“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.

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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 and is the institution’s only Black entrant. He keeps company with just 26 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. Given El-Shabazz himself seemed ambivalent about his hometown — 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 the late 1960s and early 70s, when Rowena Moore, a North Omaha resident insisted on an official marker for the spot where the child named Malcolm Little was born. That drive gradually evolved into the MXMF, which spearheaded a decades-long drive to recognize El-Shabazz as part of Omaha’s history. 

Promise and Peril

Though he rarely mentioned Omaha, Malcolm X’s links to the city are rooted in the Great Migration, when Black people escaping the Jim Crow South arrived there during the early part of the last century. The city’s meatpacking plants, dealing with unionized white workers on strike, recruited Black Southerners as replacements, offering the opportunity to multiply their earning power and leave sharecropping behind.

Drawn by positive stories in the Black press, Black people moved to Omaha in droves; its population more than doubled to around 10,000 between 1910 and 1920, according to the website — at the time, second only to Los Angeles among major cities west of the Mississippi River. As the number of Black newcomers climbed to 10%, 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. 

Malcolm’s father, 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 and active in her husband’s ministry.

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 baby Malcolm was born, according to the website. The son of Omaha, who would grow up to become one of the most important figures 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, Malcolm X told the audience that “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 Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, his body torn from shotgun blasts fired by a team of assassins.

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 commission, appointed by a Republican governor, 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.”

A veteran journalist, political analyst, and essayist, Joseph Williams has been published in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and US News & World Report. A California native, Williams is a graduate of the University Of Richmond and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives and works in metro Washington, D.C.