being put on the ships taking them to America. I met an elderly African caretaker who, at my request (I didn't want to share the experience with the mostly white tourists), gave me a private tour of the sites. My most vivid and lasting memory is of the cells where children were kept. I could see scratches they had made on the walls with their fingernails while in a state of sheer desperation and fear. The cells for adults were barely large enough for crawl space and contained scratches made by horror-stricken Africans. The old man told me that bones are sometimes still found in the shallower water where people had drowned themselves rather than board the ships. Every time I think of that scene, even twenty years later, overwhelming feelings of empathy for our ancestors engulf me. Intense feelings of anger and loathing emerge for those who put Ajar and millions of other African men, women, and especially children through that hell.

Ajar must have found such people the true reincarnation of bad spirits or devils. Family lore, beginning with the stories told by his son, Tony, describes Ajar as a rebellious African, one "who was never anybody's nigger." Tony, to whom Ajar passed on his pride as an African and his skills as a carpenter, said that one day his father mysteriously disappeared. "We heard that through family oral history," Ma told me, "that was passed on to us by my grandfather, Papa John, and reinforced by Oscar's research. He may have run away, but it is more generally believed that he was sold or traded away by his enslaver because of his rebellious nature." Sale or threat Of sale was one of the enslavers' most effective and intimidating ways to control African captives in the United States, according to historian Dr. Norrece T. Jones, of Virginia Commonwealth University. in his book Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave. Focusing on enslavement in South Carolina, Jones writes that "much emphasis has been placed on cruel lynchings and executions to the neglect of psychological forces frequently more devastating in their consequences and more effectual in spurring 'good' behavior. Slaves' fear of being separated from family members and loved ones, for example, made- the role of 'miscreant' or 'incorrigible' slaves the most powerful long-term technique of control-short of death-that masters possessed. . . ." Over a century later, words such as "incorrigible" and other similar invectives would be used by white supremacists to describe Ajar's rebellious great-great-grandson Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X.

After the disappearance of his father, Tony was sold to the Allen Little family, then based in South Carolina. When the Littles left South Carolina to explore growing economic opportunity in neighboring Georgia, they took Tony and his family with them. Because of his skills as a carpenter, Tony was considered very valuable property by Allen Little as well as by other members of the white Little clan of Talbotton, Georgia. Equally valuable because of her cooking skills was Tony's wife, Clarrie, whose ancestry was a mixture of African and Native American. She is said to have always privately referred to whites as thieves because they had stolen the land of her Native American ancestors. One of the key (and most vicious) figures in that land theft was President Andrew Jackson, who before and during his presidency was famous - or infamous, depending on one's viewpoint - as an "Indian fighter."

In the early and mid-1800s, Georgia was wide open for exploitation by avaricious people, such as Allen Little and his brother Thomas. Native Americans had been driven completely off the land they had lived on and shared for centuries. The state legislature had also passed a law requiring that persons coming into Georgia to purchase land have at least one enslaved African for every fifty acres of land purchased. Land could also be acquired by land grants or lottery.

Allen Little was the first in his family to take advantage of an opportunity to become a kind of feudal lord in Georgia, eventually owning twelve hundred acres in Talbot County, where he built his fortune. In A Rockaway in Talbot. Travels in an Old Georgia County, William H. Davidson wrote: "Allen Little, an early settler and wealthy planter of Baldwin County, Georgia, owned a fine plantation in Talbot County. Around Milledgeville, his extensive farms. many slaves, profitable business dealings, country homes and a town house, made him a man of influence during the antebellum era. . . . He began investing in land about three miles north of the town, brought and traded slaves, and owned a hotel in Milledgeville later known as the Wayne Hotel." One of the Africans enslaved by Allen was Ajar's son, Tony.

Thomas Little followed his brother to Georgia, where he also acquired land and enslaved numerous Africans. Davidson mentioned a revealing situation in which Thomas Little's son, Dr. William G. Little, gave "a gift of love and affection for his parents of a certain Negro girl, Charlotte, 15 years of age, and her future increase." In other words, Thomas Little and his wife accepted as "a gift of love and affection" from their son a fifteen-year-old African girl and any children she might have in the future. "No wonder Olaudah Equiano described such people as bad spirits and Malcolm described them as devils," Ma said angrily.

Through the years, the white Littles provided Georgia with numerous public officials, southern belles, Confederate soldiers, lawyers, and other professionals. One of the white Littles helped draft the petition for the Confederate government, and for a period served in that government's legislative body. However, after the Civil War their fortunes declined considerably, having been based so much on the enslavement of African people.

Because of their skills Tony and Clarrrie were spared being sold at one of the auctions held periodically by the white Little enslavers. Those skills had made Tony and Clarrie what their great-grandson was to later refer to scornfully as "house Negroes." "They may have worked in the Big House," said Ma, "but from everything I heard from our grandfather, they didn't have the typical house-slave mentality, because most of all they were Ajar's children."

The same skills that enabled them to survive enslavement also served them well after the Civil War. Following emancipation and liberation, Tony and Clarrie remained in Taylor County, mostly in the towns of Reynolds and Butler. Reynolds, according to a history compiled by the Reynolds Women's Club, was "first settled by wealthy Planters, who intended that it should be the Seat of Government for Taylor County, organized in 1852." They took Little as a family name from sheer necessity. When former enslaved Africans wanted to purchase land from the new government, they were asked. "Where did you come from?" Tony and Clarrie's response was "Master Little's plantation ... .. Your owner was Little, so you are Tony and Clarrie Little," declared the government official. That may help to explain why Malcolm so adamantly rejected the Little name when he joined the Nation of Islam.

Working independently, Tony was able to care for his large family, now grown to twenty-two children, including Uncle Malcolm's grandfather, Pa John. He worked for blacks and whites in the area. One of his main sources of work was building black churches in Taylor and Talbot Counties. He also began the Little tradition of purchasing land whenever possible. "By purchasing land," Ma said, "the Littles were able to avoid the vicious trap of sharecropping. When Malcolm later spoke of the importance of our people owning land, he was reflecting a belief that had long been in our family."

For over 150 years, black Littles have lived in and around the small towns of Butler and Reynolds, Georgia. They married Into families named Miller, Sealy, Seacey and Durham. Few permanently moved away from the familiarity of family and neighbors before the 1920s. However, during that decade, spurred by an Increase in white supremacist violence and a total lack of economic opportunity, many members of the Little family and other relatives moved to the North and West. A sizable number, including Ma, ended up in Boston. Ma never forgot her childhood and teenage years living among the huge Little clan in Taylor and Talbot Counties. "I can say with certainty that my strong sense of pride and connection to my people, like that of my father, Earl Little Sr., was implanted during those years among our people in rural Georgia," Ma said. "Unfortunately, Malcolm didn't have the personal experience of living among our extended family on his father's or mother's side like that, but he got at least a glimpse of what it was like from our father. Aunt Gracic, Aunt Sas, and me when he came to live with us in Boston."

All of Uncle Malcolm's direct descendants on his father's side are accounted for in Taylor and Talbot Counties. John and Ella Little, his grandparents, are buried together in Reynolds; great-gran d parents Tony and Clarrie are buried near Butler in an area called the Panhandle, near Damascus Baptist Church. Ajar's burial site is unknown. We believe he may have run away to join the Islamic community in South Carolina, or he may have escaped to join up with Native Americans in their fight to hold on to their land. "His burial site may be unknown," declared Ma, "but his legacy of pride and resistance to white supremacy is now an integral part of our history because of his great-great-grandson, Malcolm."

Finally, it must be noted that though this book focuses on the Little family, Louise Helen Norton Little must be acknowledged for her contributions to her son's life. She was as committed to the black liberation struggle as her husband, Earl Lee Little Sr. In February 1997 and 1998, the Caribbean' country of Grenada, her birthplace, held memorial services in-her honor, services at which she was represented by her oldest son Wilfred Little.

Customer Reviews

The Seventh Child
This book gave me a greater appreciation of Malcom X as a world leader and a human being. I really enjoyed reading this book during a visit to the Middle East. If you are really into Malcom X and want to know more about him and who he was, do yourself a favor and read this book.

One of the better Malcolm X books
This is clearly one of the better Malcolm X books as it actually tells us something new and firsthand unlike so many other such books that glutted the market in the early 1990s. A bonus is the revelation of the name of Malcolm's actual African ancestor that he wanted to know about through most of his adult life (this was discovered by a family researcher. "Malcolmites" have much to enjoy and learn from here-buy it!

WONDERFUL READING MATERIAL
I JUST STARTED READING THE BOOK LAST WEEK AND CAN NOT PUT THE BOOK DOWN. I AM A HISTORY MAJOR AND READING THIS BOOK WITH ALL THIS INFORMATION ABOUT MALCOLM AND HIS OWN FAMILY HISTORY IS WONDERFUL.

MR. COLLINS DID A WONDERFUL JOB!...