Ella Little-Collins (1914-1996) was born and raised in Georgia and moved north as part of the Great Migration. As an adult, she worked for Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem. She later settled in Roxbury.
She joined the Nation of Islam in the mid-1950s where she helped to establish a mosque with a daycare center attached to it. In the early 1940s, her half-brother, a fatherless teenager, came to live with her, and she became the guardian of Malcolm Little. Later in life, he changed his name to Malcolm X, and he called her “the first really proud Black woman I had ever seen.” She became active in, then led the Organization of Afro-American Unity. She paid for the funeral expenses after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965.
